EVEN when you attempt to be conciliatory about the Tories, they find a way of hurling it back at you. One week was all it took for Rishi Sunak to make a mockery of my circumspection following his appointment as Prime Minister.

I’d suggested that Sunak’s elevation – no matter how you regard his politics – would immediately restore a sense of gravitas and dignity to the highest office in the UK following its degradation by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

And then Suella Braverman happened. She had lasted six weeks as Home Secretary under the hapless Truss. Then she called a foul on herself and resigned for breaching the ministerial code by sending sensitive information via her personal email account.

It was widely believed by the Westminster lobby that her transgressions were not considered sufficiently grave as to merit her resignation and that it was a convenient means of removing herself from the train wreck that was the historically brief Truss premiership.

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It was also widely accepted that talks had also begun between her and Rishi Sunak to enable her to return to the Home Office, which she did six days after her resignation.

Now she’s in danger of having to resign again, following revelations that there were other ministerial breaches and that this seemed to indicate brazen contempt for the code rather than mere oversight.

And so she deployed the strategy favoured by politicians of all stripes when they’re in the soapy: she deflected. Except that her mode of deflection was to target refugees and asylum seekers – the world’s most vulnerable people – effectively by inciting violence against them. Even in the midst of the obscene racism and xenophobia which characterised the Leave strategy during the Brexit campaign, I can’t recall anyone ever using language as rancid as that employed by Braverman in the House of Commons on Monday. This, remember, is a British Home Secretary – effectively the third-most powerful figure in UK politics.

She was in the Commons to face questions about the reported squalor in which refugees were being held at the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent. Braverman said: “Let’s be clear about what is really going on here. The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not.”

By inferring that these poor, poor souls were here to do harm to British citizens was a clear dog whistle to the scarecrow contingent of the Tory party and to the xenophobic scourings of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group (ERG) and Nigel Farage’s six-fingered banjo players.

It has been revealed that the number of people being detained at Manston was 4000 … in a facility that’s only supposed to house 1600. Reports have suggested there have been outbreaks of diphtheria, scabies and MSRA at the site, hardly surprising in view of the inhumane conditions in which people are being held.

Braverman went on to repeat an old trope favoured by Farage and others that they’re all out to threaten our way of life and menace us in our beds. “Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone. Many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs,” she said.

She didn’t actually back her wild ravings with any documentary evidence. But I suppose she ought to know what a criminal gang looks like: they speak with public school accents; carry ministerial red boxes; and were to be found in assorted addresses along Downing Street having bacchanals during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Braverman then proceeded to go through the entire xenophobic lexicon of the hard right when addressing refugees. This is “illegal migration”; it’s “out of control”; it’s a “scourge”. She agreed with a Tory colleague that these people “can get on a dinghy and go straight back to France” if they felt that being crammed into a disease-ridden holding centre wasn’t good enough.

It was hate-filled contempt for people regarded by Braverman and some of the Tory hard-right extremists as less than human. And it happened just one day after the firebombing of a Border Force immigration centre in Dover.

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In light of her contempt for her fellow human beings, it was surprising Braverman didn’t add that they were asking for the attack by a “white, 66-year-old male from the High Wycombe area”.

We have been here before with the Home Secretary. During the Conservative Party conference last month she said: “I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession. Starting by Christmas would be amazing but if I’m honest I think it will take longer.”

Not long after this psychotic outburst, I conducted an interview for The Herald with Maggie Lennon, director of the Bridges Programmes, the main agency for economic integration for migrants in Scotland. Like me, Lennon was convinced Braverman’s Rwanda comments constituted what she called “a grotesque inversion” of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and that this was deliberate.

She also felt it echoed Boris Johnson’s attempts to evoke Winston Churchill, a man who once said: “If the Welsh are striking over hunger, we must fill their bellies with lead”.

Lennon said: “There is no safe route to travel. They’re making out that people are choosing to avoid safe routes when there are no safe routes. They don’t understand that if you turn people back in boats it won’t stop people coming. People are desperate. How desperate do you have to be to put small children in a boat in the middle of the night?”

There is a moral gulf opening up between Scotland and England in how they treat refugees and migrants fleeing terror and geopolitical chaos in South and Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Much of this grim upheaval has been caused by Britain and the affluent west meddling catastrophically in the affairs of these countries for the sole purpose of looting them of their vast natural assets and enslaving their people.

Braverman thinks the refugees being held in the Dover immigration centre are cut-throats and gangsters. As Scotland has discovered to its benefit, they are much more likely to include highly-skilled, hard-working people including doctors and engineers.

And, as such, there is room for them in a country menaced by the skill shortage caused by the hard Brexit that her party imposed on Scotland.