Rishi Sunak spoke for 26 seconds. Here are all the lies he told.

Just four sentences. That's all it took for him to blather his way into oblivion.

It's the lies that get you. The ceaseless lies and the mewling vexatious goddamn liars who spout them.

Rishi Sunak got up on a Downing Street podium yesterday, emblazoned pathetically with the phrase 'stop the boats', as if some reactionary child had been given free rein with MS Paint. And from that podium he issued the most preposterous and unconscionable amount of bullshit you could possibly imagine. There is an ITV clip of it online which lasts for 26 seconds and consists of four sentences and yet so much nonsense was issued from his mouth that you felt you might drown in it. 

Sentence one. "It's now time for the Lords to pass this bill too," he said. No it isn't. It's time for them to look at it and then to do as they please, because they are an independent Chamber that cannot be bossed around by a prime minister, and certainly not one speaking from Downing Street, like some kind of diminutive executive thug attempting to bully the legislature into submission. 

Second sentence. "This is an urgent national priority." No it is not. The 'emergency legislation' of the Rwanda bill was passed over several days with long gaps in between, including all of Christmas, which is not typically how emergencies work. It won't be fully dealt with by the Lords until mid-February, regardless of what he says, because it controls its own timetable. 

Nor is it an urgent priority in any more meaningful sense. YouGov polling yesterday showed that 45% of Brits believe most migrants come to the UK "illegally" and 34% believe most come "legally". This is the sentiment he is trading on to present a sense of urgency. It is one that was created by Nigel Farage with his obsessive focus on the boats and then perpetuated by the Tory parliamentary party in a state of hysterical nationalist belligerency. 

The fact people believe these ratios is a catastrophic failure of politics and the media. It shows that the public is desperately misinformed about one of the most prominent debates in the country. In the year ending September 2023, 3,383,446 visas were granted. Of these, 335,447 were work visas, 486,107 were sponsored study visas and 82,395 were family-related visas. There were just 75,340 asylum applications, with 75% of the initial decisions during that period being granting refugee status, humanitarian protection or alternative forms of leave, meaning that they can't in any sensible or meaningful way be described as illegal migrants. 

There is one national priority Sunak is referring to and one alone: his reelection prospects. His only real need for haste, the only reason any of this is actually happening, is that he thinks he needs to get a plane flying asylum seekers to Rwanda before polling day. Then the policy will be considered a success. It doesn't matter that it will not work and provides no meaningful solution to the asylum issue. All that matters is that he can show that he got it going. 

This is why the Home Office has hired an aircraft hanger and plane fuselage so it can practice forcibly getting asylum seekers onto a plane. Because in cash strapped times, with public services failing all around us, that's how they choose to spend the money. And yet even this is a mirage. Does Sunak really think that he is going to be celebrated for initiating a policy that was first announced two years and two prime ministers ago? No he will not.

At this point, the clip had featured Sunak speaking for a few seconds and uttering two sentences but he had already deposited an astonishing amount of bullshit into our ears. Bullshit in every dimension, on every level of magnification. Bullshit of a highly consistent granular quality, with no discernable interruption to its flow or consistency. Just an absolute fucking bullshit merchant, churning it out day after day, like a milkmaid dutifully rising each morning, sleepily grabbing the udders at their base and making sure to squeeze out every last drop.

Third sentence. "The treaty with Rwanda is signed," Sunak continued, "and the legislation which deems Rwanda a safe country has been passed unamended in our elected Chamber." And here, to be entirely fair to him, there was a subtle distinction in the flavour of bullshit on offer. The sentence was true on its face but false in any manner of substance. Yes, we've signed a treaty with Rwanda. Yes, the legislation deeming Rwanda safe was passed unamended in the Commons, although that rather sidesteps the festival of political backstabbing, murder and suicide which we watched over the last few days. But the crucial fiction is really in the interaction between those two points.

A report this week by the House of Lords international agreements committee laid it out very clearly. After the Supreme Court found it was unsafe to send people to Rwanda, the home secretary went over there and negotiated a treaty with new provisions apparently addressing the judges’ concerns. Sunak now says that the Commons "deems Rwanda a safe country". But how can that possibly be? The provisions in the treaty which would make Rwanda safe have not been implemented.

Under those provisions Rwanda needs a new asylum system and that requires new legislation. How far away are they from introducing that legislation, let alone setting up the system? No-one knows. When asked about it by the committee, home secretary James Cleverly was unable to answer. "How can parliament make that conclusion [about the safety of Rwanda] at this time," the chair inquired, "before this has been put in place, been tested, been addressed and been seen?" Cleverly insisted the framework was so robust, and the Rwandan government so trustworthy, there was no need to actually see it established, or even read the legislation which would initiate it. Astonishingly, he says all this while the British government breaks its own international agreements.

