It’s not the dishonesty that stings. It’s the insult Sir Keir Starmer is offering to our intelligence.

‘If you come to this country and commit a crime , we will deport you as soon as possible,’ declares the Prime Minister, in what is doubtlessly meant to be a manly tone.

Hmmm. Note that qualifier, ‘as soon as possible’.

In theory, foreign criminals should be being repatriated now. The 2007 Borders Act lays down that anyone who is not a British or Irish national and who is sentenced to 12 months or more should automatically be served with a deportation order – without serving a day in jail.

In reality though, foreign criminals are all too rarely booted out. They are coached on how to make claims under human rights laws, and our activist immigration tribunals then rule that they should be allowed to stay.

The grounds on which their deportation orders are overturned sometimes seem so absurd that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that our judges are having a laugh.

Your partner finds the Caribbean climate too hot? Stay as long as you like! Your child doesn’t like the food in Albania? We couldn’t possibly have that! Your transvestism would be frowned on in Algeria? Oh, you poor soul: indefinite leave granted!

Is Starmer planning to dismantle the human rights racket called into creation by Tony Blair, the racket that made the current PM a wealthy man and continues to pour rich foisons into the laps of his Leftie lawyer friends ? Of course not.

Once again, he is taking us for fools. ‘For far too long, foreign criminals have been exploiting our immigration system, remaining in the UK for months or even years while their appeals drag on,’ he declares portentously. ‘That ends now. If foreign nationals break the law, they will be deported at the earliest opportunity.’

Spot the get-out clause again: ‘at the earliest opportunity’.

Extending the 2007 law so that it applies to sentences of less than 12 months, which is what Starmer is talking about here, will make no difference as long as shyster lawyers are touring our prisons encouraging rapists and drug-dealers to challenge their removals.

Never mind the deceit, Starmer is engaging in unbelievably bad politics. The reason that voters are so angry about immigration is that politicians keep promising to tackle the problem and then doing nothing.

Sometimes, politicians make promises in good faith only to have those promises undermined by the state machine. Unless you have been up close to government, you will struggle to believe how powerless ministers are in the face of their officials.

The fact that the trade union representing Home Office civil servants went to court to block the last government’s Rwanda scheme is, in its way, even more telling than the fact that the courts did indeed block it.

When the Tories eventually managed, after many legal battles, to force that scheme on to the statute books, Labour cancelled it.

Meanwhile, Starmer is casting around for an alternative destination, having binned the original in a virtue-signalling strop. A neat example of the danger of coming to office armed only with warm, fuzzy feelings. 

Once again, we see a politician talking tough without any plan – the worst possible combination. Starmer has promised again and again to ‘smash the gangs’, yet we have just passed the grisly landmark of 50,000 illegal immigrants forcing their way across the Channel and breaking into Britain since he became PM. 

And there is no prospect of it stopping while so many interest groups are in on the scam.

The Border Force brings migrants across the Channel; Home Office officials fail to remove illegals; judges overturn deportation orders on ludicrous grounds; broadcasters refuse to report the resulting protests other than as ‘far-Right’ agitation.

Starmer won’t stop any of this.

So why the tough talk, which can only have the effect of making voters angrier?

The truth is that, as a life-long human rights lawyer, he cannot contemplate the changes needed to sort the problem out.

It is sometimes claimed that Starmer doesn’t believe in anything, but this is unfair. He has held one core belief throughout his life: as a Trotskyist student, as a human rights lawyer, as a rising Leftist MP, as a Corbyn yes-man and now as PM. He believes in the supremacy of human rights codes, both foreign and domestic.

No one else would have agreed to hand away strategic British territory in the Indian Ocean at the behest of an international court that had expressly been denied sovereignty in such disputes. No one else would be bankrupting our country in pursuit of decarbonisation targets that the rest of the world laughs at.

Such a man will never begin the re-ordering of government; the uprooting of the Blair legal settlement necessary to take back control of our borders.

What would need to change? A lot of people think that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would permit mass deportations, but abrogating that treaty is no silver bullet. Yes, we need to withdraw from the ECHR – or at least from those parts of it that are being cited to block removal orders.

But that is only the beginning. Numerous other international treaties are also cited by judges, including the Refugee Convention and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Then there is the mass of domestic legislation, including the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act as well as a lot of case law.

Even if all that were done, we would be left with the problem of partisan judges ruling on the basis of what they think the law ought to say rather than what it says. Would it be enough to abolish immigration tribunals, which attract self-selecting socialists often with long online histories of being rude about conservatism?

Is any party even asking these questions? Actually, yes, though hardly anyone is aware of it. At the beginning of June, Kemi Badenoch set up a commission under the distinguished jurist Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, which will explore all these questions and report to the Conservative conference in October.

But few voters are interested in process. The candidate who talks about the necessary structural reforms will always be trumped by the one who offers simple slogans. Send them back! Turn the boats around! Sack the officials who refuse to do what they’re told!

No one wants to hear that, if it were that easy, it would have happened by now. No one wants to listen to explanations that sound like excuses. Yet, unless this preparatory work has been done in earnest, there is no way of tackling the issue.

Parties coming to office armed with cliches rather than plans is why we are in this mess. Starmer’s sloganising will only make the problem worse.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade