Does Boris Johnson not realise that his betrayal of the promise of Brexit is the main cause of the fall of the Tory party and the rise of Reform?
That was evidently the case at a state reception dinner for British right-wingers last night, which descended into a bust-up between Boris Johnson and other senior Tories over the party’s record in government on lowering immigration.
In an astonishing turn of events, a witness described “real anger” as the meeting of minds led to a spat between Liz Truss, Johnson and his former boss, broadcaster Andrew Neil.
According to that witness: “Boris argued that Brexit gives us powers to reduce immigration if we wish, and said he did reduce it.” The second part of that sentence is untrue. Net immigration quadrupled from an average of about 200,000 a year to 789,000 in Boris Johnson’s last year as prime minister.
The dinner, at the Peninsula hotel in Mayfair, was hosted by Newsmax, the conservative US broadcaster, after a reception in honour of Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, who are in Britain for Donald Trump’s state visit.
Nigel Farage was there, with the air of a man who believes he is going to be prime minister, although he and the US cabinet members left before the after-dinner spat.
It is no use saying that Brexit gave the British government the power to control immigration when Johnson used that power to quadruple it – especially when he appeared to do so without even knowing what he was doing.
Johnson’s speech was a breathtaking exercise in denial. He must know that immigration increased under his post-Brexit rules – the much-vaunted “Australian-style points scheme”. Perhaps he thinks that the increase does not count because it included Ukrainians, Hong Kongers and Afghans given sanctuary for special reasons.
Those cases were supported by public opinion, but the biggest increases were of students and care workers – and the total was regarded by the vast majority of the British people as unacceptable. As Aaron Bastani, founder of the left-wing website Novara Media, wrote on X yesterday, “Remain would have won 60-40 if they’d said the Leave campaign wanted to replace European migration with non-European migration,” which, evidently, is what has transpired.
Contrast his incompetence, bluster and denial with the seriousness of purpose shown by Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, who today succeeded in sending one migrant back to France.
Of course, it is only one, and it is only a “one in, one out” pilot scheme. But it confirms the breakthrough secured by Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, who persuaded Emmanuel Macron to accept the principle that migrants could be returned.
Now Mahmood has finally shown that returns are possible. For the last few days, Reform, the Tories and the anti-Labour press have crowed gleefully about the “failure” of the Home Office to use places on flights that it had booked – and the predictability of a migrant yesterday succeeding in avoiding deportation by invoking the Modern Slavery Act.
Mahmood talked tough, saying that “last-minute attempts to frustrate a removal are intolerable”, make a “mockery of our laws and this country’s generosity”, and promised: “I will do whatever it takes to secure our border.”
What she could not say, because it emphasises how far she still is from sending enough migrants back to deter the boats, is that the pilot scheme is working. The point of it is to discover what the practical and legal obstacles to returns are, and to overcome them. We can now expect, for example, a change to the law on modern slavery.
If she can send one back, she can send thousands back, which is the only practical deterrent that has been devised so far.
The difference between her stern pragmatism and Johnson’s refusal to acknowledge the scale of his failure ought to reflect well on the Labour government. Unfortunately, Johnson’s legacy is also to allow Farage to pose as a credible alternative to Starmer. Labour must hope that Mahmood can now scale up the returns, and quickly.
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Is Shabana Mahmood the ‘Maggie Thatcher of the left’?
