The former home secretary Priti Patel has been knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest in the first round of voting by Tory MPs.

Polling continues in the coming weeks until the field is reduced to two candidates, leaving party members to pick one of them to be the new leader. After a heavy defeat at the general election, understanding what members want next for the party is key to the hopefuls' chances. But that's easier said than done. "I don't think Tory members themselves know what they want", said Ben Walker in The New Statesman.

What did the commentators say?

Tory members are craving a display of "competence", said Walker, so "they don’t want to see noise over the riots" or "party politicking" but rather "someone to rise above that". There has been a "clear change of perspective" since the party's defeat: they want "someone who can steady the party" but "that doesn’t mean they don't want to be self-indulgent – and choose candidates that reflect their own values and cultural politics".

The challenge is that the leadership race "requires appealing to three tribes", wrote Dr Patrick English, Director of Political Analytics at YouGov, for Conservative Home: their fellow MPs, prospective Tory voters and the party members. "Herein lies the problem", he added, "these audiences are very different".

Recent polling data "sheds light on some extremely tricky mismatches" in public and membership priorities, with the seeming demands from Conservative party members to "shift their party to the right and to appeal to Reform UK voters" being "at odds" with the public mood. So a "lurch to the right" may not be particularly helpful in building public support.

The sense that feeling among party members is more "nuanced" than previously thought was born out by a poll that found only a minority favour Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), said Gordon Rayner, associate editor of The Telegraph.

Only 33% of 1,500 Tory members surveyed said it should be party policy to leave the ECHR, with 29% saying Britain's membership should be reformed and 22% saying the country should remain in an unreformed ECHR.

In recent years, party members have "tended to pick the more right-wing candidate of the final two", said Sam Francis, political reporter of the BBC. For instance, in the first of two leadership elections of 2022, Rishi Sunak "consistently won more support" from MPs than Liz Truss, during each round, before party members "had their say".

While Badenoch "commanded the support of a number of high profile MPs" at her launch, wrote Beth Rigby for Sky News, Cleverly's first event was "instead was filled with party members", with activists saying his "undying loyalty to the party during difficult times" had "won plenty of support with the grassroots".

But a survey of Tory members will "make happy reading for Team Kemi", said Guido Fawkes, as she "pips the polls" at 34%, twice as many as Jenrick, who trails second at 18%. She also "beats all other candidates at a head-to-head contest".

How might Badenoch's opponents turn things around? Rigby thinks that playing to the various membership factions might be a wise move, whichever path the leader hopes to take in the longer term. The hopefuls "may want to take a page out of Starmer's playbook", she wrote, and note how he "engaged with the left during the leadership race", only to "reset in the centre group".

What next?

After Patel's elimination, the five remaining candidates will be "whittled down to four" by Conservative MPs in a further vote next week, said Henry Zeffman, chief political correspondent for the BBC.

Those four will march forward to the party conference, where three days will be "devoted heavily" to "multiple appearances" by the leadership contenders, said Politico's London Playbook. They will be "put through their paces repeatedly" in front of members, including a "fireside chat", a Q&A session and a speech from the main podium.

After the conference, Conservative MPs will again narrow the field, this time to two, before members have the final say. The winner will be announced on 2 November.

Meanwhile, a debate is already underway over how much power party members should wield in the future. Following her elimination, Patel called for party members to have "a greater role in the running our party" in a statement on X.

But, writing in The Times, former leader William Hague said this "will not be the change for which the wider electorate is looking", because voters have a "justified sense" that the Tories were "unable to govern well because of their internal politics".

As the Conservatives face a likely general election defeat following 14 years in power, some are already wondering who might be tasked with reversing the party's fortunes after polling day.

With Rishi Sunak's Tories lagging far behind Labour in the polls, more than 50 Conservative MPs have already said they will step down at the next election. But across the numerous remaining Tory factions, the battle for control of the party's future is stepping up. 

What did the commentators say?

In the public mind, the Sunak family are "already booked on a one-way first-class flight to California early next year," wrote Adam Boulton for Reaction. Opinion polling for the Conservatives is now "so dire" that being "only" 5% behind in some rural areas is being hailed as "good news" among the party faithful. 

In the event of a big election defeat, "big changes in the party are a certainty". And even if the Conservatives did miraculously manage to retain power, the in-fighting is unlikely to stop. "The Tories have developed such a taste for their own blood – five leaders in eight years – that the factional wars will wage on, win or lose," said Boulton.

The party's next leadership election will almost certainly take place after the general election, agreed Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. Those looking to run will need to be a plausible candidate to the Tory right, but also someone "who doesn't prompt people in the Conservative, middle and left of the party to make a face like you've just kicked their dog when you raise the idea of them as leader". 

Even the supporters of one slated contender, former home secretary Suella Braverman, privately concede that it may be a "tall order for her to overcome the depth and breadth of opposition to her among Conservative MPs", according to Bush.

Amid fears that the right will hijack the party after the election, Tory centrists are searching for a leader who can stop the party "going full Trump", said Politico. But these so-called "One Nation" liberal Conservatives lack "an obvious leader". 

Commons leader Penny Mordaunt is thought to be "good and well-liked", but "mad on the woke stuff" – a reference to her support of trans rights – a source told Politico. James Cleverly is said to be "the obvious unity candidate", but too gaffe-prone. Tom Tugendhat would want to throw his hat in the ring only if he "felt he had a really good shot". 

The party's "perceived drift to the right" means that Kemi Badenoch is also getting a second look by moderates, who say that next to Braverman – who suggested this week that the British way of life was under assault from "Islamists" and "extremists" – Badenoch now appears to be the more liberal choice. But with just seven years as an MP under her belt, one former minister reportedly likened her to a "young Beaujolais nouveau". 

What next?

A catastrophic election defeat would tilt the party to the populist right, an analysis by The Guardian found. Seat projections suggest that if there were a further 2% swing to Labour before the election, about 40% of remaining Tory MPs would come from the right of the party. So odds are that a post-Sunak contest would  "end up as a bitterly fought battle between the party's right and centre", said the paper.

One overlooked candidate who could prove an asset to the Tory right is Priti Patel, said former MP and justice secretary David Gauke in an article for The New Statesman. If the Conservatives are defeated in the next election, the solution will be "obvious" to this wing of the party: bring back Boris Johnson and bring in Nigel Farage. 

Patel would be by far the best candidate to deliver on this strategy, said Gauke. She stuck with Johnson until the end, and is on friendly terms with Farage. And after what is likely to be an "emphatic" election loss, a "breezy message that it would be possible to bring together the big beasts of populism might be just what the modern Tory party membership wants to hear". It could be as simple as "Vote Patel, get Patel, Johnson and Farage".

A man who was shot dead by officers in southeast London on Tuesday had been threatening people with a crossbow, said Scotland Yard.

The man, thought to be in his 30s, also reportedly had a knife, a sword and a hatchet, and was threatening to harm residents inside an address in Southwark. Although he was wearing body armour, he died at the scene.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct has launched an investigation following the man's death, which is standard practice after a fatal police shooting, noted Sky News.

The incident has refocused attention on concerns about the ease with which the public can acquire high-powered crossbows, capable of firing bolts at fatal velocity.

In 2010, Stephen Griffiths, who called himself the "Crossbow Cannibal", was sentenced to life in prison after he admitted murdering three women in Bradford. Another infamous case came in 2018 when, armed with two crossbows, Ramanodge Unmathallegadoo shot and killed his estranged heavily pregnant wife in east London.

On Christmas Day 2021, a man arrived at Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow and threatened to kill the Queen. Following the incident, Priti Patel, then the home secretary, launched a review to consider "strengthening controls" over the purchase of these weapons.

Pressure is growing for tighter restrictions. Laura Sugden, whose partner Shane Gilmer was killed in 2018 in a crossbow attack in their home in East Yorkshire, has long campaigned on the issue. She said that many police forces do not properly record crossbow incidents.

In 2022 she met Home Office officials alongside her solicitor, Gemma Vine. "People don't ask for ID – even if they are supposed to," Vine told The Telegraph, "and because there are no restrictions, no one checks criminal records or mental health history."

The possession of crossbows by adults is not prohibited and crossbow owners don't have to register them, said Insight, but it's an offence for anyone aged under 18 to buy or possess one.

Rishi Sunak hoped a picture of party unity at the Conservatives' conference in Manchester would provide the platform to reset his premiership ahead of next year's general election.

Instead, the first few days of the annual gathering have revealed bitter infighting, with different tribes vying for influence and attention.

Membership of what are mainly unofficial groupings overlap, said The Guardian, and "divisions are often more Venn diagram than hard borders". 

The free-market ultras

It may surprise those not used to the idiosyncrasies of internal Tory politics that exactly a year on from her disastrous 49-day term as prime minister – when her radical tax-cutting programme spooked the markets and turbocharged interest rates – Liz Truss is back as the darling of the Conservative Party conference.

Leading the call against what she first described in office as the "anti-growth coalition", Truss is the standard-bearer for small state, low tax, supply-side reforms.

These ideas still have "significant currency across a swathe of the Conservative Party", said The Times, while several of her former ministers "retain enough of a profile to carry significant sway".

Presenting themselves as keepers of the Thatcherite flame, these free-market ultras include former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, former home secretary Priti Patel, former housing minister Simon Clarke and Ranil Jayawardena, who leads the recently formed and increasingly influential Conservative Growth Group.

As Richard Vaughan and Hugo Gye wrote in i news in February, those backing Truss's revivalist mission leave Sunak "at risk of becoming sandwiched" between the two previous incumbents.

Northern Tories

With the Tories trailing Labour by double digits in opinion polls, this group of MPs from the North "are focused on policies that could appeal to Red Wall voters who switched their allegiance from Labour to give Boris Johnson his landslide victory at the general election four years ago", said The Independent.

Known as the Northern Research Group (NRG), they have lobbied the government for more tax responsibilities to be devolved from Westminster, the prioritisation of an east-west rail line linking Liverpool and Hull, and the creation of a "minister for the north".

Made up of prominent figures including former party chairman Jake Berry and current Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, "the yearning for the party to look beyond England’s south-east finds an echo among Scottish Tories and others including the north-east mayor Ben Houchen", said The Guardian.

This group will be crucial to how Sunak's impending decision to scrap HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester – and the government's wider levelling up agenda – will go down with voters in the North. Channel 4 News reported that "they’d accept a compromise over connections to London as long as East-West links connecting Northern cities get built".

Culture warriors

Promoting an anti-woke, anti-immigration message, this group of right-wing pro-Brexit MPs could make the running at the next Tory leadership contest. Champions of what they term "national conservatism", leading lights include Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

While there is an overlap with the social conservatism of Northern Tories, theirs is a "more pessimistic, authoritarian, explicitly Christian and anti-woke world-view, closer in spirit to some of the national populist movements in Europe than to neoliberalism", said The New Statesman.

Among the most vocal are Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, who lead the so-called New Conservatives group of MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake. It has called for a ban on "gender ideology" being taught in schools, curbs on legal migration and the withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

This tribe may be on "the fanatic fringe", wrote Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in i news, but to an extent it has already been "absorbed into the mainstream of Conservative politics", said The Guardian, "with even Sunak, once mistakenly viewed as a largely ideology-free technocrat, expected to lean increasingly into culture war issues as the election approaches".

'One Nation' Tories

Probably the largest group, centrist 'One Nation' Tories are also the least formalised. They "have struggled for influence under recent prime ministers" and "currently lack a standard-bearer for the internal debates convulsing the party", reported The Times.

Made up of MPs who present themselves as serious politicians for serious times, they boast the likes of the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, security minister Tom Tugendhat, Tobias Ellwood and Damian Green among their number.

Less vocal than other Tory factions, the group appears to be "biding their time for what could be a bare-knuckle fight against the culture warriors and Truss's rump group of ultra free-market devotees for the future direction of the party", The Guardian concluded.

Bullying in Westminster is back in the spotlight after Gavin Williamson quit amid claims that he told a senior civil servant to “slit your throat” while he was defence secretary and “deliberately demeaned and intimidated” staff.

The allegations followed a report in The Sunday Times that former chief whip Wendy Morton had handed over a series of expletive-laden text messages from Williamson to Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme.

The Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar then revealed that Williamson had told a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence to “jump out of the window”, in a series of furious exchanges that it is alleged constituted a sustained campaign of bullying.

Westminster’s bullying problem appears to be increasing. Just last month, Labour’s Christina Rees lost the party whip “over allegations that she bullied members of her constituency staff”, reported LabourList.

There were also allegations of bullying during a Commons vote on fracking last month, with government whips accused of “manhandling” MPs to force them to vote with the government. However, a parliamentary investigation found “no evidence” that MPs were bullied, noted The Independent.

What did the papers say?

There have been particularly “dark rumours” in Westminster for years over bullying by Tory whips, said The Guardian in 2017, after the party was forced to deny that a politician had been reduced to tears by “bullyboy tactics”.

However, as far back as the 1990s, the “imposing physique and reputation for robust methods” led to one Conservative whip being branded “the Terminator”. David Lightbown was accused of “pinning at least one potential rebel against the wall” and “warning him of the consequences of a vote in the wrong direction”, added the paper.

Several steps have been taken to address bullying. In 2018, the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme was introduced in response to the #MeToo movement. It has “resulted in several MPs being sanctioned for unacceptable behaviour, including sexual harassment and bullying,” said Politico.

However, a report by HR director Alison Stanley in 2021 found that the average time for an investigation to be concluded was 196 days, leading to claims that the probes were taking too long.

An investigation in 2019 found that there was a “significant problem” of MPs bullying and harassing staff in Parliament. The senior lawyer who led the probe said the behaviour had “seriously affected the health and welfare of far too many people”.

The publication of that report came a day after another inquiry found that staff were “bullied and harassed” by “known offenders” in the House of Lords, noted the BBC.

The following year, said Politico, parliamentary authorities and political leaders were still facing a wave of allegations of a “culture of bullying and harassment”. Several allegations were directed at Priti Patel, then the home secretary, with colleagues describing a “pattern” of unacceptable behaviour spanning her ministerial career, says The Times.

What next?

“What the hell is wrong with Westminster?” wondered Politico in April. “It’s common to hear that these transgressions are difficult to address”, it said, because of “the ingrained culture at Westminster: a toxic mix of late nights, subsidised bars and informal working arrangements”.

As well as the working culture of politics, the inherent personality of many MPs has been blamed. Civil Service World noted that “it takes a strange type of character to become a politician and a strong sense of self belief is necessary,” and though many MPs want to “make the world a better place” it “doesn’t… necessarily make you a nice person” because “you can be a great reformer and an abusive bully”.

One difficulty is who determining who should decide on punishments. “Bullying and harassment usually occurs because of a power imbalance”, wrote Emily Commander on Politics Home, so “allowing MPs to debate sanctions in the House of Commons tips the scales even further in their favour”.

The policing watchdog has placed the Metropolitan Police under special measures after a force-wide inspection raised “substantial and persistent concerns”.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services said in a statement that “we are now monitoring” the London force “to help it make improvements”.

The measures “will place extra scrutiny on the Met”, which is “already suffering a leadership vacuum and fighting to improve public trust”, said The Times.

What triggered the move?

The decision followed the uncovering of a “litany” of failings by Scotland Yard in “fighting crime and serving victims”, The Guardian’s police and crime correspondent Vikram Dodd reported. The watchdog pointed to misconduct scandals, a failure to stamp out corruption, and “barely adequate standard of crime-recording accuracy”, with an estimated 69,000 crimes going unrecorded each year.

Matt Parr, who led the recent inspection, said other concerns included a lack of victim engagement, a vast backlog of online child abuse referrals, and a “lack of detailed understanding” of capability across all policing.

The Met was also found to be failing to meet national standards, and to be making errors on stop and search. The grounds for a quarter of stops were not recorded, “thus thwarting scrutiny of whether they were justifiable”, said Dodd.

What are special measures?

Inspectors usually conduct a “root-and-branch review of forces every few years”, according to The Times. But the watchdog can escalate a force into the “engage” stage, also known as special measures, on the basis of “significant or enduring concerns” about their ability to address underperformance.

For the Met, that means increased scrutiny and a requirement for the force’s leadership to produce an improvement plan. The Met will also have to report regularly to inspectors, the Home Office and other organisations.

And “later on”, a policing performance oversight group will scrutinise the changes made by the Met to “address its problems”, said��BBC home affairs researcher Lucy Gilder.

Only three other of the total 43 forces in England and Wales are in special measures. Greater Manchester, Cleveland and Gloucestershire are facing the same restrictions.

What next for the Met?

The watchdog’s criticisms follow a series of scandals involving the force. Inspection chief Parr said that the abduction, rape and murder last year of Sarah Everard by a serving officer had also had a “chilling effect on public trust and confidence”.

Former Met commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was forced out of the role earlier this year after losing the confidence of London Mayor Sadiq Khan as well.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is seeking a replacement for Dick, with the shortlist reduced to two Met insiders: Mark Rowley, a former head of counterterrorism, and Nick Ephgrave, currently part of the force’s top leadership.

A source told The Telegraph that the special measures move could prove “helpful for the new commissioner”, as “a launchpad to reform”.

Backing the special measures move, Patel said she expected “the Met and the London mayor to take immediate action to begin addressing” the issues raised.

Khan said that he would work closely with the watchdog and that the extra scrutiny was a “crucial first step” in reforming the force.

In a statement, the Met acknowledged the “cumulative impact of events and problems” facing the force. “We understand the impact this has had on communities and share their disappointment,” the statement continued.

“We are determined to be a police service Londoners can be proud of. We are talking to the inspectorate about next steps.”

A ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has grounded the first flight due to take asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.

The flight was cancelled minutes before take-off after a late intervention from the Strasbourg court, which said one of the passengers faced “a real risk of irreversible harm” if he remained on the flight.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was “disappointed” and “very surprised” at the court’s intervention. Speculation is already mounting that the government may seek to leave the court’s jurisdiction, said The Times.

Why is the UK still a member despite Brexit?

The ECHR is not an EU institution: the court was created by the Council of Europe in 1950, while the EU’s founding text was not penned until 1957. The Council of Europe has 47 members, compared to the EU which has 27.

Nevertheless, hostility to the ECHR and the EU have often overlapped in the UK. As early as 2006, The Guardian noted that Conservative leader David Cameron had pledged to repeal the Human Rights Act that brought the ECHR into UK law.

However, at the 2017 general election, the Conservative manifesto said that the party would not “repeal or replace the Human Rights Act while the process of Brexit is under way”.

The 2018 Withdrawal Agreement committed the UK to remaining within the ECHR but the Conservatives have always left open the prospect of changing the UK’s relationship with the Court after Brexit and are planning a new Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act.

Will the UK leave?

Boris Johnson hinted last night he might seek to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which is implemented by the ECHR, to make it easier to remove illegal migrants from the UK.

