The foreign secretary was in good company in woefully misjudging the Taliban threat
Many of the excitable characters who impulsively phone talk radio stations without having thought through their contradictory positions are rightly horrified by footage of desperate people falling off planes into the chaotic inferno of hate of Biden and Johnson’s bodged British and American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Others, explaining that Brexit was about stopping refugees and immigration, want everyone there to be left to die, as sorting out the mess we have made is apparently not our business. Admittedly, I have the same attitude to the toilet bowl after an ill-advised lamb phaal, but I am just a 53-year-old “so-called” comedian, not an elected leader of the free world with blood on his hands.
On Wednesday, I drove distractedly across England listening to a baffling prime minister’s questions. Various politicians, trying to read the fickle electorate’s current position on the hate/compassion mood board, swinging again like it did after the death of little Alan Kurdi, explained how welcoming Britain has always been to refugees. I stopped to eat an artisanal steak pie at the Rollright Stones and wondered how our legendarily welcoming nature squared with the government’s new nationality and borders bill, which aims to criminalise anyone who attempts to seek asylum and anyone who attempts to help anyone seeking asylum. Even lifeboat men and women risking their lives to dredge dying children from the Channel could be criminals it seems, the horrible bastards. A fake Home Office website called Migrants on the Move, like the fake Conservative Campaign HQ factcheckUK site Dominic Raab defended during the last election, even purports to offer objective but deliberately discouraging advice to would-be Britons. Who even knew that the UK was full of venomous hamsters and that, in Kent, human hair is illegal?