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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Mark Steel

'Boris Johnson's boasts on Covid success and Ukrainian refugees are a shot in the dark'

Thank the Lord that at this critical moment, when the world could spiral into destruction if we make the wrong decisions, we’re led by people who are reliable, honest and compassionate: Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.

It’s reassuring, in the same way that if you needed to put out a fire in your house, you’d ask Ozzy Osbourne while he was riding a buffalo.

For example, to prove his commitment to refugees fleeing Ukraine, the Prime Minister said: “Since 2015, Britain has done more to settle vulnerable people than any other country.”

That must be why we created a scheme for immigrants called the “hostile environment”. We wanted to make refugees feel at home by being as hostile to them as the place they’d run away from.

If we’d been polite, they wouldn’t be used to that and become confused.

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Screaming rocker Ozzy Osbourne (WireImage)

Now we’re being just as caring. So while Poland has taken more than a million refugees from Ukraine, we’ve taken a few hundred. We were the same with Syrians. Germany settled 621,000 and Britain settled 29,000.

So we are doing more, as there’s an enormous amount of paperwork involved in rejecting that many applications. And we are settling them, we’re just not settling them here.

We scream, “They all come here to sponge off us” – so they happily go somewhere else and settle there.

This is why, while every other country is welcoming people from Ukraine, we find imaginative ways of keeping them out. We demand they fill in forms in the middle of a war zone, and our centres for applications have been shut.

I expect they’ve been told: “You need proof of identity. You should have asked the tank commander to wait until you’d collected a gas bill and a bank statement before he blew up your house. So it’s your own fault.”

The rules change every day, so this week refugees will be allowed to apply for a visa for one day at a time, as long as they complete that morning’s Wordle puzzle. Or they’ll have to perform in front of the judges from Britain’s Got Talent. If you can do a trick with your cat that pleases Simon Cowell, you’re in.

So we should sympathise with Boris Johnson when he claims we’re the best in the world. Because he clearly suffers from a serious condition, that is probably called Blustered Upside-Down Best-in-World Syndrome.

This wretched illness makes him make claims such as “we lead the world in fighting Covid” or “we have the finest Track and Trace in the world” when we’re clearly bottom of the world.

If he was asked whether Britain had any hippos living here, he’d say “Britain has more hippos than anywhere in the world. Over 20 million hippos come here every year. We are the natural home of the hippopotamus.”

He can’t help it.

So if you send a donation to any of the charities raising money for Ukrainian victims of this war, please spare some as well for those who, like Boris Johnson, suffer from this cruel disease.

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