“The legal world is very good at picking up ways of trying to stop the government from upholding what we think is a sensible law,” said the PM.

Speaking to reporters, he added: “Will it be necessary to change some laws to help us as we go along? It may very well be and all these options are under constant review.”

This would not be a simple process, explains Frederick Cowell on LSE Blogs, because the Withdrawal Agreement “makes it harder for the UK to fully withdraw from the ECHR”. The EU-UK Trade Agreement commits the UK and EU to respecting the ECHR.

However, the hardline Tory Brexiteers of the European Research Group argue that the independent nature of the security provisions means that it is possible – in theory – for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR.

A prolonged debate on the question seems a certainty. Conservative MPs were “fulminating against the ECHR last night”, wrote Stephen Bush in the FT’s Inside Politics newsletter.

“The mutterings about the convention – and Johnson’s hints that the UK’s membership could be reviewed – are a sign of things to come,” wrote Bush, adding that a “big political row over the UK’s continued membership of the convention is near certain to feature as a central dispute for the rest of the year”.

In any such debate, Johnson may not wish to be reminded of the fact that, in 2016, he praised the European Convention on Human Rights and said the UK should stay under its wing.

The Daily Mirror reported that, at a rally in York, Johnson said: “I think it was one of the great things we gave to Europe. It was under Winston Churchill, it was a fine idea in the post-War environment.

“I am not against the European Convention or indeed the Court because it’s very important for us – the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights do not have to be applied either by the UK courts or by the UK Parliament. Keep the European Convention, it’s a fine thing.”

Rishi Sunak is facing growing calls to appoint an ethics adviser following a series of allegations against senior members of his government.

On taking office last month, the prime minister promised there would be “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level” of his government. Part of this included a pledge, later confirmed by Downing Street, that he would soon appoint an independent adviser on ministerial interests.

The last person to hold the position was Lord Geidt, who resigned in June after just five months in the role saying he had been put in an “impossible and odious position” by Boris Johnson, whom he accused of proposing a “deliberate” breach of the ministerial code. Johnson failed to appoint a replacement as did his immediate successor Liz Truss.

What does an ethics adviser do?

The ethics adviser’s job is to counsel the prime minister on whether members of the government have broken the ministerial code. The position comes with a series of responsibilities, including scrutinising all interest declarations from ministers, providing advice to ministers on how to handle their interests, and overseeing the production of a statement of ministers’ interests twice a year, said The National.

The aim is to “prevent sleaze and corruption from taking hold at the top of the British state”, said The Independent, “but the role has been criticised for being insufficiently powerful, with recommendations easily brushed aside by a prime minister determined to flout the rules”.

For example, even if the independent adviser concludes there has been a breach of the code, the decision on whether to keep that minister in their post remains solely with the PM.

This means the role “is somewhat of a misnomer”, said the Evening Standard, as “the adviser does not exist to hold the prime minister’s feet to the fire”.

Rather, as Dr Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government explained, they are there to “keep ministers in line” and “allow prime ministers to distance themselves from the investigative and judgement process”.

In recent times this has led to tension between the PM and their adviser, as happened with Geidt and his predecessor, Sir Alex Allan, who according to the Daily Mail “stormed off” after Johnson found that his home secretary at the time, Priti Patel, had not breached the code, despite Allan’s conclusion that she had not “consistently met the high standards required”.

Why does Sunak need one now?

“Sunak said that appointing an ethics adviser would be among the first things he would do as prime minister,” said The Independent.

Yet nearly a month into his premiership the role remains unfilled. This despite his promise to restore integrity to the heart of a government that is already facing several challenges.

First, he faced questions surrounding the reappointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary only days after she had resigned from the Truss government for breaching the ministerial code. This was followed by multiple allegations of bullying and the subsequent resignation of former chief whip Gavin Williamson.

The Evening Standard said “the absence of such an adviser reared its head again” following allegations of bullying made against the deputy prime minister and justice secretary Dominic Raab.

With no independent adviser in place, Sunak said he would appoint someone else to lead an inquiry into the claims, a move criticised by Labour.

There is no doubt “an independent adviser would help the prime minister”, said Prospect. “Such a figure could have investigated any allegations that were floating around before Williamson’s appointment was made, or at the very least investigated new ones when they arose, and would have been able to look into the furore surrounding Braverman’s use of personal emails to forward government documents,” said the magazine.

“Instead, the prime minister is left to get to the bottom of these claims without such support – a distraction from the job of governing and dealing with pressing issues like the cost-of-living crisis.”

Is the role fit for purpose?

As highlighted by Johnson and Truss, a prime minister is under no obligation to appoint an ethics adviser. This has led MPs to table a new Independent Adviser on Ministerial Interests (Parliamentary Appointment) Bill that would force Downing Street to fill the role.

Yet “the debate about the prime minister’s ongoing failure to appoint an adviser points to a deeper problem about the role’s lack of independence from the prime minister”, said Prospect.

One suggestion to restore credibility from the Committee on Standards in Public Life is that the position should be appointed on a statutory basis.

“It was only under Johnson that the principal role of the ethics adviser came to be investigating the PM,” said Jill Rutter for UK in a Changing Europe. “More normal PMs see them as a helpful adjunct in holding their colleagues to high standards.

“Sunak should make sure the independent adviser has the resources they need – and can initiate their own inquiries and publish the results to their own timetable,” she argued.

An influential group of Conservative MPs has warned the home secretary that an expected “drastic increase” in net immigration “undeniably undermines” Brexit promises.

In a letter to Priti Patel, more than two dozen Tory politicians in the Common Sense Group “sounded the alarm” over data that suggests immigration totals may reach a record high this year, The Telegraph reported.

The letter was organised by the group’s chair, former education minister John Haynes, and several so-called “Red Wall” MPs. They point to figures that show work visas are up by 25% to 239,987, while family visas are up by 49% to 280,776,and student visas by 52% to 432,729.

The data suggests that net immigration for this year “could be higher than any in recent history”, the letter said. “Of course, there are exceptional circumstances regarding Ukraine and Hong Kong, but the reality of such a drastic increase undeniably undermines our promise to reduce immigration numbers.”

What is the Common Sense Group?

The group “launched quietly in the summer” of 2020 with around 40 members and is one of a string of backbench pressure groups formed after the influential European Research Group found success in shaping Brexit policy, The Guardian reported.

More Conservative MPs quickly joined the Common Sense Group, which made headlines in November 2020 after accusing the National Trust of being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma” and in the grip of “elitist bourgeois liberals” amid a row about links between the charity’s properties and slavery.

At the time, some “59 MPs and 7 members of the House of Lords” were reported to be members. Their ranks have included disgraced Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan, who was sentenced this week to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.

In the fallout of the National Trust challenge, group founder John Hayes told The Guardian that while the European Research Group had “served an important role”, the government needed “to decide what its defining purpose is beyond Brexit”.

“There’s a thirst in the party to have an open debate about what the direction should be now,” he continued. “There’s a different kind of Conservative family emerging.”

In a manifesto published by his own group in May 2021 – titled Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age – Hayes wrote that it was time for a “refreshed national conversation on the defining issues of our time” such as “nationhood, community, migration, the rule of law and public order”.

The former minister hit headlines again earlier this month after vowing to write to Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi to demand an investigation into an early years anti-racism consultancy whose work he described as “brainless nonsense” and “deeply sinister”, reported The Telegraph. According to the paper, “several local authorities” had called on the services of The Black Nursery Manager, which runs training sessions on how to explore the concept of race and culture with under-fives.

Consultancy chief Liz Pemberton, a former nursery manager, “said her inbox had been flooded with abuse” in the wake of Hayes’ comments, The Guardian reported.

What has the group said about immigration?

In their letter to the home secretary, the backbenchers write that “as you have grasped, mass immigration only pays lip service to the concept of ‘control’”.

The signatories argue that the vote for Brexit was a “resounding declaration from the British people that they wanted to take back control” of the immigration system, and that voters understand the “dire consequences” of failing to tackle rising immigration numbers.

“It is our duty to do right by the promise we made to them,” the letter added.

In response, the Home Office said that the new post-Brexit points-based system “delivers on a key government commitment to put in place an immigration system which works in our national interest”, but added that the “rise in dangerous Channel crossings is unacceptable”.

“The Nationality and Borders Act will fix this broken system by protecting those in genuine need while cracking down on evil people smuggling gangs,” said a spokesperson.

The scope of Sadiq Khan’s powers as London mayor is under scrutiny after Priti Patel ordered an independent review of his role in the hiring and firing of Metropolitan Police commissioners.

The Times reported that the review will be headed by Tom Winsor, the recently retired chief inspector of constabulary. The move follows the “ousting” of Met chief Cressida Dick in February, after Khan withdrew his support for her amid “racism, misogyny and misconduct scandals” in the force.

Patel was said to have been “blindsided” by the Labour mayor’s withdrawal of confidence “only a few months” after Dick was awarded a two-year extension to her contract, the paper continued. The home secretary will choose Dick’s successor but is “legally required to take Khan’s opinion into account”.

In a further clash over Khan’s powers, Policing Minister Kit Malthouse has told the mayor to end his “baffling” support for legalising cannabis and focus on knife crime in the capital instead.

What is Khan’s role as mayor?

Khan “sets the budget and is responsible for making London a better place for everyone who visits, lives or works in the city”, according to the London Assembly website. The former Labour MP for Tooting “has a duty to create plans and policies for the capital”, covering issues ranging from arts and culture to housing, transport and policing.

According to Police UK, Kahn “is responsible for setting policing and crime priorities for London”. As mayor, he “will hold the Met Police commissioner to account and work with partners to ensure that crimes goes down and criminal justice outcomes are improved”.

The Telegraph reported in February that Patel was planning a shake-up of legislation to prevent police and crime commissioners (PCC) from dismissing chief constables, including Met commissioners, “for political or personal reasons”. Khan is the equivalent of a PCC for London, so “does have the power to effectively dismiss the commissioner and suspend them if the Metropolitan Police Authority wants to remove or force them to retire”, said the paper.

Khan can also influence policing in the capital in other ways, although he doesn’t have the power to change specific legislation.

Following through on a key manifesto pledge in his mayoral campaign last year, Khan has appointed former justice secretary Charlie Falconer to lead a London Drugs Commission that “will examine the potential benefits of legalising cannabis” in London, This is Local London reported.

While the mayor cannot legalise cannabis, he can “provide recommendations on any potential model” for drug reform in the capital, and is likely to “focus on existing solutions that can be implemented without Home Office approval”, said Politics.co.uk.

Khan is backing a pilot scheme in which young people aged 18 to 24 found with “small” amounts of cannabis in the London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley are to be offered speeding-course-style classes or counselling instead of arrest.

The project is being spearheaded by Damien Egan, the mayor of Lewisham, but may be funded by the mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), after “similar pre-custody ‘diversion schemes’ for drug users” were found to work successfully in other parts of the country, the London Evening Standard reported.

Could Khan’s powers be reduced?

According to The Times, a terms of reference for the independent review ordered by Patel asks Winsor to “provide the home secretary with advice, options and recommendations on how accountability and due process in these respects may be strengthened”.

The review will look at whether the mayor’s role should be “diminished” in order to “reduce the impact of politics”, said the paper, and “whether changes could be made so that a withdrawal of mayoral confidence would not necessarily result in a commissioner’s resignation”.

Reducing Khan’s powers would require new legislation, and would be likely to “anger City Hall, given that his role is to hold the Met to account and requires a close working relationship with its leadership”.

But, added The Times, “it is possible, though considered much less likely”, that Winsor could recommend that the mayor “be given more powers, to skew the balance in his favour”.

The government has faced furious criticism over its handling of the Ukrainian refugee crisis as those fleeing the war-torn country are confronted with red tape and delays if they want to reach the UK.

The brunt of the criticism has been directed at Home Secretary Priti Patel, who faced “days of public and private opprobrium” before her department finally allowed Ukrainians to apply for UK visas online rather than visit application centres in Europe, reported The Guardian last week.

Boris Johnson is reportedly “perturbed by the volume of negative headlines around the low number of refugees being granted visas”, fuelling speculation that “Patel’s future would again come under discussion at the summer reshuffle”, the paper continued.

This week the number of visas granted to Ukrainians wishing to enter the UK has risen since last week when just 300 had been approved, but numbers remain low. Just 4,600 visas have been granted through the Ukraine family scheme, according to the latest Home Office figures.

Now the prime minister is facing calls to sack Patel from Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who branded her response to the “humanitarian catastrophe” as “utterly shameful”, The Guardian reported.

“She has answered desperation with delays; crisis with confusion; pain with paperwork,” he told his party’s spring conference this weekend. “It couldn’t be clearer that Priti Patel is not up to the job. The buck stops with the prime minister. So Boris Johnson must sack her now,” he added.

Misjudged the public mood

It seems the “mood of compassion” that the British public have shown over the Ukrainian refugee crisis could “spell curtains” for the home secretary, said political sketch writer John Crace in The Guardian.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she has “failed to read the room” despite the rest of her party picking up on the mood of the nation. She has presided over a “steadfastly old school” approach to immigration, which meant only those refugees with close family ties to the UK could apply for a visa – “if they could find a visa application centre that was open”.

“Eventually enough was enough, even for the most hardline Tory MPs,” continued Crace, although just about the only concession they could get from the home secretary was that refugees could fill their visa forms in online.

The chaos of the Home Office’s approach meant that it was practically “a failed state in itself”, said Crace. “No one had any confidence that Patel could organise an adequate humanitarian response and so no one even bothered to ask her.”

After taking flak for “a refugee policy that made Scrooge look like Oxfam”, said Tim Stanley in The Telegraph, the government has “cooked up” a new policy in the form of its new Homes for Ukraine scheme, unveiled by levelling up secretary Michael Gove yesterday.

“Goodbye Priti Patel, hello Michael Gove,” said Stanley, who called Gove’s leadership of the new project “a tonal switch from baseball bat to kid gloves”.

Gove seemed “comfortably in command of areas normally controlled by the home secretary” during his Commons performance, agreed Quentin Letts in The Times, leading one Gove loyalist to comment that they “expected more resistance” from the home secretary as he took over her “territory”.

Can Patel hang on?

Patel may be able to hang on, for now, said HuffPost, but it may be “too late to restore” her “battered reputation”.

As well as putting Gove in charge of the government’s new scheme, it is “significant” that the prime minister has appointed former Tory MP Richard Harrington as the new minister for refugees, and made him a life peer at the same time. Both moves are a “clear sign of Johnson’s unhappiness with Patel’s performance”, said the news site.

But while the past week has “left her more damaged than ever”, Patel still has some support among the Conservative right.

“Priti still has support from certain quarters – she’s good at going round the constituency parties and associations and pressing the flesh,” said one former minister.

“She’s also got support from the right wing of the party, but the general view is that it’s either the home office that’s dysfunctional or that she simply isn’t up to it,” they added.

The UK government is under growing pressure to grant more visas for Ukrainian refugees after it emerged that only 300 had been issued as of yesterday.

The Home Office said a total of 17,700 visa applications have been started under the government’s Ukraine Family Scheme, which launched on 4 March. Three days later, 8,900 applications had been submitted, while 4,300 applicants had made appointments to submit their biometric details.

Of these, 640 applications had been confirmed, and 300 visas issued. More than two million people have fled the war in Ukraine, with the majority seeking safety in neighbouring Poland, which has taken in 1.2 million refugees, according to the United Nations.

Technical difficulties and delays

The Guardian reported that Ukrainians attempting to flee to safety in the UK have described their “intense frustration and anger at the bureaucratic hurdles and technical difficulties” in trying to get a visa under the new scheme.

Applicants told the paper they have been left in unfamiliar countries “wrestling with the complex application process” and hindered further by “difficulties uploading crucial documents or the application website was crashing”. Others have complained that there are “no appointment slots available to finalise their applications” or found themselves being asked to “post supporting documents to an office in Wandsworth”.

And Ukrainian refugees arriving in Calais have faced uncertainty and delays, with almost 600 refugees stuck in the French port town, reported the BBC. Many said they have been turned away at the border for “for lack of paperwork”. The French authorities told the broadcaster that “almost 300 people have been turned away while trying to cross to the UK”.

Some refugees told the BBC that they had been told to go to Paris to apply for the visa, where they have “faced a wait of more than a week” for an appointment.

On Monday, Home Secretary Priti Patel denied that refugees were being turned back in the French port town, and said her department was in the process of setting up an application centre. “We have staff in Calais, we have support on the ground. It is wrong to say we’re just turning people back, we’re absolutely not, we’re supporting those that have been coming to Calais,” she said.

But the Daily Mirror’s chief reporter Andy Lines tweeted a picture of a poster in a youth hostel in Calais that appeared to suggest that visas would not be delivered to the town, and directed people to fill out an online form before going to visa centres in Paris or Brussels.

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has criticised the number of visas issued for Ukrainian refugees as “shockingly low and painfully slow”.

After the publication of the Home Office figures, she tweeted: “Just 250 since yesterday. At this rate it would be weeks before many families reunite. Urgent action needed.”

She also questioned why there were so many reports of Ukrainians in the French town unable to apply for a visa because there was no official available to process applications, reported The Guardian.

“I hope the home secretary is going to deliver some of the promises she has made, but there is a huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality that is badly, badly letting Ukrainian families down,” Cooper said.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the government should be offering a “simple route to sanctuary” for those feeling Ukraine, and criticised the Home Office as “in a complete mess”, said the BBC.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International UK suggested “history is repeating itself” after the response to last year’s crisis in Afghanistan.

Refugee and migrant rights director Steve Valdez-Symonds said the Home Office was “once again too slow and too bureaucratic in response to a refugee crisis that almost everyone saw coming”.

The UK visa routes open to Ukrainian refugees

Under the UK’s recently extended family visa scheme, Ukrainians with parents, grandparents, children and siblings already in the UK are allowed to stay for up to three years.

Another route for Ukrainian refugees is through sponsorship by an individual or business.

But the offer “does not match that of EU countries”, said ITV. Some have already waived visa rules for Ukrainian refugees, allowing them to enter EU countries for up to three years without first having to seek asylum.

It is thought that Patel could be examining “legal options” to create a “humanitarian route”, which would offer all Ukrainians seeking refuge the right to come to the UK, whether or not they have family ties to the UK, in a scheme similar to the EU’s.

But Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to talk down the possibility of such a route being introduced, telling reporters on Monday: “What we won’t do is have a system where people can come into the UK without any checks or any controls at all, I don’t think that is the right approach,” the Independent reported.

“But what we will do is have a system that is very, very generous,” he added.

Johnson continued: “As the situation in Ukraine deteriorates, people are going to want to see this country open our arms to people fleeing persecution, fleeing a war zone.

“I think people who have spare rooms who want to receive people coming from Ukraine will want us to have a system that enables them to do that. And that is already happening.”

Priti Patel is set to scrap the UK’s so-called golden visa scheme in a bid to halt the flow of “dirty money” flooding into the UK from Russia, according to reports.

