Tight trousers and angry rebukes can’t throw Priti Patel off her stride over Channel migrants

Iwas in Ukraine at the weekend and the talk of the air-raid shelter was that someone had been accused of distracting Tories with their legs in the British Parliament. I knew instantly who that was. They did it again at yesterday’s Home Office questions.

I refer, of course, to Stephen Kinnock, who is notorious for wearing ridiculously tight trousers designed for a man half his age. They ride up his legs when he’s sitting down, such that when he stands up to make a point, the skinny-fit kecks are practically glued to his calves.

Once or twice he’s nearly toppled over. We’ve seen outrageous red socks. We’ve seen a streak of bare ankle. But if the goal is to throw Priti Patel off her stride, Stephen Stone is wasting his time. The lady is back in command of the Commons.

It looked like the Channel crisis might finish her off, but then she cooked up the idea of sending the refugees to Rwanda and the plan speaks to her backbenchers’ most basic instinct of all: the lust to win. “The whole of Dudley” wants it, said Marco Longhi. Stoke-on-trent North is gagging for it, said Jonathan Gullis. Few of the Tory awkward squad who oppose the scheme bothered to attend, including Theresa May (a true Somewhere woman, Mrs May preferred not to send migrants to a foreign hostile environment but to

These immigration debates are starting to sound like a slightly menacing edition of ‘Wish You Were Here…?’

create one at home instead). “The world class Rwandan plan has been welcomed by anybody who lives in the real world,” said Lee Anderson. Only those pinko liberals in Narnia would vote against it.

All this puts “New” New Labour in a tricky spot, because it wants to sound mindlessly patriotic but it also has to oppose everything the Tories do. So Mr Kinnock – as he danced about on his feet, trying to pull his trouser legs down – called it “profoundly unbritish”, while Labour MPS decried the death of “law and order”. But if you want order, said Priti, you could vote for my Nationality and Borders Bill: you have no alternative plan. “No plan!” yelled the Tory backbenchers. “No plan!”

This earned an angry rebuke from the SNP’S Anne Mclaughlin who pointed out that her side has proposed several alternatives only for them to be ignored. But I’m sure they involve facilitating more arrivals via safe routes, and given that the Government is distributing work, student and family visas like candy, it has to say “no” to someone to look like it’s being tough. It’ll just have to be those folks on the dinghies.

They don’t need to come here, said Priti: they have passed through “safe countries like France”, and Rwanda has a fine history of resettling people.

The Home Secretary is so lavish in her praise of anywhere but Britain that these immigration debates are starting to sound like a slightly menacing edition of Wish You Were Here…? Or, rather, We Wish You Were There.

That said, with the queue to get a passport getting longer and longer – the Passport Office is a shambles, warned Grahame Morris – it is becoming almost as difficult to leave the United Kingdom as it is to break into it.