In Suella Braverman’s head, irony is a small island from which another flotilla of makeshift boats is heading here.
What a surprise then that the Home Secretary with the spectacular lack of self-awareness has been manipulating the system – the very thing she has accused migrants of.
Those who champion the diversity of a system that enabled her and Rishi Sunak to rise to their respective positions still don’t seem to grasp that they’d never have made it that far had they not agreed to vilify and demonise people who look like them.
For a Conservative Party without a plan that has shredded our public services, a Prime Minister happy to stoke fear by making “small boats” central to his party leadership campaign pledges and a Home Secretary determined to start a race war are perfect distractions.
Braverman’s bid to stoke tensions by making sweeping generalisations about Pakistani men in relation to grooming gangs is undermined by a report from her own department which makes clear most gangs are made up of white men.
The NSPCC and experts on grooming gangs have warned ministers that framing the issue as one based on ethnicity could prove counter-productive, hampering efforts to actually protect the young girls in danger.
But why on earth would Braverman allow those facts to get in the way of a good scaremongering?
It is what makes her, in a crowded field, the most dangerous Tory politician of recent times - and you thought Johnson, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock were bad.
Braverman weaponises her colour to prevent those uncomfortable with doing so from challenging her bigotry.
She’d willingly pack people who look like your columnist off to Rwanda, to appease the rabid, far-right racists who want to purge this country.
Braverman lies to overestimate the scale of the migrant issue when United Nations statistics confirm most move to countries nearest to their own.
Braverman would have us all at each others’ throats when we should be joining forces to ask why we are all having to meet our rising energy costs while she doesn’t.
Let’s all keep holding this Home Secretary to account on the truth.
Braverman might not recognise it because she deals so often in deflection and misrepresentation.
But we can give her a helping hand.