The Tier 1 investor visas are effectively “golden tickets for foreign billionaires”, who can fast-track residency in the UK “in return for millions of pounds in business backing”, said The Sun. But the home secretary is expected to announced an immediate end to the scheme next week, “amid concerns London is flooded with cash and assets linked to Kremlin tyrant Vladimir Putin” and other Russian oligaths, the paper reported.

‘Londongrad’

Tensions over Moscow’s build-up of troops on the border with Ukraine have intensified “long-standing concerns” that the visa scheme, introduced by Labour in 2008, “had been exploited by those from hostile states”, said The Independent.

Late last month, diplomatic sources told The Times that the US State Department had voiced “dismay and frustration” at the UK’s failure to crack down on the flow of suspect funds, especially in what they termed “Londongrad”.

According to the paper, American officials “fear that they will be unable to impose effective sanctions on President Putin if Russia invades Ukraine”, following “years of British tolerance” of such money being invested in the English capital.

“Putin doesn’t hold his money abroad,” a source in Washington said. “It is all in the kleptocrats’ names and a hell of a lot of it is sitting in houses in Knightsbridge and Belgravia right under your government’s noses.”

The government estimated in 2016 that around £100bn of corrupt money was flowing into the UK each year. In 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said that oligarchs were drawn by “a light and limited touch to regulation, with London’s strong capital and housing markets offering sound investment opportunities”.

‘Send message to Putin’

The golden visa scheme was introduced by Labour back in 2008 in response to the financial crisis. Under the scheme, foreign nationals can get residency for themselves and their families by investing £2m or more in the UK.

A £2m investment into British businesses paves the way for an application to then get British citizenship and a passport within five years, shortened to three years for £5m, or two years for £10m.

According to the Daily Mail, more than 12,000 of the visas “doled out” so far, including 2,500 to Russians.

Critics have long warned that the scheme was being exploited to launder the proceeds of corruption, and to increase the influence of hostile states such as Russia and China.

Since 2015, applicants “have had to produce a letter from a UK financial institution confirming that they have opened an investment account”, said Spear’s Magazine. Further reforms were introduced in March 2019 “to protect better against financial crime and ensure that investments are of greater benefit to the UK economy”.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that pressure was growing on the government to enact new legislation designed to tackle the problem. “Influential” Tory MPs had argued that the move was long overdue and would “serve to send a message” to Putin over Ukraine, the paper said.

Patel now plans to end the scheme entirely in a move linked to “a range of sanctions” being drawn up against Moscow, said the Daily Mail.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned yesterday that Moscow would “retaliate” if new sanctions were imposed by the UK.

The Home Office is “outdated and far too reliant on other departments” for support, a Whitehall figure has claimed amid mounting pressure on Priti Patel to stem deadly Channel migrant crossings.

In comments reported by PoliticsHome, the civil service source described Home Office leadership as “outdated” and the department as “completely incompetent”, adding that their view was so widespread in Whitehall that “it’s not even an open secret”.

Patel, who is “ineffective and unpopular”, is still in place only because of personal support from Boris Johnson, they continued, adding: “Under their watch, so much fails.”

The blistering attack on the department is not the first of its kind. The Guardian reported in May that the Home Office “strains to be seen as competent and tough”, but repeatedly “struggles to show evidence that its policies are working”.

So is the Home Office really broken – or are its critics getting it wrong?

Troubled history

Despite being one of the four “great offices of state”, the Home Office has a long history of internal criticism. In 2006, the then Labour home secretary John Reid declared that it was “not fit for purpose” following a scandal relating to foreign prisoners.

While Reid later told the BBC that the quote was actually spoken by a senior civil servant, it came as his department was being roundly criticised after it was “revealed that 85 serious foreign offenders, released from prison without being considered for deportation since 1999, were still on the run”, The Guardian reported at the time.

Amid what the paper termed a “tidal wave” of crises, Reid submitted a written answer ahead of an appearance in the House of Commons that read: “Our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes.”

According to the Daily Mail, Patel has this month privately repeated Reid’s criticism of the department, also describing it “not fit for purpose” while considering writing to Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to “lambast” its “failure to get a grip of the migrant boat crisis”.

In response, one Home Office figure told the paper that “she hates us and we all hate her”. Another added: “What’s become abundantly clear is that she is out for herself and only interested in how this plays out publicly.

“If we actually worked collaboratively, then we could get things done,” they said. “But instead we just have cloud cuckoo land public statements from the home secretary and we all look and think: ‘Well, that won’t work’.”

The current dispute within the department has been triggered by a record number of deaths among migrants attempting to cross the Channel from France to England.

Despite strong rhetoric from both Boris Johnson and his ally Patel, migrants have warned that they will not be dissuaded from attempting the dangerous crossings.

However, the department has repeatedly courted controversy in recent years, most prominently after the Windrush scandal, which claimed the scalp of former home secretary Amber Rudd and was a result of the so-called “hostile environment” overseen by Theresa May.

Allegations of “institutional racism” followed, with the Windrush Lessons Learned Review prompting Patel to tell the Commons: “There is nothing I can say today that will undo the suffering… On behalf of this and successive governments I am truly sorry.”

Writing in The Sun in March 2020, the paper’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh said the department is a “putrid, leaky swamp” that repeatedly lives up to its reputation as “the politicians’ graveyard”.

Listing Labour’s Reid, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, as well as the Conservatives’ Michael Howard and Rudd, as victims of the department’s failures, he added that it is “a sprawling blancmange of bungling inertia” that “stands as a monument to serial Whitehall ineptitude”.

Over 14 years on from Reid’s infamous quote, Kavanagh said: “Nothing has changed.”

‘A blunt instrument’

So what is the problem with the Home Office?

What is going on within the walls of 2 Marsham Street “has become an increasingly urgent question in recent years”, said The Guardian, adding that “it is the department of law and order, yet it is constantly found to have broken the law”.

Citing the Windrush scandal as an example of departmental wrongdoing, the paper continued that “from the perspective of the people at the top, it has a simple purpose: keeping the public safe”.

But instead it has come to resemble “a blunt instrument obsessed with looking tough”, the paper added. “No other department is so defined by its failures and the spectre of blame.”

In The New Statesman, columnist Jonn Elledge argued that the time has come to “abolish” the department, describing it as a byword for “a dystopian combination of cruelty and incompetence”.

Instead, he suggested that the government should “break it up for parts, transfer its functions to a new department or perform them elsewhere; then hold an inquiry into how a major civil service department became quite so in thrall to hard-right politics”.

Elledge’s suggestion may have an unlikely cheerleader in the prime minister’s former right-hand man, Dominic Cummings. In July, the ex-Downing Street adviser tweeted that the Home Office “should be literally closed” and “everybody fired”.

Instead, “a new institution” should be introduced “with a small percentage of old staff re-hired”, he argued, adding: “Ditto for much of Whitehall.”

The Sun’s Kavanagh was less convinced that the department should be shut down, instead arguing that the problem is the “mandarin class” that walk its corridors.

“Like Japanese soldiers still fighting World War Two long after Armistice Day” the department “remains stoutly pro-EU”, he said. Officials “have enormous power to sabotage policies they dislike or kick them into the long grass”.

Patel has fallen foul of her department because she is “driving through the crime and illegal immigration crackdown demanded by voters who handed Boris ­Johnson his landslide victory”, he added. She is being stopped by staff who are “determined to block, humiliate and undermine” her “at every turn”.

Speaking to The Guardian, one former Home Office official said that a major problem with the department is its focus on immigration, describing “a constant battle against the numbers” of people coming in and out of the country each year.

They said that this has led to a “nervousness” among advisers in terms of adjusting policies, adding: “If you relax the rules in one area, you may create a great big loophole through which everybody will rush.

“The fear is that if you relax the rules in London in the morning, they’ll know about it in North Africa or in Afghanistan by lunchtime. It goes around the world.”

With immigration back on the agenda due to the spate of Channel crossings, that does not look likely to change anytime soon.

“New leadership might help. Reform might help,” The New Statesman’s Elledge said.

But as another scandal hangs over the department, “it’s hard” to avoid the conclusion “that anything less than a completely new institutional culture will be enough”.

Desperate migrants are vowing to continue attempting dangerous sea crossings despite the drowning of at least 27 people in the deadliest day in the English Channel since records began, according to reports.

After visiting a makeshift camp on the outskirts of Dunkirk following Wednesday’s tragedy, The Guardian’s security editor Dan Sabbagh reported that “everybody says they still have the same plan, to try to get on a boat to the UK”.

“Everybody knows the risks,” he wrote. But the crossings will continue “because they do not believe that death will come to them – and because of their hope for a better life”.

An Iraqi Kurd migrant named only as Mira told the paper that he had left his home in the city of Sulaymaniyah because “there is no life” there. That phrase, said Sabbagh, was “repeated by many in and around the camp” who are “ready to make the perilous journey in the hope of eventually making money to send back home”.

Another migrant, Muhammed, said Britain was his favoured destination because he has “friends in Nottingham, in London and Birmingham”.

An Iraqi Kurd at the same camp told the Daily Mail that he has tried to cross the channel 11 times so far and would continue trying, even in a fragile dinghy. “If I don’t get in this year, I’ll try again next year – it’s very dangerous but we’re obligated to try again,” he said.

A source told the paper that the “thousands of migrants in France” are” in a state of collective hysteria”, because “by the time they reach France, they are exhausted”.

“They are not thinking straight,” the source said. “They can’t go back, only forward”.

People-smugglers are also reported to be determined to ensure that the crossings do not stop. Criminals charging up to £6,000 for each crossing “put guns to the heads of anyone who dithers about getting on a boat”, because “the more seats they fill on a vessel, the more money they make”.

The “lure” of the UK is down to a “few main factors”, said The Times – namely “work, family ties and the English language”. Informal work in the black market is “easier to find in Britain”, and many people who make it across will have family and contacts here who can “smooth their path”. And most migrants are more likely to already speak at least some English than other European languages.

Home Secretary Priti Patel has claimed that 70% of people crossing the Channel in small boats are economic migrants, but this figure been disputed by the Refugee Council.

Undocumented economic migrants “do not generally deliver themselves into the hands of Home Office officials as soon as they reach UK soil”, The Guardian noted. The paper pointed out that Patel and the then immigration minister Chris Philp rejected recommendations to make payments of £12.11 a week to asylum seekers in UK hotels for essential living needs because they “did not want to further increase any possible pull factors”.

Patel has also proposed a “turn back the boats” policy. But the policy has “triggered a heated battle inside the government amid fears that people on the boats could puncture them as UK vessels try to turn them around, meaning they would have to be rescued”, The Telegraph reported.

At least 27 people including a pregnant woman died trying to cross the English Channel in a small boat yesterday in the worst migrant tragedy in the Channel since records began.

Three children, seven women and 17 men were confirmed to have drowned after the inflatable boat capsized, according to the French authorities. The Guardian reported that Paris and London have “traded accusations” over who is to blame for the deaths and the rise in dangerous crossings of the Channel by migrants.

Rising numbers

The tragedy on Wednesday has triggered fresh calls for action over the growing number of people attempting to cross one of the busiest, most dangerous shipping lanes in the world in inflatable dinghies and other makeshift vessels.

Home Office data suggests that the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has soared in the past three years. Almost 26,000 people are believed to have arrived in Britain since January after crossing the Channel on a small boat – an increase of almost 8,700% on the 299 recorded in 2018.

The tally of people who have reached the UK via the Channel so far this year is “roughly equivalent to the population of Staines-upon-Thames, in Surrey”, said the i news site.

In the past, many migrants sought to smuggle themselves aboard trucks that regularly cross the Channel on ferries or by rail from France. But a migration expert told CNN in 2019 that the UK had “invested a lot of money” in blocking such access, and that people-smugglers had increased their fees for the routes that remained.

The Covid-19 crisis has also fuelled the increase in Channel crossings, because lockdowns have made road, rail and air routes more difficult to access.

And in recent weeks, the weather has been “less stormy than is usual for autumn, which has meant the crossings have continued beyond summer”, The Telegraph added.

Patel’s dilemma

The possible options available to Home Secretary Priti Patel to try to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel all have practical, political or moral drawbacks.

Everyone agrees that “the system is broken and in desperate need of reform”, said The Times. “What they disagree on is why the system is broken and the methods for fixing it.”

Some migrants are attracted to the UK because of the relatively high levels of “irregular work”, such as at car washes,the paper continued. But enforcing stricter rules for employing people would be a “sledgehammer approach to cracking the problem as it would hurt the whole economy”.

Intercepting migrant boats in the Channel could breach international maritime law and Border Force guidance rules that the tactic can only be used under very limited circumstances and in a particular section of the waters that is just 1.8 miles wide.

Patel has agreed two multimillion-pound deals with Paris since 2019 to pay for more surveillance of the French coast, but the agreements have failed to reduce migrant crossing numbers and have caused political tensions.

The home secretary has also introduced rules barring people who have travelled through “safe” third countries from claiming asylum. But while 4,561 people who crossed the Channel in the first six months after the rules came into effect post-Brexit were flagged as “inadmissible”, a lack of evidence meant only seven were eventually judged to be so by officials.

A bid to shake up the UK’s asylum laws has met with criticism too. Opponents claim that the Nationality and Borders Bill will not prevent arrivals from becoming a drain on national resources and could face a legal challenge.

Other possible options to tackle the Channel crossings crisis, including new criminal offences and offshore processing and reception centres, have been deemed inadequate or impractical.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has travelled to Dover today to try to get a grip on a UK asylum system she says is “broken”.

The process for housing asylum seekers has been labelled a “national disgrace”. Overcrowding at detention centres set up to process record numbers of migrants crossing the Channel has led to the spread of disease and the government spending millions of pounds a day to house people in hotels.

The number of people crossing the Channel this year will soon reach 40,000, twice the number that had arrived by this time last year.

Braverman, recently reinstalled as home secretary after being forced to resign, has been accused of ignoring legal advice and deliberately allowing overcrowding at the Manston airfield processing centre in Kent. “The Channel migrant crisis has swiftly emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing Rishi Sunak,” said The Times.

Last week, the prime minister spoke about how to finally fix the crisis, telling French president Emmanuel Macron that they must find a way to make cross-Channel migration “completely unviable”.

But what are the options for Sunak to fix the UK’s broken asylum system?

What did the papers say?

“Key to fixing the crisis is a deal that stops migrants making the journey in the first place,” said The Times.

France and the UK already have an annual security pact that governs the Channel border. Under the 2021 agreement, the UK sent about €60m to France in exchange for specific policing and control measures. However, Sunak is said to want a more “ambitious” deal.

Euronews said that “in contrast to previous governments, which took an aggressive stance towards France with regards to migrant crossings, the new UK administration has already adopted a more conciliatory tone”.

According to The Times, Home Office officials believe that if the interception rate can reach 75%, “it will be enough to destroy the business model of people smugglers and make attempts to cross the Channel not worthwhile”. However, the French interception rate has dropped from 50% last year to just 42% this year.

Some charities have suggested that the UK should allow asylum seekers in northern France hoping to reach the UK to register their claim with UK officials and then be safely placed on ferries to be brought to the UK while their claim is processed.

The Guardian said if such a scheme were adopted it would “achieve what the government has repeatedly promised to do: smash the business model of the people smugglers”.

Perhaps the most contentious option is the “turnback” policy, which gives UK Border Force officers the power to intercept migrant boats and redirect them back towards France.

After Australia introduced the policy in 2013 to “combat migrant boat arrivals”, the number of maritime asylum seekers fell from 20,000 to just 160 people and the next year none arrived, said The Times. However, the tactic risks breaching international maritime law and would require the co-operation of the French authorities, who have already stated they will not comply.

The suggestion “triggered a heated battle inside the government amid fears that people on the boats could puncture them as UK vessels try to turn them around, meaning they would have to be rescued”, The Telegraph reported.

What next?

The issue is increasingly pressing because the current system is designed for about 20,000 asylum seekers a year so “when around 50,000 applications were made last year (the highest number since 2003) by mainly irregular entrants – 28,500 from the Channel, more than 8,000 on lorries – it seizes up”, said The Spectator.

Aside from building new migrant centres to house and process those applying for asylum more efficiently, The Times has said the Home Office is “considering introducing targets for staff to process 80% of asylum claims within six months”.

Some in Tory circles have pressed the government to try to make the UK a less attractive proposition for asylum seekers, a policy that has its roots in Theresa May’s controversial “hostile environment” strategy of a decade ago.

But informal work in the black market is “easier to find in Britain”, said The Times, and many people who make it across will have family and contacts here who can “smooth their path”.

For now, both Braverman and Sunak have reaffirmed their commitment to follow through with the controversial deal to send illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Yes “it has many drawbacks: it is inhumane, it is expensive, it is unwieldy and impractical. And, like socialism, it has never been tried” said Tom Harris in The Telegraph.

But if “ministers finally find a way through the morass of legal objections, judicial reviews and general outrage of the legal and charity establishments”, it could actually provide “a severe deterrence effect on others contemplating that short, hazardous journey across the waves”.

Offenders whose crimes result in the death of emergency service workers in the line of duty will receive mandatory life sentences under a new law being introduced by the government

The Ministry of Justice said today that Harper’s Law, named after police officer Andrew Harper, would be passed “as soon as possible”, following a campaign by his widow. Welcoming the announcement, Lissie Harper said that her late husband “would be proud to see Harper’s Law reach this important milestone”.

PC Andrew Harper was 28 and recently married when he was “dragged down a winding country road” by a car while responding to a quad bike theft by a trio of teenagers in August 2019, said The Guardian. He died from his injuries after his foot became tangled in a tow rope attached to the car as the teenagers made their getaway in the Berkshire village of Sulhamstead.

Henry Long, 19, was sentenced to 16 years in July last year after pleading guilty to manslaughter at the Old Bailey, while Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, both 18, were each jailed for 13 years. The Court of Appeal rejected a bid by the attorney general to increase their sentences.

Harper’s widow told reporters that she had been “shocked and appalled” that the teens were cleared of murder and felt “let down” when senior judges refused to extend their prison sentences. She launched a campaign for mandatory life sentences for such killers, with more than 750,000 people signing a petition backing the proposal.

Following the law change, life sentences will “apply to manslaughter of emergency service workers in nearly all circumstances”, The Times reported, “even in cases where the accused may not have had the intent to kill”.

Under the legislation, Harper’s killers would have received a mandatory life sentence on conviction of manslaughter and would have had to appear before a parole board before they would become eligible for release.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) sources told The Telegraph that there would be scope for judicial discretion in “exceptional” circumstances. For example, a drunk or careless driver who killed a police officer could face prosecution under the new law, but “if it was careless driving and it was low culpability, the judge might think a mandatory life sentence is too harsh”, according to an insider.