The committee asked the Home Office for further information about the measures to prevent refoulement - the sending of an asylum seeker back to their home country. The absence of such measures was at the heart of the Supreme Court's ruling against the government. "The response was vague but indicated that the detail of measures had not yet been agreed," the report said. "There was no commitment to publishing them." They asked what the monitoring system would be to make sure that the Rwandan system remained safe once it was initiated. But no process has even been outlined for submitting confidential complaints, the most rudimentary possible level of its operation. 

What about the recruiting and training of personnel for the Monitoring Committee, the First Instance Body and the Appeal Body, as well as legal advisers, interpreters, a national co-president and international judges, who need to be trained in Rwandan law and judicial practice? No answers there either. The best the Home Office could do was to say that the process for selecting co-presidents was still being discussed. "It is clear from this," the committee concluded, "that significant legal and practical steps have to be taken before the assurances provided in the Rwanda treaty can be fully implemented."

Clearly this doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. How can the Commons deem Rwanda safe if the measures which will apparently make it safe have not been put into practice, have not even been written into law, have not even, as far as we know, been formulated? Through trust? Because it promised? That offers no reassurance at all. Rwanda made similar promises to Israel before clandestinely moving asylum seekers to Uganda.

That speaks to one of the core contradictions around which this debate is embroidered. Sunak insists Rwanda is a safe country, but he also insists the Rwanda policy is a deterrent. How can one be true if the other is also true? If it was safe, it would not deter. If it deters, it's because it's unsafe. 

But of course this is all nitpicking compared to the central failure of logic governing the relationship between the treaty and the legislation. The treaty makes Rwanda safe and the legislation forces the courts to consider it safe. But if the treaty was effective there would be no need for the legislation. And if the legislation is needed, the treaty cannot be effective. Why prevent the courts from assessing safety if you’re confident you’ve ensured safety? These two documents do not support each other. They refute one another.

Fourth sentence. "There is now only one question: will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House, or will they get on board and do the right thing?" 

Anyone who uses the phrase 'will of the people' is a fraud and a huckster. It is the language of the demagogue and the populist, of Rousseau and Robespierre, the gangster-speak of Brexit and Trump. But at least with Brexit there was a veneer of legitimacy. There was a referendum result - a popular vote, uncorrupted by the arbitrary geographical and mathematical distortions of first-past-the-post. 

The Rwanda policy has nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not the fucking tiniest plant cell of a figleaf of democratic legitimacy. It wasn't in the Tory manifesto. It doesn't have majority support in polling - according to the latest YouGov, 40% of people think it should be reversed and 34% think it should go ahead. It only passed the Commons because Tory rebels feared that a defeat would kill the government, lead to a snap election and deprive them of their seats - a fear which, in and of itself, speaks volumes about their commitment to the will of the people. The prime minister has not won an election. He didn't even win the Tory leadership contest. And he is currently sitting bunkered-up in No.10 refusing to go to the polls until the last possible moment because he knows he'll lose. The meaninglessness of the phrase 'will of the people' has never been starker than it is right now.

But the real mendacity here is marginally more sophisticated. It's in that oh-so-subtle reference to "our elected Chamber" and "the appointed House of Lords". You can see the tactic quite clearly. It's intended to bully the Lords into submission, as Theresa May did before him. If they block, it gives him some tawdry populist pitch for the election as a culture warrior battling the ermine-clad elites to fight off an invasion of migrants. 

If Sunak gave a shit about an elected House of Lords, he could try to reform it. He is, after all, the actual prime minister. It's in his gift. Those who believe in an elected Lords have every right to complain that it is appointed. Those who do not, who have not said a single thing about it despite having the power to change it, have no right whatsoever. They cannot legitimately start questioning the legitimacy of the Lords when it becomes inconvenient to them.

Sunak doesn't give two shits about the appointed nature of the Lords. He cares about the following things: That it controls its own timetable. That it has no government majority. That whipping operations are less effective. That there is actual expertise in the Chamber, including legal expertise, that will take a fucking scalpel to his contrived piece of legislative sophistry. That it will not allow him to bully backbenchers into submission with the threat of an election and then present it disingenuously as validation of his plan. That there is a culture where empty party political platitudes are sneered at and forensic examination is valued. 

And why would those things be threatening to him? Because he trades in bullshit. And the Lords is where bullshit goes to die. 

In just four sentences, he managed to splatter out so much mendacity, nonsense and cynicism that it takes nearly two thousand words to lay it all out. He's an empty shell of a man, presenting a package of vacuities, without moral substance to sustain him or meaning to motivate him. And if you watch him closely, you can see it all deflating, slowly but surely, into the nothingness which he truly represents.