Such is the level of rot in our public institutions, and so accustomed have we become to daily stories of inexplicable and indeed unforgivable asylum decisions, that it takes a lot nowadays for a story to come along that is genuinely jaw-dropping.

The Refugee Convention, the general right of asylum and our entire approach have been proven to be utterly broken

The Refugee Convention, the general right of asylum and our entire approach have been proven to be utterly broken

But a story in this week’s Sunday Times is just that, and should be a genuine line-in-the-sand moment. The UK granted asylum protection, and then British citizenship, to a former bodyguard of a leader of Hamas. At the point at which he was awarded refugee status, it was public knowledge that he had worked for the Hamas chief, was the son of another senior Hamas official, and had been arrested in Egypt, allegedly for operating a tunnel used to smuggle firearms into Gaza. He subsequently allegedly went about plotting to murder Jews in Europe to mark the second anniversary of October 7th.

If this disgusting sequence of events were not enough, the man was granted an extraordinary 100-year anonymity order by our justice system. The Sunday Times has successfully challenged that order so that he can be named in this country once criminal proceedings against him have concluded.

The facts of the case speak for themselves, but there are a few things worth noting. First, this story comes just a few weeks after that Home Office whistleblower said that just one in a hundred asylum claims were genuine and revealed the deep dysfunction within the asylum decision-making process.

Every critic of the........

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