The reform will apply to the killings of police officers, paramedics, firefighters and prison guards, and will go on to the statute book via an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. It is likely to become law in early 2022.

Priti Patel said that she was “proud to be able to honour Andrew’s life by introducing Harper’s Law”. Thanking his widow for her campaigning efforts, the home secretary added that people who sought to harm emergency workers represented the “worst of humanity”.

“It is right that future killers be stripped of the freedom to walk our streets with a life sentence,” Patel said.

The Church of England has defended itself against accusations of having helped asylum seekers “game the system” by converting to Christianity.

Questions were raised after it emerged that the Liverpool hospital bomb suspect, Emad Al Swealmeen, had converted to Christianity from Islam. The suspected suicide bomber is reported to have been baptised in 2015 and confirmed two years later at a ceremony in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, close to where he died when a home-made device detonated in a taxi on Remembrance Sunday.

According to reports, Swealmeen – who was born in Iraq – had been refused asylum in 2014, before losing further appeals.

‘Gaming the system’

A Home Office source told The Times that Swealmeen was among a number of asylum seekers who try to “game the system” by converting to Christianity.

The newspaper said that “applicants who show they are committed Christians can argue that their new faith would put them at risk in their home country”.

The Telegraph reported that “thousands” of asylum seekers had been “welcomed into the Anglican faith in recent years, with clergy even given written guidance on how to navigate the Home Office system”.

In an article published in the paper yesterday, former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris wrote that a “crucial piece of advice” offered by people traffickers to many asylum seekers was to “get involved in a local church” immediately after lodging an initial asylum claim. “A full-on conversion to Christianity was even better, though not always necessary,” Harris added.

Several newspapers pointed to a tribunal decision on an anonymous asylum case in 2017 that suggested an “improbably large” number of Iranians attending the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral cast doubt on whether they were all “genuine converts”. In other cases, asylum was granted after conversions were deemed authentic.

According to The Sun, Tim Loughton, a senior Tory MP on the Home Affairs Select Committe, has vowed to launch a Commons investigation into the alleged “loophole” used by “certain” asylum seekers. Some were “playing the religious card to avoid deportation”, he told the paper.

‘Seeing into minds and hearts’

The allegations against the Church of England have generated a “certain amount of anger” among religious leaders, said the BBC’s Harry Farley on Radio 4’s Today programme.

A CoE spokesperson said: “We are not aware of any evidence to suggest a widespread correlation between conversion to Christianity, or any other faith, and abuse of the asylum system.”

Separately, an insider told religious affairs reporter Farley that responsibility for assessing asylum claims laid with the Home Office, not the Church.

While it is “certainly true” that large-scale services for asylum seekers have been held in the past, including at the Liverpool Anglican Church, said Farley, “it is very difficult to see into people’s minds and hearts”.

Liverpool Bishop Cyril Ashton, who conducted Swealmeen’s confirmation, said the Church takes the ritual seriously. The suspect “would have been thoroughly ­prepared with an understanding of the Christian faith”, Ashton said.

“It seems that, sadly, despite this grounding, the bomber chose a ­different path for his life,” the bishop added.

The Daily Mail said that another clergyman at the cathedral raised concerns in 2016 that asylum seekers were posing as Christians, in a scheme dubbed “pray to stay”.

“There are many people abusing the system,” Rev Mohammad Eghtedarian reportedly said. “I’m not ashamed of saying that. But is it the person’s fault or the system’s fault? And who are they deceiving? The Home Office, me as a pastor, or God?”

Another church worker who let Swealmeen live with him and his wife told the BBC that he still believed the bomb suspect was a “genuine Christian”. Malcolm Hitchcott, who welcomed Swealmeen into his home for eight months in 2017, said: “What went wrong, I do not know.”

‘Dysfunctional system’

Home Secretary Priti Patel last night pledged to overhaul the asylum process. The case in Liverpool was “a complete reflection of how dysfunctional, how broken, the system has been”, she told reporters.

The system was “a complete merry-go-round” that had been “exploited by a whole professional legal services industry”, she added.

The home secretary spoke out as a newly published analysis by the Refugee Council contradicted her past claims that 70% of people who risk Channel crossings in small boats are single men who are economic migrants to the UK.

Using “Home Office data and requests under freedom of information laws”, the council concluded that “nearly two-thirds of people who migrate to the UK in small boats are deemed to be genuine refugees and allowed to remain”, The Guardian reported.

Child refugees have disappeared from two hotels used by the Home Office to accommodate unaccompanied minors, according to a report.

Since July, the Home Office has housed 287 children at a hotel in East Sussex and another in Kent. The average length of stay was nine days before the children were moved to a more permanent home.

Home Office sources have admitted that during this time a “small number” disappeared, including at least one who was under 16, said The Times. Officials do not know how many people cannot now be traced but it is believed to be fewer than ten.

In a separate report last week, the newspaper said hundreds of child refugees as young as nine have gone missing from the care system after arriving in Britain from across the Channel.

In one case, a 15-year-old Vietnamese boy is feared to have been forced into slavery after the Home Office placed him alone in a hotel and he disappeared overnight.

The Times added that since July charities have been raising their concerns for the welfare of children housed in hotels. And Home Office officials have privately warned ministers that unaccompanied child refugees were “at risk of disappearing, being kidnapped by traffickers, harming themselves or being exposed to sex offenders”, said the paper.

The Home Office does not require hotels to prove they meet strict health and safety requirements before children move in. Priti Patel, the home secretary, said it was merely “an expectation that hotels meet the statutory health and safety requirements”.

Under current arrangements, local authorities are by default the “corporate parent” of any unaccompanied child in their area. The Home Office said that children staying at the hotels were encouraged to remain there to receive support but were not forced to do so.

Bella Sankey, director of Detention Action, a charity that campaigns for migrants, said the news raised “serious concerns” over the Home Office’s safeguarding.

She said “the fate of the missing children should now weigh on the consciences of civil servants in the Home Office”.

In August, the BBC reported that a five-year-old Afghan refugee fell to his death from a Sheffield hotel window.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We take the welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children extremely seriously and have safeguarding procedures in place to ensure all those in our accommodation are safe and supported whilst we seek a permanent place for them with a local authority. All hotels are selected using commercial agreements used across government, they must meet relevant health and safety legislation and provide their latest health and safety risk assessment.”

She added that there were care workers at the hotels around the clock and that social workers and nurses visited at least three days a week.

The Tories are making their case for being the party of law and order today as Priti Patel and Dominic Raab give speeches at the Conservatives’ annual conference in Manchester.

In his first public address speech to the Tory faithful as justice secretary, Raab said his “number one priority” would be to protect women and girls, following the high-profile murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa.

The home secretary followed this up with the announcement of an inquiry into the “systematic failures” that allowed Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens to be a police officer. Patel also used her speech to lay out plans to tackle Insulate Britain protesters on the M25.

But amid claims that justice in England and Wales “is on its knees”, is the government doing enough to tackle crime?

Tags and asbos

The Tories’ latest “law and order crackdown” includes proposals for the “return of chain gangs”, reported the Daily Mail. Criminals will be ordered to wear high-visibility “Community Payback” tabards to carry out unpaid work, such as cleaning streets and towpaths, although “unlike the historic ‘chain gangs’ in the US and Australia, offenders will not be shackled”, the paper added.

Raab also wants to double the number of offenders wearing electronic tags by 2025 and, in a separate programme, to force 12,000 criminals leaving jail to wear “sobriety tag” devices that can monitor alcohol intake.

Patel is planning a raft of new measures too, including criminal disruption prevention orders that “will effectively create a new type of anti-social behaviour order to crackdown on disruptive protests by Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion”, said The Times. She also announced a new offence of criminal interference of critical national infrastructure.

According to the paper, the new measures were dubbed “Asbos for crusties” by a government source.

Party of law and order?

The latest plans come amid faltering faith in the police and justice system. In July, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee argued that “the Tories have lost control of law and order”, with huge court delays leaving justice in England and Wales “on its knees”.

The “handcuff-rattling” home secretary “likes announcing draconian new sentences”, Toynbee wrote, “but without adequate police, prisons and, above all, law courts to hear cases, her bombast is empty”.

At the Labour conference last week, shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds accused the government of “defunding the police” through a decade of cuts, and claimed that the Conservatives were actually “the party of crime and disorder”.

Meanwhile, the “dreadful” murder of Everard by a serving police officer “continues to cause an earthquake in the criminal justice world”, said The Telegraph in an editorial on Monday.

The “grotesque actions of Wayne Couzens cannot be allowed to undermine the entire system”, said the paper, which is calling for a wider debate about the protection afforded to women by the police and the courts. “We need a criminal justice system that is accountable, responsive and swift backed up by a police force that can be trusted and is visible.”

While many commentators have cast doubt on whether the Tories can deliver such a system, voters appear to have more faith in the governing party.

The Conservatives continue to top a monthly poll by YouGov that asks more than 1,600 people which political party they think would be the “best at handling law and order”. Although the Tories are now on 32% - their lowest level since September 2019 - the party is still far ahead of Labour, on 16%.

Following the sentencing of Everard’s murderer Couzens last week, Patel offered “powerful” statements on violence against women during an interview with the London Evening Standard, wrote the paper’s Susannah Butter and Nicholas Cecil. But, they added, “can she offer more than just words?”

The prime minister has also insisted that “no woman should have to fear harassment or violence”.

“Now,” concluded Butter and Cecil, “it is up to him and his government to make things happen.”

1. Boris Johnson should explain his climate conversion

David Aaronovitch in The Times

On the PM’s chutzpah

Boris Johnson was “on a cloud of chutzpah” when he arrived at this week’s UN General Assembly in New York to tell the world it needed to “grow up” on climate change, writes David Aaronovitch in The Times. Yet this is the same man who once ridiculed “eco doomsters” and their absurd belief that “evil gases” were encircling the planet, and who has “invoked the work of the climate denier (and now antivax activist) Piers Corbyn to cast doubt on claims that warming might be affecting weather”. Of course, “it may be that Johnson changed his mind and changed his views”, says Aaronovitch, but “he has never explained his conversion”. A “full accounting” by the prime minister for his “180-degree shift in attitude towards global warming” could help persuade the hold-outs “that they should undergo a similar conversion. And reassure the rest of us that he’s actually serious.”

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2. Why has Sabina Nessa’s murder not dominated the news? Take a wild guess

Hira Ali for The Independent

On disproportionate coverage

The case of Sabina Nessa, a 28-year-old primary school teacher believed to have been murdered as she walked home in southeast London on Saturday afternoon, bears a “painful resemblance” to Sarah Everard’s killing six months ago, says Hira Ali. But Nessa’s case “has not dominated the news yet because of how the media treats victims of colour differently”, Ali writes in The Independent. She insists that “it would be naive to ignore the repeated pattern of discrimination in the way media and police treat victims of colour”. This “disproportionate coverage and attention is in equal parts appalling and disheartening”. As “an Asian woman of colour” like Nessa, Ali finds it “disappointing to see how much it takes to bring cases like her’s into the limelight”. Gender violence does not discriminate, she concludes, “but we do”.

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3. What would Jesus do? He’d get vaccinated, that’s what

Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times

On jabs and Jesus

More than 500 members of the Los Angeles Police Department have filed a federal lawsuit against the city over its vaccine mandate on city employees, which they claim violates constitutional rights to privacy and due process. Robin Abcarian argues that the group bringing the lawsuit are “pawns” who have been “manipulated by social-media-spawned misinformation, ignorance and antagonism toward scientific expertise”. And “now we learn that about a quarter of the Police Department’s workforce has indicated it plans to pursue religious exemptions to the vaccine, a patently absurd and disingenuous dodge”, she writes in the Los Angeles Times. But “if you’re wondering what Jesus would do, by now it should be pretty obvious: love your neighbor, get the shot”.

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4. Britain faces a triple crunch – and the political cost for the Tories could be huge

Larry Elliott in The Guardian

On looming challenges

“It is easy to see why ministers are getting a bit jittery,” writes Larry Elliott. The national energy crisis is growing, economic growth is slowing and inflation is rising, while Covid-19 infection rates remain high. Adding to the misery are the end of furlough, the withdrawal of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit, plus higher fuel bills and food shortages. In fact, Elliott warns in The Guardian, a “triple crunch” now looms: an economic crunch, an energy crunch and a climate crunch. He predicts that the “political cost” for the Tories could be “huge” and could allow Labour to inflict some “serious damage”. Indeed, Keir Starmer is “never going to have a better opportunity” to “land a knockout blow”.

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5. Angela Rayner vs. Dominic Raab: a contest of wet lettuce against flame-haired fury

Madeline Grant for The Telegraph

On class war

Deputising for Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions while the Tory leader was in the US, Dominic Raab “delivered his lines with his usual bland efficiency - the interminable dullness of a Tim Henman post-match interview enlivened by occasional glimpses of Andy Murray-style surliness”, says Madeline Grant. Meanwhile, Angela Rayner stood in for Keir Starmer. The Labour MP was “resplendent in her pretty frock - the kind of delicate floral pattern you might see in the revamped No. 10 powder room”, writes The Telegraph sketchwriter. “Her Excellency could have been off to lunch at The Ivy, or quaffing Pimm’s at the Wimbledon Members’ Enclosure.” But “appearances proved deceptive, for Angela’s game was class war, red in tooth and claw, and waged with all the subtlety of a heat-seeking missile”. In the end, Grant concludes, “this battle of fire and water - wet lettuce vs. flame-haired fury - proved an inconclusive tussle”. Deciding who won “all depends on which extreme you prefer”.

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1. It’s shocking to see so many leftwingers lured to the far right by conspiracy theories

George Monbiot in The Guardian

on individualist hippies

“It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit, but in the countercultural movements where my sympathies lie, people are dropping like flies,” writes George Monbiot for The Guardian. Acquaintances are becoming “seriously ill with Covid, after proudly proclaiming the benefits of ‘natural immunity’, denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals”, he says. Mourning what he sees as anti-vaccine conspiracy theories “travelling smoothly from right to left”, he writes of “hippies who once sought to build communities sharing the memes of extreme individualism”. Granting that “there has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas”, Monbiot adds that “much of what we are seeing at the moment is new” because “the old boundaries have broken down, and the most unlikely people have become susceptible to rightwing extremism”. He concludes that the trend has been “accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal” on top of the Covid pandemic. However, “there’s a temptation to overthink this”, he says: “we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy”.

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2. Biden’s vacuous platitudes at the UN won’t fix his tattered global image

The New York Post editorial board

on blah and blather

“US presidents rarely look to make waves with speeches to the annual United Nations General Assembly,” says a leader in the New York Post, but President Joe Biden’s talk “actually challenged global leaders… to stay awake.” He “lectured” countries to “act together” to prevent pandemics and fight climate change, to meet “the challenges” we face by “looking to the future”. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” says the paper’s editorial board, which accuses the Democrat of “empty claims” and of a diplomacy that means US interests “will again take a back seat to whatever the world body’s thugs and corruptocrats prefer”. It concludes that “the worst world leaders surely loved Biden’s blather (if they didn’t nod off), while America’s friends frantically try to figure out how to handle the leadership vacuum in Washington”.

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3. The grim spectre of the 1970s haunts politicians to this day

Philip Johnston in The Telegraph

on eerie discontent

“The auguries are eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the Seventies,” writes Philip Johnston for The Telegraph. “An energy crisis, rising inflation, price controls, massive indebtedness and complacent ministers insisting that there is nothing to worry about.” Forty years on, he explains, the winter of discontent is “a period that continues to cast a pall over politics”. Johnston says that although “ministers are going out of their way not to sound alarmist”, as in the 1970s, matters are “beyond their control”. Therefore, he argues, this reassurance comes over more as “worrying insouciance”. He concludes that “if Boris Johnson’s famed luck runs out, this winter could be bad, even worse, indeed, than the lockdowns. Now, where did I put those candles?”

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4. As Angela Merkel steps down, her kindness to refugees is in stark contrast to Priti Patel’s lack of compassion

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i

on a crass approach

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says she will never forget the day in August 2015, when Angela Merkel said: “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this!”) and allowed over a million displaced people to settle in Germany. “Compare and contrast Merkel with our Home Secretary, Priti Patel, whose own family, like mine, was forced to leave Uganda,” continues The i columnist. “We started over again and remade our lives. Yet when she talks about migrants and asylum seekers it’s like a dragon breathing out fire. There is no compassion, no vision, no plan, only a growing list of strict, impossible regulations.” The Tories now in charge are “feral, unbeholden to international treaties, crass and careless about suffering humans outside these isles”, mourns Alibhai-Brown. “Merkel was the opposite.”

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5. Marcus Rashford is now on the GCSE syllabus – exactly where he belongs

Rupert Hawksley for The Independent

on a class act

“You would have to be very stupid and oddly traditional – obsessed with, say, imperial weights and measures – not to see the benefits of teenagers learning more about Rashford and the ways he has harnessed the media to promote his campaigns on food poverty and free school meals,” writes Rupert Hawksley for The Independent. The columnist says “we should applaud AQA for its willingness to put together an original and creative syllabus” and that he hopes “parents, surely, will have no objections to their sons and daughters learning about a young footballer who has tackled food poverty, promotes reading and cares deeply about fighting racism in the UK?” He also hopes that “we are coming to the end of the era in which reality television stars and ‘celebrities’ are idolised; when being famous is a goal in itself” because “young people now look to those with drive and decency”. Rashford, he concludes, “is at the top of that list and absolutely belongs on the academic syllabus”.

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More than 14,000 migrants have arrived in Britain illegally this year by crossing the Channel in small boats, said The Daily Telegraph. Many Britons are furious that people-smugglers are still making “a mockery of UK borders”.

The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is “frustrated” too: she is threatening to “pull the plug” on a failing £54m deal with France to prevent migrants leaving its coast. She has also secured new advice from the Attorney General authorising Border Force to “push back” migrant boats into French waters: officials have been filmed using jet skis to turn around dinghies during practice drills off the Kent coast.

This policy has caused an outcry, but I know that it can work, said Alexander Downer, Australia’s former minister for foreign affairs, in the Daily Mail. Australia did it when “large numbers of economic migrants” began arriving in our waters from Indonesia. Patrol boats intercepted the smugglers’ vessels, repaired and refuelled them, then pointed them back towards Indonesia. It became very clear that we were going to stamp out people-smuggling, and the numbers were soon greatly reduced.

Such a policy would face a great many practical problems, said The Times. Legally, the migrants would have to be intercepted before they had reached British waters. Their boats would have to be seaworthy, not overloaded, and capable of returning to the French coast. The French coastguard would probably have to escort them back. And if migrants jumped into the sea, British officials would legally have to rescue them.

The key to solving this problem isn’t pushing back boats, it’s sensible cooperation with France. More importantly, it’s a deeply “callous” policy, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Are we really contemplating leaving migrants stuck “in limbo, waiting to sink”, between two of the richest nations on Earth? How long before some “poor desperate Afghan” is found “dead in the water”? The Government will bear responsibility for any deaths. Border Force staff must understand the repercussions if they “obey orders”.

