No, Amber Rudd, it's not Labour conflating legal and illegal immigration, it's your deportation squads

Three months ago, shortly before Prime Minister’s Questions, a robin flew into the commons chamber, and spent the session fluttering about high in the rafters.

Had he been there on Thursday, he would have passed considerably lower over the home secretary’s head than the questions she had been summoned to the despatch box to answer.

Some background: on Wednesday, as the Home Affairs Committee had been trying to find out how on earth it had come to be that Jamaican-born British pensioners had been raided at dawn, told they were here illegally, and would be taken to a detention centre, they heard evidence from a regional border official.

That official had told them there were “net removal targets”, and that those targets had been stuck on the walls in the office. Staff had been advised that the best way to get the numbers down was to go for the “low-hanging fruit” – the people that could be deported the easiest. Undocumented Jamaican born pensioners, say, to pick an example entirely at random.

A couple of hours later, when both Amber Rudd and the Home Office’s own director general responsible for borders and immigration appeared before the same committee, to a backing track of utter disbelief, they made clear neither of them had any idea that such targets existed. They would “go away and find out” what was going on.

By this morning, not only had Amber Rudd gone away and found out, she had also found the flimsiest, most transparent and frankly shambolic line of defence.

Apparently, the treatment of the “Windrush cohort” who are in the UK legally is completely different from the “net removal targets”, which concern illegal immigration. And it was, in fact, the Labour Party, and Diane Abbott, who were conflating the two.

Yes, here was the home secretary, a few hours after having been told that border officials with targets to work to that she didn’t even know about, had been incentivised to target the wrong people, the easy people.

And here she was telling the Labour Party, and telling the SNP too, to stop conflating legal and illegal migration. Home secretary, how to put this? It’s not them. It’s you.

When an elderly Jamaican born, British woman who lives in Croydon, and whose case was put to the home secretary only on Wednesday, is woken up at dawn by immigration officers, told she is here illegally when she isn’t and told she is going to be taken to a detention centre, who exactly is confusing illegal and legal migration?

If only said British woman had had the Amber Rudd defence to hand, to put to the squad of men that has wrongly burst into her home. “You are confusing legal and illegal immigration. Leave me alone. Please. Leave me alone.”

Indeed, Michelle Donelan, the Conservative MP for Chippenham, in an act of jaw-dropping idiocy not seen in the House of Commons in at least 24 hours, even stood up to tell Labour to stop “playing politics with people’s lives” by “cynically conflating legal with illegal migration”.

Guys, listen. When your department’s been utterly found out for treating legal migrants, who are scarcely even migrants, like illegal immigrants, there is no “cynical conflation” happening. Just an attempt to find out what on earth is going on, because it’s been made abundantly clear that nobody in the Home Office does.

MPs from Labour and the SNP took it in turns to invite the home secretary to resign, an invitation she did not accept, but did prompt Alex Chalk MP, and others, to again attack Labour “cynicism” for conflating two things that had in fact been accidentally conflated by regional border officials with targets to meet that had been stuck up on their walls.

Philip Hollobone of Northampton and Philip Davies of Shipley naturally took this opportune moment in the life of a nation that has been either threatening to deport its own elderly citizens, or barring them from their own mother’s funeral, to remind Rudd not to go soft on illegal immigration. Indeed, by appearing to show some degree of contrition for what had gone on, Davies took the view that she risked showing “how out of touch she is”.

Rudd again made clear that she is the “right person” to sort this mess out, even if her attempts thus far have been akin to the Tasmanian Devil from the old Looney Tunes cartoons being the right person to tidy your house up.

It was up to her, she said, to “give the Home Office a more human face”. It certainly needs one, but it may not be much longer before that human face belongs to somebody else.