As Home Secretary, on the whole, you’ll want to stay on the right side of the law, right? I mean, you’re in charge of the police, the prisons, national security, immigration and all that sort of thing. Your portfolio is definitely what might be termed law-adjacent or, on Tinder, ‘law-curious’. On the principle of leading by example, you might be expected to comply not only with the letter but with the spirit of the law. So it is not a little concerning that in the matter of Manston asylum processing centre Suella Braverman is accused of knowingly breaking the law as a matter of policy.
I know: compassion for traumatised and penniless refugees isn’t part of the brief. We can moan all we like about the cruelty of detaining more than 3,000 asylum seekers in a processing facility with a capacity of 1,600. We can fret about the outbreaks of diphtheria and scabies, about the fact that toothbrushes are only issued with their handles broken off so that they can’t be turned into weapons, about how the asylum seekers are separated from family members of the opposite sex, are known by numbers rather than by names, and all the rest of it.
If someone told me there was only a 50-70 per cent chance that robbing a bank was illegal, I might fancy my chances
But there’s nothing in the statute book that says the Home Secretary needs to be cuddly.
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