It’s not yet clear whether this is official policy, said Diane Taylor in The Guardian. In the past, many of Patel’s plans to tackle the migrant crisis have come to nothing. She has previously suggested holding asylum seekers in “processing centres” outside the UK; and greatly increasing deportations. She has even mooted “installing giant wave machines” in the Channel. None of these plans ever came to fruition. It has also been rumoured that she might yet lose her job. The chances of the push-back scheme “actually being put into practice are slim”.

Priti Patel has risked further damaging diplomatic relations with France by sanctioning plans to forcibly redirect migrant boats back across the Channel.

The home secretary has “ordered officials to rewrite maritime law to allow boats carrying migrants to be intercepted in the Channel”, meaning Border Force will be allowed to turn boats around and force French authorities to deal with them on their return to French waters, The Times said.

Officers will also “be trained in new tactics to turn around small vessels” after Patel “lost patience over what she perceives as French inaction”.

Under the controversial new proposals, Border Force will contact the French coastguard to inform it that vessels in French territorial waters were in need of rescue, handing France the legal responsibility for the migrant boats.

Asked about the plans this morning, Health Minister Helen Whately did not deny boats would be turned back, telling Sky News that the government wants to “deter” migrant crossings and was “looking at all the options”.

“You wouldn’t want to put people in any greater danger, they’re taking a dangerous journey as it is,” Whately said. “What we want to do is actually deter them from starting that journey in the first place.”

Campaigners have previously described the pushback plans, first outlined in July, as both illegal and “morally wrong”, the Independent reported.

Charities urged the Home Office to take a “more humane and responsible approach”, the Evening Standard said, and stressed that more humanitarian visas were needed to help “prevent the chaos of the Channel crossings”.

Meanwhile, the French government has already warned Patel that the move would have “a negative impact on our co-operation”.

In a letter to Patel seen by the Financial Times, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, said: “The French position on intervention at sea remains unchanged. Safeguarding human lives at sea takes priority over considerations of nationality, status and migratory policy, out of strict respect for the international maritime law governing search and rescue at sea.”

Tensions have been growing over Channel crossings in recent weeks. Before talks between Patel and her opposite number yesterday, the Daily Express said Paris had warned that it would equate to a “serious loss of trust” if the UK tabled fresh demands.

Earlier this week, Patel, who recently agreed to pay France £54m to double patrols on its Channel coast, was reported to be “furious” at the number of migrants being intercepted. Patel told Conservative MPs that she was “prepared to pull the funding promised less than two months ago if they failed to stop three in four crossings by the end of this month”.

Patel’s anger was stoked after a record number of migrants were believed to have attempted to cross the Channel earlier this week.

Eyewitnesses told Sky News that at least 1,000 men, women and children were spotted making the journey from France to the UK, taking advantage of the heatwave and some of the most settled weather conditions for some weeks.

The government may be on a collision course with France after Priti Patel reportedly threatened to withhold millions of pounds of funding if it fails to take tougher action on migrants.

The home secretary, who recently agreed to pay France £54m to double patrols on its Channel coast, is “furious” at the number of migrants being intercepted, The Times said. Patel has told Conservative MPs that she is “prepared to pull the funding promised less than two months ago if they failed to stop three in four crossings by the end of this month”.

At a meeting last night, during which Patel attempted to quell anger over the migrant issue, she said: “We’ve not given them a penny of the money so far and France is going to have to get its act together if it wants to see the cash.

“It’s payment by results and we’ve not yet seen those results. The money is conditional.”

Record arrivals

Patel’s anger was stoked after a record number of migrants were believed to have attempted to cross the Channel yesterday.

Eyewitnesses told Sky News that at least 1,000 men, women and children were spotted making the journey from France to the UK, taking advantage of the heatwave and some of the most settled weather conditions for some weeks.

Although the Home Office put yesterday’s figure at lower than 1,000, it has not confirmed whether or not the record was broken. The current record of 828 migrants was set on 21 August.

The BBC noted that the previous highest totals were 416 people on 2 September 2020 and 430 migrants on 19 July. If yesterday’s rumoured tally is confirmed it would mean more than 13,500 people have reached the UK from France so far this year, The Times said, compared with 8,420 for the whole of 2020.

Amid concern for migrants’ safety on the channel, Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of the charity Refugee Action, told The Guardian: “The shocking images we’ve seen in Afghanistan have shown what forces people to leave their country. That same terror is happening in other countries such as Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and elsewhere.”

Trouble brewing

Government patience is wearing thin after Patel pledged to crack down on the number of people illegally crossing the Channel en route to the UK. More than 5,000 migrants have now arrived since Patel pledged to pay France £54m to double police patrols and boost surveillance.

The home secretary has said that she will confront her French counterpart, Gerald Darmanin, over the issue at a G7 meeting she is hosting in London this week.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has demanded the French “stiffen their sinews” to prevent more migrants reaching the UK, The Telegraph reported.

Asked in the Commons about the surge in arrivals, the prime minister said that “a large number of people want to come to this country, and we are doing everything we can to encourage the French to do the necessary and impede their passage”.

After the French stopped just 200 migrants from crossing in boats on Monday, a UK government source told the paper: “They have to get a grip.”

The Conservative MP for Dover, Natalie Elphicke, has called for emergency laws to give UK Border Force powers to turn back boats carrying migrants.

“First it was a few, then hundreds, and now 1,000 in a day, the French just waving them through with a cheery ‘Bon Voyage’,” she told The Telegraph.

“If the French won’t stop the small boats then we need to by turning them back, making returns and taking firm control of our borders.”

1. Crime always pays for the Tories – that’s why they turn to it again and again

Martin Kettle in The Guardian

on a weak strategy

“What better way to signal a return to supposed political normality than to reprise that old Conservative favourite, a dose of law and order?” writes Martin Kettle in The Guardian. “July’s opinion polls have not been as good for the Tories as those of the spring”, and it seems a “crime crackdown is a way of reassuring the voters that, whatever the appearance otherwise, the government really is in control”. Except, says Kettle, that “actually the government is not exercising control over crime”. He says this week’s package is for show. “To dignify it as a real anti-crime strategy is to miss the point of it, which is rhetorical.” The plan will therefore “not work because it has not been designed to work. It has been designed to be noticed.”

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2. If we want to live we have to suffer and weep

James Marriott in The Times

on human pain

“David Pearce, a leading figure in the transhumanist movement that obsesses Silicon Valley’s elites, is an ‘abolitionist’,” writes James Marriott in The Times. That is, he “is an abolitionist with respect to the totality of human suffering,” continues Marriott, and he believes “states of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health”. While the “scale of Pearce’s ambition” might qualify him as an “eccentric”, he is also “a man very much of his time”, Marriott says. “Witness the behaviour of the 21st century’s affluent classes: their neurotic and elaborate evasion of even small degrees of suffering through therapy, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, esoteric workout routines, wild swimming and (more commonly in America) medication,” he says. “But we must not pathologise the human condition. It is terrible to suffer but suffering is valuable because it broadens our understanding of what life is and what the business of being a human might involve.”

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3. Britain is a hostile place to become a mother

Olivia Utley in The Telegraph

on the baby bust

“Whichever way you look at it, 21st century Britain is a hostile environment to become a mother,” writes Olivia Utley in The Telegraph. “Despite the UK being in the grip of a baby bust that has the potential to cripple our economy in the not so distant future, there is a growing cultural hostility to those who want to start families, let alone large ones.” Indeed, “I’ve heard woke young greens with an armageddon complex – who see children primarily as energy guzzlers – argue that bringing them into a world on the brink of collapse is selfish.” Utley concludes: “Having babies isn’t for everyone. And no one should be shamed for wanting to remain childless. But there is power to be found in being a pro-natal society, with the confidence and vision to regenerate and grow.”

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4. What if the unvaccinated can’t be persuaded?

Ezra Klein in The New York Times

on vaccination passports

“It is nearly impossible to convince people of what they don’t want to believe,” writes Ezra Klein in The New York Times. “Decades of work in psychology attest to this truth, as does most everything in our politics and most of our everyday experience,” writes Klein. “Which brings me to the difficult choice we face on coronavirus vaccinations. The conventional wisdom is that there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 per cent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose”. But the truth is: “There probably isn’t.” Indeed, “the Delta strain is fearsome enough, but if we keep permitting the virus to dance across the defenceless, we could soon have a strain that evades vaccines while retaining lethality, or that attacks children with more force.” As a result, says Klein, “I urge those who object to vaccination passports as an unprecedented stricture on liberty to widen their tragic imagination.”

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5. Make time for the people at the edge of your life

Elizabeth Uviebinene in the Financial Times

on weak ties

“I bumped into someone recently at a mutual friend’s event,” writes Elizabeth Uviebinene in the Financial Times. “We caught up for 30 minutes and then parted ways. I left feeling invigorated and inspired. During this brief chat we were able to brainstorm and discuss new projects we were working on, which in turn provided much needed sense-making and problem solving”. These friendly acquaintances, with whom we have “weak ties”, serve “many important functions, including promoting a sense of belonging, boosting both happiness and knowledge”, new research suggests. “As we begin to reconnect in person, it is a good moment to make time for casual conversations. The fear of being awkward or embarrassed stops many people from initiating weak ties, but you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen?”

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More than 430 migrants crossed the English Channel in small boats to the UK yesterday - the highest number ever recorded in a single day.

The arrivals included a dinghy carrying around 50 people that landed at Dungeness in Kent after crossing the 21-mile Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the channel, says the London Evening Standard.

“Some people raised their hands in the air in apparent celebration at having completed the dangerous journey, while others had to be supported as they walked on to the beach,” says the paper. “Among the arrivals were women and children, some too young to walk.”

Nearly 8,000 migrants have travelled to the UK in a total of around 345 boats so far this year, including 241 on Sunday.

The Guardian notes that yesterday’s peak came as MPs debated the Nationality and Borders Bill, “branded the ‘anti-refugee bill’ by critics” in Parliament.

Home Secretary Priti Patel told fellow lawmakers that “the British people have had enough of open borders and uncontrolled migration… Enough of dinghies arriving illegally on our shores, directed by organised crime gangs. Enough of people drowning on these dangerous, illegal, and unnecessary journeys.”

Patel’s proposed legislation “would make it a criminal offence to knowingly arrive in the UK illegally, and people could face up to four years in prison”, explains the newspaper. The bill “also includes clauses that would allow the UK to send asylum seekers to a ‘safe third country’”.

Refugee Council chief executive Enver Solomon told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that the legislation was a “callous, cold-hearted, brutal response” by a government that is trying to “arrest and prosecute its way out of the problem”.

Explaining the drivers behind the record surge, the BBC’s Jon Donnison told the programme that migrant crossings are “cyclical”. “Obviously, it is a much more appealing route in the summer and the weather has been particularly good with flat seas over the last few days,” he said.

But more importantly, Donnison continued, this overseas route is now the “clear favourite” among people-smuggling gangs as it is seen as less “risky” than using lorries, containers or trains. Indeed, the number of migrants travelling on those land routes has gone down.

Finally, “while the government is pushing back”, Donnison added, “the pull of a better life for migrants - many from some of the world’s most troubled countries - is really strong”.

1. The freedom divide: Why are politicians able to side-step their own rules?

Kate Andrews in The Spectator

on double standards

If the government line is to be believed, we are all simply doing our part: “the Prime Minister, Chancellor and the public all in this together”, writes Kate Andrews in The Spectator. “Everyone’s obeying the rules: it’s just that what those rules are, and who they apply to, looks slightly different.” Of course, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak went back on their decision to skip quarantine and be part of an exclusive pilot scheme “almost as quickly as it was announced”, she says. But not before it sparked outrage “akin to the Matt Hancock revelations that social distancing didn’t apply in his office”. The U-turn may “quell the political damage this time around”, but “it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide the double standards that exist for those inside Whitehall”, Andrews continues. “The ‘party elite’ designed the rules, and alongside them the loopholes and get-out clauses that have allowed ministers to carry on with many aspects of normal life, while the public is sat at home, isolated and often alone.”

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2. The “pingdemic” is a symptom of the UK’s problems, not the cause

Stephen Bush in the New Statesman

on the United Pingdom

“It’s true to say that a summer of stop-start self-isolations is potentially disastrous for most businesses,” writes Stephen Bush in The New Statesman. “If you run a restaurant and your staff are in self-isolation, you are simply losing trade,” he writes. However, there is an important “but” here, too, says Bush. It is that “amid all the talk of a ‘pingdemic’, it’s easy to forget that the constant threat of being asked to self-isolate by the NHS app isn’t a glitch in the system or some strange oversight.” He says it is “a feature, not a bug, of England unlocking, and this, coupled with the faster-spreading Delta variant, means a new wave of coronavirus cases.” He concludes: “Complaining about a pingdemic is a bit like complaining that your fire alarm has gone off because you’ve burnt something on the hob: yes, it’s a pain, but the problem isn’t the fire alarm.”

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3. The good ship GB News is listing – and Nigel Farage is here to sink it

Katherine Denkinson in The Independent

on the new news channel

“The good ship GB News is listing dangerously to the Left. As one of its presenters takes the knee, the moral fibre of the country is at stake. The captain flails around desperately: ‘Is there anyone on board who can sail?!’” writes Katherine Denkinson in The Independent. “Luckily for our failing start-up, an unassuming commodities broker raises a tentative hand. Doffing his flat-cap and rolling up his sleeves, Nigel Farage bravely prepares to steer the creaking vessel into safer waters.” “Given Farage’s track record, it is unlikely that GB News will be any more successful than Reform UK or the Unfortunate Mr Fox’s political career,” writes Denkinson. “These extreme right-wing voices are active on Twitter, but the very existence of GB News and its desperate scramble to conjure into being the culture war they want us all to fear, is a sign of impending demise.”

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4. Germany’s floods are politically dangerous, too

Katja Hoyer on UnHerd

on disaster politics

“A cynical mind might think that natural catastrophes like the floods in west Germany are a God-sent for politicians in election campaign mode,” writes Katja Hoyer on UnHerd. “If you can credibly pull off the rolled up sleeves, the wellies and a facial expression somewhere between grim concern and firm reassurance, the emotional gravity of the moment will do the rest.” And unfortunately for Armin Laschet – “currently the most likely candidate to become chancellor” – he “messed up”. A video emerged that seemed to show him “sniggering” while German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier “spoke of the ‘heart-tearing’ grief” he felt for the victims of the floods. Indeed, “how lasting the damage will be remains to be seen”, writes Hoyer, but as “the rain is beginning to subside and the torrents of mud are painstakingly carried away in buckets, what remains behind is potential and risk for Germany’s politicians”.

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5. It is time for Priti Patel to step in and force change on the failing Met Police

Nick Timothy in The Telegraph

on radical reform

“Disdain for independent oversight and disrespect to victims of crime and their families is part of a rotten Met culture,” writes Nick Timothy in The Telegraph. “The sheer size of the force makes its leaders remote from local concerns,” writes Timothy, and while policing a population the size of London is “difficult enough”, adding the challenges presented by a capital city, like “national sporting events, security for embassies and visiting foreign leaders, and regular protests and marches”, the task becomes “tougher still”. If London Mayor Sadiq Khan “continues to refuse to accept responsibility for policing London”, then Priti Patel should “legislate to put the Met into special measures and impose change on it herself”, suggests Timothy. “London’s police cannot be allowed to lurch from crisis to crisis. The Met is failing, it needs to be radically reformed, and the only person who can make that happen is the Home Secretary.”

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Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have been accused of hypocrisy in their condemnation of racist abuse targeted at the England footballing squad’s penalty takers.

The prime minister and home secretary spoke out against social media attacks on Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, who all missed penalties in the nail-biting Euro 2020 final at Wembley on Sunday night.

Yet both Johnson and Patel have “repeatedly stopped short” of criticising fans who booed England players for “taking the knee”, the now well-known gesture against racism and discrimination, reports The Guardian. Patel even dismissed it as “gesture politics” and said booing England players was a “choice” for fans to make.

‘We’ve run out of room on the bandwagon’

Former England right-back and football pundit Gary Neville told Sky News he “wasn’t surprised” at the abuse England players have faced given the previous statements made by Johnson.

“The prime minister said it was OK for the population of this country to boo those players who were trying to promote equality and defend against racism,” Neville told the broadcaster.

“It starts at the very top. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest that I woke up to those headlines; I expected it the minute the three players missed.”

Neville also slammed previous comments made by Johnson about Muslim women, particularly a 2018 column in The Telegraph in which he compared veiled women to “letterboxes”.

“Gareth Southgate and Boris Johnson are poles apart. You can be a leader and gentleman. You can be ruthless but have empathy and compassion,” said Neville.

The Daily Mirror’s sports writer Darren Lewis accused the PM of having a “Donald Trump ‘good people on both sides’ moment” after failing to denounce fans who had booed ahead of matches in the early weeks of the tournament.

“Sadly for Priti Patel and Boris Johnson we’ve run out of room on the bandwagon,” he wrote ahead of last week’s semi-final match against Denmark.

England player Tyrone Mings also had strong words of criticism for Patel on the social media platform, tweeting: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.”

Conservative peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi also called on the home secretary to “think about our role in feeding this culture in our country”.

“If we ‘whistle’ & the ‘dog’ reacts, we can’t be shocked if it barks & bites,” Warsi wrote in a fiery public tweet. “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations.”

But a No. 10 spokesperson defended the prime minister against accusations of racism, telling journalists Johnson had made it “extremely clear” that “racism in any form has no place in our society” and that “he wanted to see the whole nation getting behind the team and not booing”.

Johnson also tweeted: “This England team deserve to be lauded as heroes, not racially abused on social media. Those responsible for this appalling abuse should be ashamed of themselves.”

‘I will never apologise for who I am and where I came from’

In an emotional message to fans, the 23-year-old England forward Marcus Rashford tweeted that he felt he had “let everyone down” in missing a crucial penalty against Italy. But while he could take the criticism of his performance “all day long”, he said “I will never apologise for who I am and where I came from.”

A mural dedicated to the young player in Withington, Manchester, was defaced and “daubed” with swear words after the England loss, reports the BBC. The mural, dedicated to Rashford after he was awarded an MBE for services to vulnerable children during the pandemic, has since been covered by “hearts, flags and notes expressing their support and admiration for Rashford”, says the broadcaster.

‘It’s just not what we stand for’

Racist incidents in the aftermath of the match show how social media companies have “struggled to crack down on racism and abuse” on their platforms, “despite high-profile players, including the England team, and lawmakers repeatedly calling for action”, reports the Financial Times.

In April, the Premier League and other clubs and sporting bodies boycotted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for four days in order to draw attention to the abuse, with the worst abuse “typically reserved for black footballers and ethnic minorities”, reports the paper.

