I haven’t got sunstroke – bear with me.

I check into the BBC News website from time to time to see what’s going on at home and in the wider world, and to monitor how much further the dial on the government competenceometer’s fallen.

This time it’s a plane load of asylum seekers bound for Rwanda, grounded by legitimate legal process. Well, not really a plane load. By Tuesday of this week there was only one and the flight was cancelled, leaving a £500,000 bill for us, the taxpayers. Johnson and others’ oft squirmed defence of having ‘got all the big calls right’, now worn out through overuse, is replaced by the sheer hoodwinking genius of ‘it’s all the fault of lefty lawyers’. A cunning diversionary tactic to blame the left for your own folly, dreamt up by the party of law and order’s finest minds.

No doubt Marine Le Patel will soon be hauled briefly from the dark pit in which she develops cruel ideas, singing Rwanda’s praises. Rwanda, a country known for summary executions, enforced disappearances, unlawful arrests, detentions and torture. She won’t mention that our own Foreign Office has said that Rwanda’s president, Kagame, presides over a murderous network run from his embassies aimed at assassinating exiled opponents. She won’t mention that it’s 4,000 miles away. Because these are irrelevant details.

So, evidently, are ethics. Now Christopher Geidt has thrown in the towel, Johnson’s second ethics adviser to quit in two years. Like his predecessor, Alex Allan, he’s come to the conclusion that maintaining an ethical position and working with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is an impossible hill to climb. As his resignation letter says, he had been placed in an impossible and odious position. Yet given that a breeze block has more integrity than Johnson, renowned for his flexible approach to the truth, rules, national and international law, women etc., it should come as no surprise.

But aside from the unsurprising predictability of the competenceometer’s ever falling dial, what struck me most reading Geidt’s letter and Johnson’s reply, was the PM’s signature, pictured below. As well as demonstrating a flexible approach to handwriting, and only men will know this, it looks just like the kind of juvenile graffiti we see on the back of toilet doors. An unkind person might say that it’s where he belongs, and that there are ample vacant cubicles for the equally worthy contenders who surround him.

You couldn’t make it up, except that now, in the new world of alternative facts, you can, because anything goes. As we all get used to truth, rules, national and international law etc. being flouted, we sleepwalk into a culture of acceptance, and Johnson and his ilk have us by the hand.

Others have put it better than me.

‘What is the precise moment in the life of a country when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight and, at first, the eyes adjust.’

Albert Camus

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Rwanda footnote

On the subject of Rwanda, my friend Carole has shared a link to an interesting episode of R4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, in which Anne Soy, the BBC’s Senior Africa Correspondent, reports from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where the 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was held in June.

At the conference Soy asked Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s President for the last 22 years, and now chair of the Commonwealth Heads of Government, what his leadership would look like given his government’s record on silencing opposition politicians and journalists. Brave woman! His response lasted for half an hour and provides an interesting insight into his take on global values and who gets to choose what they are.

Acknowledging that Kagame’s reputation will continue to be haunted by the skeletons in his closet, Soy referred to a sense of frustration in many African nations that they are frequently criticised for not measuring up to international ideals, which are often vague and constantly redefined anyway. She argues that there is an urgent need to change the narrative and showcase Africa as a place where solutions can be found.

Her piece starts 17.35 minutes into the broadcast, which is linked to > here.

Welcome to Rwanda

From the BBC: The government has described Rwanda, where it intends to send some people who arrive illegally in the UK, as “one of the world’s safest nations”. But this small, landlocked country in east Africa divides opinion. To some, it’s the Singapore of Africa, with a burgeoning economy, clean streets and gleaming skyscrapers. It’s also heralded for having the highest proportion of women parliamentarians in the world. But to others, Rwanda is a frightening and repressive place.

In the BBC Radio Four programme, ‘Welcome to Rwanda, linked to below, Victoria Uwonkunda looks at what’s happening in the country of her birth, which she fled as a child during the genocide of 1994. Is this country a developmental model for the rest of the continent – or an autocratic and ruthless state?

Welcome to Rwanda (< link)