In April, the Premier League and other clubs and sporting bodies boycotted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to draw attention to the abuse, with the worst abuse “typically reserved for black footballers and ethnic minorities”, reports the paper.

England manager Gareth Southgate has described the abuse directed at his young players as “unforgivable”.

“It's just not what we stand for,” he said during a news conference on Monday.

“We have been a beacon of light in bringing people together, in people being able to relate to the national team, and the national team stands for everybody, and so that togetherness has to continue.

“We have shown the power our country has when it does come together and has that energy and positivity together.”

A furious Boris Johnson is ramping up pressure on Priti Patel over the rising number of migrant boats crossing the English Channel to UK shores, according to sources.

A government insider told The Times that the prime minister is becoming “increasingly frustrated at the images of boats arriving day after day”. With the total tally of migrants who have crossed the Channel this year at almost 5,000, including more than 1,700 in the past fortnight alone, Johnson reportedly asked a minister: “What the fuck is the Home Office doing? When is she [Patel] going to sort this out?”

Downing Street has insisted that the reported remarks are not representative of Johnson’s views on Patel, and says the pair are “work closely together on this issue”.

But a Whitehall source suggested that the embattled home secretary may have “lost the authority” needed to rule over her department following last year’s bullying scandal, when she was accused of “creating fear” among her staff by shouting, swearing and making unreasonable demands.

The insider told The Times that there was a “seismic gap in Priti Patel’s rhetoric and the actions of Border Force on the waves”, adding: What some in government are wondering is after everything that’s happened with officials, is she actually running the Home Office?

“Are they actually doing the things she tells them? Or has she lost the authority that you need to hold this wayward bunch of officials together on policies they may not necessarily agree with?”

Patel is facing further pressure over a drop in the number immigration raids, which have hit a five-year low. According to The Sun, 3,211 raids were recorded in 2020, down from 19,932 in 2016. And the Home Office last year deported 1,128 foreign nationals convicted of crimes, down from 5,322 in 2019.

Responding to the latest figures, anti-immigration think-tank Migration Watch said: “Home Office ministers talk tough but the facts tell a different story. Where’s the control we were promised?”

Patel is also being blasted by opposition MPs over her decision to house asylum seekers at Kent’s Napier Barracks, with growing calls for her resignation over claims that she misled the House of Commons.

The home secretary insisted in February that “use of the accommodation was all based on Public Health England (PHE) advice”, but a subsequently leaked Home Office email from September said that the “advice is that dormitories are not suitable”.

Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Joanna Cherry told the BBC this week that “what she said - that the department had previously followed public health guidance regarding Napier Barracks in every single way - was simply not factually correct”.

A “Home Office source” has defended Patel’s record on migration, telling The Times that “Priti is the only home secretary since 2010 that is tackling this issue head-on”. The source added: “She’s introduced legislation which has broad public support, will tackle these crossings and go after the criminal gangs responsible.”

In an official statement, the Home Office said last week that its “New Plan for Immigration” would “overhaul our asylum system and speed up the removal of failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders”.

Nicola Sturgeon has blamed the UK government’s Home Office for creating a “dangerous” situation in Glasgow yesterday after activists became involved in an eight-hour stand-off with immigration officials.

After two men were seized in a dawn raid, “growing numbers of peaceful protesters surrounded a Home Office van”. One demonstrator “crawled underneath and prevented it from transporting the detainees”, Politico reports.

Following an all-day stand-off, during which a number of scuffles broke out between protesters and police officers, the two men, both Indian nationals who have lived in Scotland for 10 years, were released. The front page of The National this morning read: “Glasgow 1, ‘Team UK’ 0”

‘No one is illegal’

The demonstration began when “hundreds of demonstrators descended on Kenmure Street” in Glasgow as “UK Border Force officials apparently attempted to deport a pair of men from a property there on Thursday morning”, The Scotsman reports.

Footage from the confrontation shows “a small number of local residents rushing to block a Home Office van from leaving”, before one activist managed to “position themselves under the van” where he would stay for the ensuing eight hours, the paper adds.

After the initial group of neighbours rushed to block the van, the crowd quickly grew to around 200. Some held banners that read “no one is illegal” and chanting “leave our neighbours, let them go” and “cops go home”, The Herald says.

And as the crowd swelled, the Home Office van was “surrounded by protesters, with some sitting on the road in front of it and a crowd gathering down the street”, the paper adds.

After being released from the van, one of the two men, Lakhvir Singh, told ITV: “I’m so happy that my fate brought me to live here in Glasgow, where the people are so connected that they’ll come out onto the streets to help one of their own.”

Scottish First Minister Sturgeon, who was yesterday being sworn in as a member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) following last week’s elections, tweeted that she was “deeply concerned” by the Home Office’s actions, adding that the raid was especially harmful “in the heart of a community celebrating Eid”.

Sturgeon continued that she “will be demanding assurances from the UK government that they will never again create, through their actions, such a dangerous situation. No assurances were given - and frankly no empathy shown - when I managed to speak to a junior minister earlier.

“I disagree fundamentally with [the Home Office’s] immigration policy but even putting that aside, this action was unacceptable. To act in this way, in the heart of a Muslim community as they celebrated Eid, and in an area experiencing a Covid outbreak was a health and safety risk.”

‘Lawful removal’

The Home Office has gone on the defensive following Sturgeon’s criticism, with an unnamed source telling BBC Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall that “it is completely unacceptable for a mob to stop the lawful removal of people living in our country illegally. We 100% back the frontline in removing those with no right to be here.”

Scottish politicians from across the spectrum leapt on the quote, with the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) Michael Russell, Scotland’s constitution secretary, tweeting that the comment was “utterly tone deaf”.

The Home Office source’s stance was proof, “if further proof was needed, that the gulf between Scottish consented governance and UK Tory imposition is now so great as to be completely unbridgeable”, Russell added.

This was echoed by Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, who tweeted: “The people who put themselves at risk to defend their neighbours from state violence today are not a ‘mob’. Today we saw the best of Glasgow, and the worst of the racist Home Office.”

Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf shared a video in which he said that after “hours trying to get the Home Office to abandon their operation, without success” he was “pleased” to see the release of the two men.

In a second tweet, Yousaf continued that he “abhors Home Office immigration policy at the best of times”, adding that “to have taken the action they have today is at best completely reckless, and at worst intended to provoke”.

The home secretary has ordered a review into the mandatory reporting of what are known as “non-crime hate incidents”.

Verbal abuse, bullying, offensive jokes, hoax calls and malicious complaints could all fall into the category of hate incidents but fall short of being criminal offences.

Priti Patel wants the College of Policing, the police service’s professional body, to review whether these should be reported on a person’s criminal record, which critics say can present problems for individuals when applying for jobs or having a DBS check.

Sarah Phillimore, barrister and co-founder of campaign group Fair Cop, told The Telegraph she hopes the review “marks the beginning of the end for the well-intentioned but deeply flawed hate crimes guidance”.

However, the College of Policing’s Iain Raphael has warned that, without recording the incidents, officers risk “having a blind spot in their local understanding, hampering their ability to protect members of vulnerable and marginalised groups”. Raphael cited the Stephen Lawrence inquiry report as showing the need for officers to understand “how hate can escalate”.

How is a ‘hate crime’ different to a ‘non-crime hate incident’?

A hate crime is defined by the Crown Prosecution Service as an incident where the offending party is “motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility” towards a person’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity. In order to prosecute an alleged hate crime “it is necessary to demonstrate hostility” through evidence, the College of Policing explains.

Verbal abuse, damage to property, threats and intimidation can all be classed as forms of hate crime. In March, following the murder of Sarah Everard, Patel “hinted” that the government will look into whether misogyny should be recorded as a hate crime, according to The Guardian.

If it is found that a reported incident can not be classed as a criminal offence but the victim “or any other person perceives that the incident was motivated wholly or partially by hostility”, the current policy outlined by the College of Policing means the incident will be recorded as a non-crime hate incident, or NCHI, and put on the perpetrator’s criminal record.

What does Patel want to change?

Critics of the current policy say that the potential ramifications for the perpetrator of an NCHI infringes upon their right to freedom of speech. “We need to avoid a situation where something you said entirely lawfully, possibly in the heat of the moment and some time ago can blight your employment prospects permanently,” writes The Spectator’s Andrew Tettenborn.

Patel has told the College of Policing to change guidelines that state that NCHIs be recorded on police files, according to The Times. If the police review of the policy leads to the removal of the guidance, it could signal the end of NCHI reporting.

“These so called non-crime hate incidents have a chilling effect on free speech and potentially stop people expressing views legally and legitimately,” the paper reports a Whitehall source as saying.

Priti Patel is today unveiling what is billed as the “biggest overhaul of the UK’s asylum system in decades”.

The home secretary’s “New Plan for Immigration” sets out tough new rules that “will for the first time treat those who come to the UK illegally differently from those who enter via legal routes”, The Times reports.

A two-tier system

Patel is planning a “two-tier” or “twin-track” system under which the status of asylum seekers who arrive in the UK via unauthorised routes - such as boats across the Channel - will automatically be downgraded.

These illegal migrants will only be granted “temporary protection status”, which means “they will be regularly reassessed for removal from the UK, have limited family reunion rights and no access to benefits unless destitute”, The Telegraph reports.

By contrast, those who arrive through new legal routes set up to help refugees escape war zones or persecution will be allowed to stay in the country and given access to subsidies “to help integrate”, says The Times.

The plan, outlined in a 60-page document, is “designed to eradicate the ‘pull factors’ that are seen as having encouraged 8,420 people to cross the Channel in small boats last year”, the paper continues.

The Home Office has said the changes will ensure that access to asylum is based on “genuine need of refuge, not on the ability to pay people smugglers”.

But the chief executive of the Refugee Council has warned that the new system will “unjustly differentiate between the deserving and undeserving refugee”. Many refugees are “forced to take extraordinary measures [without] a choice about how they seek safety”, Enver Solomon tweeted.

Patel hit back at widespread criticism from rights campaigners as she prepared to set out the full details of her plan in the Commons this afternoon. The new rules are “firm” but “undeniably fair”, she said, and will also crack down on asylum seekers who come to the UK after arriving in other “safe” European countries.

“If, like over 60% of illegal arrivals, they have travelled through a safe country like France to get here, they will not have immediate entry into the asylum system, which is what happens today,” she told the BBC’s Today programme.

“Profiteering from illegal migration to Britain will no longer be worth the risk, with new maximum life sentences for people smugglers,” she continued.

“I make no apology for these actions being firm, but as they will also save lives and target people smugglers, they are also undeniably fair.”

‘Withdrawing support from desperate people’

As it stands, “the majority” of people granted refugee status in the UK arrive via unauthorised routes, says The Independent.

“In 2019, only around one in five grants of protection arrived through the government’s designated resettlement schemes,” the paper reports.

A total of almost 30,000 people sought asylum in the UK last year, and the Home Office says the system is “collapsing” under the weight of illegal entries.

“But the current rate of arrivals to the UK is a third of the all-time record and well below the numbers in some European Union neighbours”, writes the BBC’s Dominic Casciani.

Meanwhile, the backlog of asylum seekers waiting for a decision on their application has risen to “eight times higher than a decade ago”, leading some critics to argue that “the real problem is years of mismanagement”, Casciani adds.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has warned that Patel’s new plans will create an even more “chaotic, dangerous and fragmented” asylum system that will make journeys into the UK “more perilous” than ever.

Shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds has also criticised the new rules, but has stopped short of a “total rejection of the proposals”, reports Politico’s London Playbook.

“Measures are clearly needed to speed up processes and stop criminal gangs profiting from dangerous crossing,” the Labour MP said.

“However, we fear these plans will do next to nothing to stop people making dangerous crossings, and risk withdrawing support from desperate people, such as victims of human trafficking.”

Asylum seekers who illegally cross the Channel to reach Britain may be sent abroad for processing under new plans being considered by Priti Patel.

The home secretary is in talks with “several non-EU countries” about taking migrants “in return for money”, the Daily Mail reports. The strategy, which would require law changes, is part of Patel’s push to take “a much tougher stance on unauthorised migration” and “stop people smugglers”, the paper continues.

Turkey is among among the potential third countries to which migrants could be sent to await either being “returned to their home nation or the safe country they arrived from”.

The Times says that the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar and the Isle of Man, a Crown dependency, have also “been discussed by officials” as potential options. “Other islands off the British coast, possibly in Scotland”, are “in the mix” too, the paper continues.

Ministers have scrapped proposals leaked to the press last year to send migrants to Ascension Island and St Helena in the south Atlantic. But Patel is now reportedly eyeing “countries in north Africa, such as Morocco”, and “Denmark, which has a hard-line policy towards asylum seekers”.

On the flip side, government insiders are claiming that Patel is also planning new legal routes to the UK for migrants fleeing war zones. The Times says that “persecuted minorities such as Coptic Christians under threat in Egypt and Iraq” may be offered safe passage as well.

Australia-style system

Patel’s plan is thought to have drawn inspiration from Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”, which bans “refugees who arrive by sea” from “ever settling in Australia - without exception”, Politico reports.

“Critics (and some proponents) of the system say it is brutal by design,” says the news site, but “it works”. The number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat has fallen from 20,587 in 2013 to zero following the launch of the project three-and-a-half years ago.

Sending migrants to third countries in exchange for money is also “similar to a controversial scheme operated by Australia”, the Daily Mail says.

But ministers believe the proposed UK strategy “would be compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights”, The Times adds.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council charity, told the paper that the Australia model is “inhumane” and would “undermine our nation’s proud tradition of providing protection to people fleeing persecution and terror”.

Priti Patel is set to hit back at people smugglers by helping asylum seekers fleeing war zones with safe passage to the UK, according to Whitehall insiders.

The Sun reports that the home secretary will lay out plans next week to introduce “new legal pathways to try stem the tide of illegal crossings over the Channel”, in a move which will “rip up parts of the Modern Slavery Act” that are “exploited by criminals”.

The “firm but fair” package will enable “genuine refugees” to “come to the UK through agencies working in war zones and volatile areas of the world”, the paper adds.

A Whitehall source said the government is “committed to setting up safe legal routes” that will be “fair and will ensure those under oppression, persecution and tyranny” can come to Britain.

The plan is thought to have been inspired by the path to citizenship offered to Hongkongers after China passed “draconian” legislation aimed at cracking down on dissent in the city state. Boris Johnson responded to the new security laws by opening the door to the three million residents of the former colony with British National Overseas status.

Around 5,000 Hongkongers applied to live and work in the UK after visa programme changes were made in late January, and the government expects that total to rise to 300,000 eventually.

Despite that precedent, Patel’s planned changes would mark a dramatic shift in tone for the Home Office. The Financial Times reported last year that the Foreign Office had been “consulted” on proposals to send asylum seekers to isolated islands in the south Atlantic - some 4,000 miles from the UK.

But in what would be a major U-turn, Patel will now open the doors to an unspecified number of asylum seekers, sources told The Sun.

An insider said that the new plan will be “based on need, so we can take in an appropriate amount of people, and not based on numbers plucked out of thin air”.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Paul Ormerod in City A.M.

on pushing the coronavirus jab

Want people to get the Covid vaccine? Pay them

“Incentives need to be put in place. There are externalities involved: if I refuse to have a vaccination, I can infect others. That means vaccination cannot simply be left to individual self-interest. Some negative incentives seem obvious. For example, anyone who refuses the vaccine could be excluded from treatment if he or she caught the disease. Fines or even prison could be applied in vaccine refusers who are shown to have spread Covid. But such measures would create the wrong sort of climate. The best incentives in the current circumstances are positive ones. The idea being floated of a “vaccine passport” that would enable immunised people to experience more freedom in their day-to-day lives might work, though it would immediately create a market in forgeries. But there is a much simpler way: people should be paid when they get vaccinated.”

2. Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph

on the embattled home secretary

Most Britons back Priti’s hard line against Leftist snobs

“Increasingly, the Leftists who dominate our institutions get to define what constitutes offensive behaviour, then they come up with a new ‘ism’ to describe that behaviour (racism, sexism, Conservatism), the better to use as a cosh on anyone who dares challenge them. You can see where this is going, can’t you? In the days since, a report by Sir Alex Allan found Priti Patel guilty of breaking the ministerial code after she shouted and swore at civil servants. I haven’t spoken to a single person who believes the Home Secretary’s conduct was ‘bullying’. Outside bien pensant circles and TV studios, people seem to think it’s far more likely she came up against a bunch of white male snobs who seemed averse to actual work and accountability.”

3. Bernie Sanders in The Guardian

on the left’s route to victory

How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key

“For a president who lies all the time, perhaps Donald Trump’s most outlandish lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country. The truth is that Trump put more billionaires into his administration than any president in history; he appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Relations Labor Board (NLRB) and he gave huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations while proposing massive cuts to education, housing and nutrition programs. Trump has tried to throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare they have and has produced budgets that called for tens of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security.”

4. Andrew Mitrovica on Al Jazeera

on war crimes

Australia is guilty of state-sponsored terrorism

“These home-grown terrorists in battle fatigues were recruited by Australia. They were trained by Australia. They were paid by Australia. They were sent to Afghanistan by Australia. They murdered civilians, including children, in Australia’s name. The barbarity committed by Australia’s terrorists in battle fatigues – mostly, I suspect, white, Christian men – had one aim: to terrorise non-white, non-Christian Afghans. Aussie ‘soldiers’ murdered people not to achieve a ‘strategic objective’, but for a diseased, intoxicating sense of pleasure and, given the defining, competitive nature of Australians, they murdered people for sport. They accomplished their detestable mission.”

5. Holly Baxter in The Independent

on the departing president

The Thanksgiving turkey pardon was the final humiliation of Donald Trump

“There is nothing sadder than seeing a man who promised just a few short weeks ago that he was going to ‘make liberals cry again’ be reduced to a dejected comedian at an event about dinner. I almost offered him a little vial of my own tears, which naturally I carry on my person at all times, to perk him up. Slouching in with dead eyes, the president elicited a smatter of applause when he mentioned the highs of the Dow Jones this morning. He half-heartedly thanked Melania, as he usually does, for redoing the Rose Garden. He talked about the ‘doctors, nurses and scientists who have waged the battle against the China virus’. He said that members of the US military ‘keep America safe, keep America great and, as I say, America first’. No, that’s not a fully coherent sentence, despite the fact that he kept his eyes down on a printed piece of paper on the lectern in front of him the entire time, but at least it wasn’t a conspiracy theory about commie voting machines from Venezuela.”

Boris Johnson’s adviser on ministerial standards has resigned after the prime minister backed Home Secretary Priti Patel over a bullying inquiry.

Alex Allan found that Patel’s behaviour had breached the code, but she looks set to hold on to her cabinet role after Johnson said she has his “full confidence”.

The home secretary today said that she was sorry “that my behaviour in the past has upset people”, after a Whitehall investigation found that she had “not always met the high standards” required of ministers.

Allan said that while “it is for the prime minister to make a judgement on whether actions by a minister amount to a breach of the ministerial code”, he felt “that it is right that I should now resign from my position as the prime minister's independent adviser on the code”.

Sources familiar with the probes told The Guardian that it had “found evidence that civil servants were treated poorly by Patel, as well as compelling evidence of bullying”.

The report concluded that her actions may have been “unintentional” and “its criticism of senior civil servants for not raising their concerns directly with her before they became public”, The Times reports.

It is also understood that Johnson will not publish the report, which was launched after details were made public in February about Patel’s “behaviour towards senior staff in the Home Office and previous departments in which she had worked”, the paper adds.

Patel has denied allegations of bullying, with allies describing her as a “demanding” boss but not a “bully”, The Guardian reports.

The dispute over Patel’s behaviour was triggered in March, when Philip Rutnam, the former Home Office permanent secretary, resigned his role after what he described as a “vicious and orchestrated campaign” against him for raising concerns about her actions.

An employment tribunal has been launched into Rutnam’s departure, while reports have also described how a “senior Home Office official collapsed after a fractious meeting with Patel”, the paper adds.

It is also alleged that Patel “humiliated civil servants in front of others” while she was a minister in the Department for International Development 2017. A civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions also received a £25,000 payout after she claimed that she had been bullied by Patel in 2015.

The timing of the inquiry leak is not ideal for the government. As Politico’s Alex Wickham notes, “it’s anti-bullying week”.

As the anniversary of China’s first reported Covid case came and went, two separate clinical trial results have this week prompted hope that an end to the pandemic may be in sight.

The results put Moderna alongside Pfizer in the ranks of effective vaccines, with Oxford seemingly not far behind, increasing hopes of an inoculation roll out in the near future.

It was also anti-bullying week, an occasion Boris Johnson marked by throwing his full support behind Home Secretary Priti Patel after an inquiry found she breached the ministerial code in her treatment of civil servants.

To find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest developments in global events, put your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week:

Need a reminder of some of the other headlines over the past seven days?

Plans being considered by ministers to allow household mixing over the Christmas period could result in strict measures being reimposed in early 2021, according to research by Andrew Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University College London.

Meanwhile, Johnson declared that Britain’s “era of retreat” is over, as he announced plans to “transform the armed forces. The ambition will be funded by a £16.5bn rise in defence spending over four years, amounting to an increase of about 10% in the annual budget.

The battle to reach a Brexit deal is first on the agenda, however, with Michel Barnier telling the European Commission that Brexit negotiators are in the “final push” to secure a trade deal with the UK.

The EU’s chief negotiator gave the update as senior diplomats warned that governments may begin enacting emergency no-deal plans if a trade accord was not struck by the end of this week.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Kara Alaimo on CNN

on presidential sexism

With ‘husbands’ remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women

“As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally, he argued that he deserved their votes because ‘we’re getting your husbands back to work.’ Before these comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.”

2. Maighna Nanu on HuffPost

on the home secretary’s guilt

Priti Patel has blood on her hands. Her condolences mean nothing

“Priti Patel and Boris Johnson have expressed their condolences, making sure that both of their apologies refer to the ‘ruthless criminals’ or ‘callous criminals’ who they attribute to be at the helm of these tragic losses. In both cases, they abdicate culpability from a situation that the British government bears responsibility for. Their apologies have become as rehearsed as the faux compassion that they show. These words ring incredibly hollow given the government’s barbaric stance on asylum seekers and those seeking refugee. Words mean nothing without actions to back them up.”

3. Robbie Gibb in The Daily Telegraph

on bias in public broadcasting

Tackling the BBC’s endemic bias will be a mammoth task

“It seems having a non Left-wing comedian has become a new form of tokenism. Since the rise of alternative comedy in the Eighties, the BBC has never moved culturally away from the dominance of Left-wing Tory-bashing comics. Only ‘anti woke’ Geoff Norcott seems to have broken through this barrier. Norcott is a funny man but so too are Andrew Doyle, Leo Kearse and Dominic Frisby. You would be forgiven for never having heard of them unless you are a comedy circuit regular. And how on earth did the jaw-droppingly biased Roadkill drama get commissioned? With its grotesque caricature of a Tory minister and ludicrous plot line about secret plans to privatise the NHS – surely this is the most inane, inaccurate and biased prime time drama to air on British TV.”

4. Owen Jones in The Guardian

on an environmental revolution

Tory MPs are right: the north needs a renaissance – but it’s got to be green

“You see, the neglect of the north and the climate emergency are two problems in search of a common solution. A debate about how we reshape the post-pandemic economy should be welcomed, even if it is coming from the Tory benches. Across the globe, the coronavirus has underlined how states can mobilise vast resources to confront an unprecedented crisis when the will is there. While the virus has required the suppression of economic activity, the climate emergency seeks to reorientate that activity away from fatally harming the only home our species has. That means replacing the skilled, secure jobs stripped away from northern communities by deindustrialisation.”

5. Harriet Hall in The Independent

on celebrity foolishness

Kim Kardashian’s birthday posts were beyond insensitive – but what did we expect?

“Nobody can begrudge someone looking to appreciate the small things during the pandemic – like marking your birthday. But this was not small, in any sense. Kardashian is far from the first celebrity to be so staggeringly tone-deaf during the pandemic. Throughout lockdown, stars from Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Ellen Degeneres and the Beckhams have shared the interiors of their estates, discussing the struggles of quarantine with their swimming pools, gyms and sizeable acreage of land in view while the rest of us chumps tried to clear enough space in our living rooms for a Joe Wicks session (and that will have been a luxury for some).”

Seven people have been detained after special forces commandos stormed a tanker off the Isle of Wight following a suspected hijacking by stowaways.

The nine-minute operation, by members of the Special Boat Service (SBS), ended a ten-hour stand-off that reportedly began when stowaways on board the Liberian-registered Nave Andromeda became violent.

Navios Tanker Management, operator of the crude oil tanker, said the master of the vessel became concerned about the “increasingly hostile behaviour of the stowaways”, who had “illegally boarded” in Lagos, Nigeria, earlier this month.

Adhering to a maritime drill, the crew locked themselves inside the ship’s strong room, known as “the citadel”, before calling for assistance. According to the Daily Mail, the captain sent a “panicked” mayday message that read: “I’m trying to keep them calm but please send help.”

In response to what the Ministry of Defence has described as the “suspected hijacking”, a total of 16 SBS commandos boarded the vessel by either “fast-roping down from Merlin and Wildcat helicopters hovering above the deck of the tanker” or “rappelling up the side from inflatable ribs bobbing on the black waters below”, Sky News reports.

The stowaways, believed to be Nigerians seeking UK asylum, were handed over to Hampshire Police on Sunday evening. The ship later docked in Southampton, with all 22 crew members found safe.

The raid “was authorised by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel”, ITV News reports.

The SBS is Britain’s “elite military unit tasked with tackling terrorist and other localised, violent incidents at sea”, says The Guardian. “Its origins date back to the second world war, and the Ministry of Defence refuses to say how many fighters it comprises or give any detail of its operations.”

Following months of criticism over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Boris Johnson has used the Conservative’s first virtual party conference to show that he has not lost his “mojo”.

Delivering his closing speech to the four-day event, Johnson this morning outlined a string of planned reforms for the UK economy, which he insisted was “in pretty good shape” but has some “chronic underlying problems”.

After the party’s resounding victory in last year’s general election, the conference was “supposed to be a champagne-soaked victory rally”, yet instead often resembled a “rather lonely Zoom-based wake” amid growing concerns about rising coronavirus cases, says The Independent.

But such gloom aside, what did we learn from the event?

Johnson’s fighting talk

In a speech “light on policy but heavy on vision”, the prime minister pledged to “use the coronavirus crisis as a catalyst for change”, The Guardian reports.

Pointing to Winston Churchill’s Second World War coalition government as a model, Johnson described how they “sketched out a vision of the post-war new Jerusalem that they wanted to build”.

“That is what we’re doing now, in the teeth of this pandemic,” he added.

Laying out his goals, the PM said he wants to turn “generation rent into generation buy” by introducing long-term, fixed-rate mortgages of up to 95% of the value of a home for first-time purchasers.

Johnson also pledged that offshore wind would power every UK home in ten years, in what The Telegraph describes as an “optimistic and forward-looking speech that ended with a utopian vision of the future”.

Rounding off his keynote address, Johnson offered a message of hope, saying that “it seems tough now... but I believe it is a measure of the greatness of this country that we will not let it hold us back or slow us down.

“Even in the darkest moments we can see a bright future ahead.”

A return to austerity?

One of the most talked about moments of the conference has stoked speculation that the future may be very different to that outlined by Johnson.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak told delegates on Monday that “hard choices” would need to be made to pay down the debt incurred during the pandemic, and made a George Osborne-style commitment to honour the government’s “sacred responsibility” to balance the books.

“We will protect the public finances,” Sunak said. “If instead we argue there is no limit on what we can spend, that we can simply borrow our way out of any hole, what is the point in us?”

Although some commentators believe the chancellor was hinting at possible public spending cuts, rumours in Westminster suggest that he may opt instead for tax increases in order to avoid alienating the party’s new “red wall” voters.

However, economists have warned that both approaches - cutting spending or raising taxes to tackle record debt levels - “would be counterproductive, because it would risk choking off Britain’s economic recovery, and would damage future income for the Exchequer”, says The Guardian’s economics correspondent Richard Partington.

Law and order

Home Secretary Priti Patel used her speech to “declare war” on the tactics of some Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protestors, says The Telegraph.

Criticising the “hooliganism and thuggery” seen on the UK’s streets, Patel said there was “no excuse” for violent behaviour from protesters, adding that police had the “backing of the government, backing of our party, our government and our prime minister” in their efforts to tackle the demonstrations.

“This government will always defend the right to protest,” she told the conference on Sunday. “That right is a fundamental pillar of our democracy, but the hooliganism and thuggery we have seen is not - it is indefensible.

“There is no excuse for pelting flares at brave police officers, for throwing bikes at police horses, for disrespecting the Cenotaph or vandalising the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, one of the greatest protectors of our freedoms who has ever lived.”

Tackling fake news

Health Secretary Matt Hancock used the conference stage on Sunday to reveal government plans to tackle misinformation online about vaccines.

“Sadly, there a small number of people who make an active case against vaccines,” said Hancock, who is currently under fire over a track-and-track glitch that saw the number of reported new Covid cases soar by almost 23,000 on Sunday.

“We have got a programme of work under way to get the counter narrative out there to explain the importance and safety of vaccines.”

Virtual teething problems

Having touted their virtual conference platform as a technological solution to problems posed by social distancing, the Tories got off to a bumpy start as viewers reported that the website crashed during an appearance by Cabinet Minister Michael Gove.

Viewers who had paid to register for the conference “posted screenshots on social media of error messages received as they logged in to watch the ‘fireside chat’ between Mr Gove and West Midlands mayor Andy Street”, Metro reports.

But the glitch “seemed to be sorted out within around half an hour, with viewers able to access the conference to catch the end of Mr Gove’s appearance”, The Independent adds.

Allies of Priti Patel have accused the Foreign Office of leaking “bizarre and unworkable” asylum policies to discredit her.

Friends of the home secretary say that rivals in other Whitehall departments leaked Patel’s “blue-sky thinking” on how best to deal with asylum seekers crossing the Channel “to make her look stupid,” The Telegraph reports.

Some of the ideas the home secretary reportedly discussed included transporting refugees to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, housing them on disused ferries and oil rigs, or even building a giant wave machine in the Channel to repel them.

A Conservative MP and ally of Patel told The Times: “It’s pretty obvious what’s happened here. By coming up with bizarre and unworkable policy options, then leaking them, the Foreign Office is attempting to discredit any and every solution to a problem which my constituents write to me about daily.”

Patel is being used “as a punchbag”, another government source insisted, adding “she’s being caught in the crossfire”.

”A lot of this stuff is coming from No. 10 but people are too scared to say it. People are so afraid of crossing Dom [Dominic Cummings, the senior adviser to the prime minister] that they are pinning it on other departments,” the source added.

Other allies of the home secretary told Politico that she was the victim of a “rotten core of civil servants who have never got over Brexit”, adding that officials “fear the hard rain that is coming. They’re the enemy within and will be rooted out”.

As the Whitehall blame game intensifies, Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, confirmed that an inquiry has been launched to determine the source of the leaks.

Migrants seeking asylum in the UK could soon be met with an altogether different greeting, according to a series of government leaks revealing the brainstorming behind planned reforms.

Following the revelation that Priti Patel looked into setting up migrant centres on two distant British territories, a sequence of briefings to journalists have revealed plans ranging from “floating asylum centres” to sending migrants to Moldova for processing.

Politico’s Alex Wickham writes that the deluge of sensitive leaks have set off “strong condemnation from critics of the blue-sky proposals”, as well as a “frenzied Whitehall blame game”. Here’s a guide to the unfolding saga.

Origin story

Late on Tuesday night, the Financial Times revealed that Patel had asked officials to explore sending asylum seekers to isolated islands in the south Atlantic, 4,000 miles from the UK.

The plan, condemned as “inhumane, completely impractical and wildly expensive” by Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds, would see migrants transferred to Ascension, an isolated volcanic British territory, and St Helena, which is part of the same island group but 800 miles away.

Allies of the home secretary were quick to tell the FT that the suggestion was not going ahead, but Patel is not the only minister in government throwing around suggestions for reforming the UK’s asylum policy.

Downing Street has reportedly asked officials to look into the possibility of sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea for screening and is the “driving force behind proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres”, The Guardian says.

Documents seen by the paper - marked “official” and “sensitive” - reveal that “officials in the Foreign Office have been pushing back” against No 10’s proposals, but suggest that the government has “for weeks” been working on plans for overseas detention.

The document includes cost estimates of building asylum camps and make reference to a plan that would involve moving asylum seekers “who have arrived in the UK and are firmly within the jurisdiction of the UK for the purposes of the ECHR and Human Rights Act 1998”, the paper adds.

Floating ideas

If reports of Patel’s pitch earlier in the week set the cat among the pigeons, the new leaks reveal the depth of interest in an outsourced approach to asylum processing.

Downing Street has also considered screening claimants on “disused ferries moored off the coast”, with officials also holding “discussions about moving migrants to decommissioned oil platforms in the North Sea for processing”, The Times says.

While the latter was considered a “no-go”, the former plan - to “buy retired ferries and convert them into asylum-processing centres” - has not been taken off the table, the paper adds.

Described as a “favoured option on a list that will be presented to the prime minister”, the ferry-approach will be listed alongside a suggestion to “building a processing centre on a Scottish island”, The Times’ deputy political editor Steve Swinford says.

Political pressure from Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party is thought to be a flaw in that plot.

Island isolation

Further complicating the matter, Daily Mail home affairs correspondent David Barrett suggests that an asylum processing centre could be built on the Isle of Wight, the Shetlands or the Isle of Man.

Officials were “ordered to draw up feasibility studies for the hostel-type centres on islands within the British Isles”, which Barrett says is considered more practical than Patel’s notion of building the centres 4,000 miles from Britain in the south Atlantic.

Politico’s Wickham says one plan that is “definitely not happening” is another leaked suggestion in the FT for “boats with pumps generating waves that would force boats back into French waters”.

This plan was shelved after “concerns were raised about the risk of capsizing migrants in already-overladen boats”, however, it is thought that a separate plan to “lay booms or barriers in parts of the Channel” is still under consideration.

Asylum leakers

The leaks emanating from Whitehall has got people wondering where the flow of evolving - and abandoned - policies is coming from.

After speaking to ministers and officials in the Home Office and other government departments, Wickham writes that they are “all blaming each other - and getting extremely angry about it”.

A spokesperson for the prime minister said the government is “developing plans to reform our illegal migration and asylum policies so we can keep providing protection to those who need it, while preventing abuse of the system and criminality”.

The spokesperson added: “As part of this work we’ve been looking at what a whole host of other countries do to inform a plan for the United Kingdom. And that work is ongoing.”

And the plan has not sprung a leak in support from Conservatives. According to a survey from YouGov, 40% of the public supports the proposal for a centre in the south Atlantic - including 62% of Tory voters.

Tried and untested

However, the government may come unstuck when blue sky ideas meet cold reality.

In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s government looked into building offshore processing centres - specifically considering Tanzania - but abandoned the plans as unfeasible.

Colin Yeo, an immigration barrister and author on asylum law, told the FT that the government may also find itself on shaky legal territory if it attempts to go through with any of the plans.

“If you intercept people and you remove them, the Refugee Convention prohibits you from indirectly returning them to their country of origin,” Yeo said.

“If you take them somewhere like north Africa, you have to guarantee that they won’t send them back to their country of origin because you’re just not allowed to do that.”

Priti Patel asked officials to explore sending asylum seekers to isolated islands 4,000 miles from the UK in the south Atlantic, it has emerged.

The home secretary made the suggestion of transferring migrants to Ascension, an isolated volcanic British territory, and St Helena, which is part of the same island group but 800 miles away.

The Foreign Office was “consulted on the plan and provided an assessment of the practicality of shipping asylum seekers to the remote locations”, the Financial Times reports.

Several Whitehall officials told the paper that Patel “had ordered work on how other countries dealt with what Home Office ministers have called ‘illegal’ migration”, drawing inspiration from Australia, which runs a number of offshore asylum centres.

Allies of the home secretary said that the idea was not going ahead, however, individuals close to her department said an offshore asylum centre had been on the table.

A Home Office source made no mention of the plan, but told Sky News that ministers “are developing plans to reform policies and laws around illegal migration and asylum to ensure we are able to provide protection to those who need it, while preventing abuse of the system and the criminality associated with it”.

Responding to the news, Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds, tweeted: “This ludicrous idea is inhumane, completely impractical and wildly expensive. So it seems entirely plausible this Tory government came up with it.”

Ascension Island, which has a population of less than 1,000, houses a Royal Air Force airfield and was used to launch aerial attacks during the Falklands conflict. St Helena “is also one of the most isolated islands in the world, lying 1,210 miles off the west coast of Africa”, The Guardian adds.

A row has erupted over government proposals to classify Extinction Rebellion (XR) as an organised crime group in a crackdown on the climate crisis protest movement.

Priti Patel has vowed to take action after XR members delayed the distribution of a string of national newspapers on Friday by “blocking access to three printing presses owned by Rupert Murdoch”, the BBC reports.

In article for The Mail on Sunday, the Home Secretary said the government was “committed to ensuring that the police have powers required to tackle the disruption caused by groups such as Extinction Rebellion”.

Issuing a stark warning to the protesters, Patel added: “You will be punished for your actions.”

The prosecution: law and order

A total of 77 people were charged over last week’s newspaper blockade, which obstructed deliveries of titles including The Sun, The Times, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and the London Evening Standard.

In her article for The Mail on Sunday, Patel argues that such activists should “face the full force of the law” for pursuing “guerrilla tactics” to “attack democracy” and “undermine and cause damage to our society”.

According to The Telegraph, Whitehall sources have confirmed that the home secretary and Boris Johnson have asked officials to take a “fresh look” at how XR is classified under the law.

An insider “said one option under discussion was for XR to be viewed as an organised crime group, which could result in its members being policed primarily by the National Crime Agency”, the paper reports.

According to the 2015 Serious Crime Act, an organised crime group “has at its purpose, or one of its purposes, the carrying on of criminal activities, and consists of three or more people who agree to act together to further that purpose”.

Anyone convicted of participating in the activities of this type of group can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

The plan to enable harsher punishments for XR activists has been welcomed by Richard Walton, a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank and former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.

“The actions of Extinction Rebellion cross the line from protest into planned criminality and should be treated as such,” he said. “The police need to get better at gathering intelligence pre-emptively and intervening to prevent such acts of criminality and upholding the rule of law.”

The defence: right to protest

XR has criticised the reclassification proposals as “ridiculous”.

“The group said associating it with the state’s definition of a crime gang as ‘characterised by violence or the threat of violence and by the use of bribery and corruption’ was an insult to the thousands of ordinary citizens who supported its cause,” The Guardian reports.

A number of MPs have also spoken out against the move.

Former shadow cabinet minister Diane Abbott said that direct action such as that taken by XR was a “legal tactic” of protest. “They’re not criminals, they’re protesters and activists in the tradition of the suffragettes and the hunger marchers of the 1930s,” she told Sky News.

In a further twist in the growing row, fellow Labour MP Dawn Butler has faced criticism after praising the newspaper blockade as “excellent work” in a now deleted tweet.

The controversy is proving something of a headache for Labour leader Keir Starmer, amid “signs of division within Labour on how to respond to the group’s protests”, says The Times.

“The free press is the cornerstone of democracy and we must do all we can to protect it,” Starmer said in a statement yesterday. “Denying people the chance to read what they choose is wrong and does nothing to tackle climate change.”

In an apparent rift on the other side of the political divide, meanwhile, Foreign Secretary and ex-human rights lawyer Dominic Raab argued that “we have the enforcement powers necessary” to deal with such protests.

“We always keep all of our laws under review but I think actually the laws are in place to take relevant enforcement action against criminal behaviour,” he told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News.

More than 40 Conservative MPs have called on the prime minister to “take back control of our borders” by introducing a new bill that ends asylum claims by migrants who have passed through “safe” countries.

In a letter seen by The Telegraph, the newly formed Common Sense Group of Tory politicians tell Boris Johnson that the government must overhaul the UK’s asylum system, which “is unfit for purpose”, as “a matter of urgency”.

“Nothing less than root and branch reform is acceptable,” warn the MPs, who want to prohibit “claims from asylum seekers who have travelled through ‘safe’ countries and are not lodged immediately after the individual has arrived in the UK”.

What are the current rules?

“Record numbers of asylum seekers have crossed the Channel to reach the UK this year”, with more than 5,000 migrants making the crossing so far, says The Telegraph.

The hike in new arrivals from France has prompted “locals to call for the boats to be blocked”, while campaign groups are “urging the government to improve routes into the UK for legitimate refugees and asylum seekers, particularly children”, adds The Times.

Under current asylum laws in the UK, crossing the Channel without authorisation is not a legal way to enter the country.

But Article 31 of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, also known as the Geneva Convention, states that refugees cannot be penalised for entering the country to claim asylum if they are “coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened”, FullFact reports.

They must “present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence”, the fact-checking site notes.

One of the most common complaints about the UK’s current law is that many asylum seekers who attempt to cross the Channel to Britain have already transited through countries such as France or Germany.

However, neither the Geneva Convention nor EU law requires a person to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.

The only exceptions relate to an EU directive known as the Dublin Regulation, which dictates that an asylum seeker can be sent back to another EU country if they have already been fingerprinted and claimed asylum there.

But “the Dublin system only operates within the EU and it will almost certainly cease to apply to the UK following Brexit”, according to London-based charity Refugee Action.

What do the MPs want?

Earlier this month, Home Secretary Priti Patel told MPs that migrants were seeking to cross the Channel to Britain because they believed that France was a “racist country” where they may be “tortured”.

But that claim has been rebuked by the new Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, who argue that the crossings have become a “highly lucrative industry” by a “motivated elite” who are “expertly gaming the immigration system for their own ends”.

In their letter to Johnson, the politicians say that “geography dictates that the vast majority of asylum seekers who arrive in the United Kingdom have travelled through numerous safe countries. Not only does this illustrate that safety is not the primary motive for many migrants, it exposes thousands to the wicked exploitation of unscrupulous people traffickers.”

The MPs, who include Edward Leigh and former security minister John Hayes, say that the UK offer of “refuge to those at genuine risk of persecution is a long and noble national commitment”. But “that noble cause is undermined by those determined to take advantage of the compassion and generosity of the British people”, they add.

According to data from EU statistical office Eurostat, Germany received the most first-time asylum applications in the EU last year, at 23.3%, followed by France (19.6%) and Spain (18.8%).

Each of the three countries took in well over 100,000 refugees, while Britain took 44,156 in the same period.

A British victim of of sex abuse and drug trafficking is bringing a case against Home Secretary Priti Patel, arguing that her department “unlawfully accessed personal information including details of her intimate thoughts”.

The woman cannot be identified, but “is currently living in a safe house, assisted round the clock by support workers” due to a combination of learning difficulties and mental health problems, The Guardian reports.

The paper reports that she was the victim of drugging, abuse and was “trafficked on a number of occasions for the purposes of sexual exploitation and drug trafficking”, the paper adds. She has “suffered extensive sexual and physical abuse”, and has been said by the Home Office to be a “serial victim of modern-day slavery”.

Lawyers for the woman claim that “sensitive information” about her, collected and stored on a database operated by the Salvation Army, was accessed by the Home Office, despite being “considered irrelevant to her trafficking case”.

The Home Office says that while it is unable to directly access the database, it can get data via the Salvation Army. The charity told The Guardian that “the Home Office owns the information and so it is obliged to disclose it under the terms of its contract”.

Patel last week promised “sweeping reforms” to Home Office culture, following condemnation over the Windrush scandal which saw people wrongly deported, the BBC says.

The new legal action also comes a year after the Salvation Army was revealed to have allowed immigration officers to “infiltrate refugee centres for the homeless in order to gather information used by immigration enforcement”.

Speaking to political news site Left Foot Forward, director of advocacy at the Refugee Council Dr Lisa Doyle said at the time that “homelessness charities and shelters must remain the safe places for vulnerable people they are designed to be”.

“Home Office processes should remain entirely separate from this,” Doyle added.

Boris Johnson has thrown his support behind Robert Jenrick amid calls for the housing secretary to resign over his involvement in a “cash for favours” row.

The prime minister insists he continues to have “full confidence” in Jenrick, who is fighting for his job after newly released text messages and emails suggest he saved property developer and Tory donor Richard Desmond up to £50m by rushing through a planning application.

So just what does it take for a minister to resign in politics today?

Are politicians now slower to resign?

Recent years have seen a number of high-profile politicians clinging on to office after becoming embroiled in controversy.

Johnson leads the country despite a facing a series of high-profile scandals, from his careless comments about jailed British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, to claims that he ditched his security detail while serving as foreign secretary to attend an “exotic” party hosted by Russian-born media tycoon Evgeny Lebedev, as The Guardian reported last year.

The PM’s current cabinet has a fairly chequered record too. In 2017, Priti Patel refused to resign as Theresa May’s international development secretary after repeatedly failing to disclose multiple unofficial meetings with Israeli ministers, business people and lobbyists.

The now home secretary was ultimately forced to quit after it emerged that she had two further meetings with Israeli officials without UK government officials present or in the know.

But Patel has managed to hang on to her current role despite multiple bullying allegations, including reports in March that her former aide had received a £25,000 payout from the government after allegedly attempting suicide following “unprovoked aggression” by the Tory minister.

Dominic Cummings has been equally tenacious in retaining his place at Downing Street. Although not a politician, the senior advisor is a political appointment, yet Johnson has refused to sack his right-hand man despite Cummings being caught caught breaking coronavirus lockdown rules.

The phenomenon of seeming unbudgeable political figures is by no means limited to the Tory party.

In 2016, a motion of no confidence in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn passed by 172-40. But Corbyn held on as the party’s chief, while being dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism, until the disastrous 2019 general election result eventually forced him out.

And Keith Vaz continued to serve as a Labour MP after reports emerged in 2016 that he had offered to buy cocaine for sex workers. Vaz finally stood down at the election last December after the Commons Standards Committee recommended that he be slapped with a six-month ban from Parliament over the scandal.

What about the exceptions?

Of course, some rows prove too damaging for even the most brazen political figures to survive.

Alun Cairns quit as Welsh secretary last November amid allegations that he lied about his knowledge of an aide’s alleged “sabotage” of a rape trial.

And Amber Rudd stepped down as home secretary in April 2018 over the Windrush scandal, after admitting that she had “inadvertently misled” MPs over deportation targets.

However, Rudd was soon back in government as work and pensions minister, before resigning again - alongside the PM’s brother, universities minister Jo Johnson - over the Tory leader’s controversial prorogation of Parliament and “purge” of party moderates.

But arguably the most famous resignation in recent history is that of Theresa May in July 2019, after failing three times to get her Brexit deal through Parliament.

What has changed in modern politics?

“It feels like ministers are allowed to get away with far more than they did even a few years ago, for example when immigration minister Mark Harper stood down in 2014 over the illegal status of his cleaner,” Anoosh Chakelian wrote in the New Statesman in 2017.

She suggested that one factor might be that then PM “May is so weak that she can only get away with the least politically-contentious sackings”.

But digging deeper, it appears that political resignations or sackings due to scandal have never been all that common, according to Chakelian.

She pointed to research by Liam McLoughlin, a PhD politics researcher at the University of Salford, which found that between 1945 and 1997, only 34% of all scandals resulted in a ministerial resignation.

“So it looks like errant ministers have generally been getting away with it for most of history,” Chakelian concluded.

What may have changed is the extent to which voters are aware of such scandals, Richard Skinner argued in Vox last year.

“There is more national attention to these scandals than there was a generation ago. Cable news and social media can make a juicy story the topic of national conversation within hours,” he wrote.

But “on the other hand, partisans are more reluctant than ever to accept a ‘loss’”, Skinner added.

This refusal to accept blame, at least in public, has been noted by a number of commentators.

“Credit is due to some, like Boris Johnson and David Davis, who have indeed resigned,” James Bartholomew wrote in January 2019 article for The Telegraph calling for May to resign as PM after her Brexit deal was voted down in the Commons.

“They have done the right thing. But others have dishonoured themselves. The resulting cabinet is both low on quality and deserving of little respect.”

A man being held of suspicion of fatally stabbing three people in a Reading park had been investigated by MI5 last year, according to security sources.

Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah was arrested shortly after the stabbing spree on Saturday evening, and has now been re-arrested under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000, the BBC reports.

Saadallah, 25, had left jail just 16 days before the attack in the Berkshire’s town Forbury Gardens, after serving less than half of a 28-month sentence for non-terror-related offences, adds The Sun.

What happened?

Witnesses say that a knife-wielding man approached a group of friends in the popular town-centre park shortly before 7pm on Saturday, reports The Telegraph.

Lawrence Wort, 20, a personal trainer from Chippenham, said: “The park was pretty full, a lot of people sat around drinking with friends when one lone person walked through, suddenly shouted some unintelligible words and went around a large group of around ten, trying to stab them.

“He stabbed three of them, severely in the neck, and under the arms, and then turned and started running towards me, and we turned and started running.

“When he realised that he couldn’t catch us, he tried to stab another group sat down, he got one person in the back of the neck and then when he realised everyone was starting to run, he ran out the park.”

Another witness described how he realised something was wrong after seeing “a gentleman who I believe was stabbed in the eye, his right eye”.

Software developer Brendan Healy, 55, told The Guardian that he had tried to perform CPR on one victim after seeing three people lying injured on the grass.

The knifeman was reportedly rugby-tackled to the ground by a police officer near the park within minutes of the first emergency call.

Saadallah remains in custody, and his flat, around a mile from the park, is under a police cordon.

Who is the suspect?

Saadallah is a Libyan refugee who was granted asylum in the UK after coming to Britain several years ago as a refugee following the civil war in his home land.

He was investigated by the security services last year after MI5 “received information that he had aspirations to travel abroad - potentially for terrorism”, says the BBC.

The Sun reports that Saadallah was added to the security agency’s “long list” of around 40,000 suspects after expressing a desire to join Islamic State in Syria.

However, the investigation into his activities is said to have been dropped after no genuine threat or immediate risk was identified.

Saadallah is also understood to have served prison sentences for non-terror-related offences including possession of a bladed weapon, assaulting a police officer, breaching a suspended jail term, racially aggravated assault, criminal damage and affray, according to the newspaper.

A source told The Sun that Saadallah “had a history of violence and serious mental health problems”, while neighbours claimed that he peddled drugs.

Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust declined to comment on reports that the suspect was being treated for mental health conditions.

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What will happen next?

The head of counterterrorism policing, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Bas, said yesterday that “officers have found nothing to suggest that there was anyone else involved in this attack”.

“Although the motivation for this horrific act is far from certain, counterterrorism policing have taken responsibility for leading the investigation,” Bas added.

If confirmed as a terrorist offence, the attack would be the fourth in the UK since November.

Detectives are interviewing Saadallah today “and a huge operation will have swung into operation”, says the BBC’s home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani.

“Electronic analysts will delve into any social media accounts linked to the suspect; they’ll trawl every call and text message going back years, looking for contacts with extremists. Intelligence officers at MI5 will review both their open and closed case files on so-called ‘subjects of interest’,” adds Casciani.

In the wake of the attack, Boris Johnson has indicated that he is prepared to make changes to the law in order to prevent suspected terrorists from slipping through the net.

“If there are lessons that we need to learn about how we handle such cases, how we handle the events leading up to such cases, we will learn those lessons, and we will not hesitate to take action where necessary,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Home Secretary Priti Patel stayed “up with officials into the early hours of Sunday morning to understand the suspect’s full immigration status and criminal background”, says The Guardian.

“The event will embolden our plans to reform the asylum system and speed up deportations for foreign national offenders through legislation, which will likely be opposed by the opposition,” a Whitehall source told the newspaper.

An up-to-date estimate of the number of people living illegally in the UK has not been produced by the government since 2005, according to Whitehall’s spending watchdog.

A new report from the National Audit Office (NAO) says that the last official estimate suggested that around 430,000 people were in the country with no right to remain - but notes that more recent independent research has put the figure at more than a million.

The NAO investigation into the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement directorate found that the department has “estimated demand for immigration enforcement activity” to be between 240,000 and 320,000 cases a year, says Sky News.

But “the report said there was no baseline given against which progress can be measured or to demonstrate whether demand is rising or falling”, the broadcaster adds.

The watchdog also “disclosed that illegal immigrants who evade detection for two years are disregarded”, and concluded that the £392m annual budget for Immigration Enforcement, one of the divisions run by Home Secretary Priti Patel, was not “good value”, says the Daily Mail.

The NAO has now “called for officials to produce a proper estimate of how many people are living in the UK illegally”, the newspaper continues.

The watchdog said that without up-to-date figures, the Home Office “cannot show whether its measures are working”, despite “collecting information around its missions and objectives”.

That accusation has been echoed by Labour MP Meg Hillier, head of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, who said that the “Home Office has no idea how many people are in the country illegally and doesn’t seem interested in finding out”.

“It can’t demonstrate that its actions to control illegal immigration are working as intended, and doesn’t understand how different aspects of its work fit together,” she added.

The NAO report also reveals that detected attempts by people to enter the UK illegally increased to 46,900 in the 12 months to October 2019, up from 40,800 in the same period for the previous year.

But as ITV News notes, the watchdog concluded that it is “it is unclear whether that was down to more attempts being made overall or better detection”.

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Responding to the pubication of the watchdog’s findings, a Home Office spokesperson said: “We have taken back control of our immigration system and for the first time in a generation, we will have full control over who comes and stays here.

“As this report acknowledges, the nature of immigration crime and offending is complicated and we are consistently looking at ways to get ahead of the organised gangs behind it.”

Priti Patel has insisted that she “will not be silenced” after a group Labour MPs accused her of using her own experiences of racism to “gaslight other minority communities”.

In a letter to the Home Secretary, 30 opposition MPs from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds claim that her response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations seeks to undermine protesters’ concerns.

“We write to you.... to highlight our dismay at the way you used your heritage and experiences of racism to gaslight the very real racism faced by black people and communities across the UK,” the politicians say.

Patel hit back on Twitter, insisting that she would not change her approach to BLM because it does not “conform to their view of how ethnic minorities should behave”.

What is gaslighting?

The word gaslighting “derives from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton about a sinister and controlling husband, but has been popularised more recently as part of the new lexicon of social justice”, says The Telegraph’s Gemima Lewis.

These days, it refers to the act of psychologically manipulating someone to doubt their own experiences, and “typically refers to intimate relationships”, says Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol.

“It’s a way of controlling someone by creating false narratives – for example, that they are irrational or crazy,” Lewandowsky writes in an article on The Conversation. “If such lies are repeated constantly, victims may get confused and start believing there really is something wrong with them.”

Gaslighting also takes place in public and political life, he says, adding: “When it comes to politics, the signs are similar. You may feel confused and alone in the world, assuming nobody understands your point of view and that it must therefore be wrong.”

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How did the Patel row begin?

The accusation of gaslighting was levelled at Patel following a heated exchange in the House of Commons on Monday.

Labour MP Florence Eshalomi called on the home secretary to “act now” to resolve “structural inequality, discrimination and racism”, as demonstrators take to streets across the UK to demand action on racism following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The black Labour MP for Vauxhall voiced doubts as to whether Patel could “actually understand the anger and frustration” felt by protesters.

Patel replied: “Well, on that basis, it must have been a very different home secretary who as a child was frequently called a Paki in the playground, a very different home secretary who was racially abused in the streets or even advised to drop her surname and use her husband’s in order to advance her career.

“So, when it comes to racism, sexism, tolerance for social justice, I will not take lectures from the other side of the House.”

However, in their letter responding to her comments, the Labour MPs argue that “being a person of colour does not automatically make you an authority on all forms of racism”.

Shadow minister for community cohesion Naz Shah tweeted: “Shared feelings allow us to show solidarity not gaslight other minority communities.”

“The only silence we don’t need is inaction,” adds Shah, who is calling on the government to implement the recommendations of recent reports into the Windrush scandal and criminal justice reform.

“If #Blacklivesmatter then don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk,” she concludes.