Suella Braverman took a deep breath. She had come to Parliament to explain her wizard plan to stop people crossing the Channel to seek asylum. This is to make it illegal. If it was illegal before, it will now be even more illegal. As illegal as you can get, at least until the government’s next plan.

It was urgent, she explained: “Unless we act today, the problem will be worse tomorrow, and the problem is already unsustainable.” How unsustainable is unsustainable? “There are 100 million people who could qualify for protection under our laws,” she said. “Let’s be clear, they are coming here.”

The government had lost control of the Channel

All 100 million of them, eh? And that’s just the ones who qualify. If you factor in the government’s assumption that a lot of the people making the crossing don’t have legitimate claims, you’re looking at 200 million people who, let’s be clear, are coming here. When you put it like that, you can see why the government’s worried. Not even Rishi Sunak has that many spare bedrooms.

“The British people are famously a fair and patient people,” Braverman said. Is there a country whose politicians describe its citizens in any other way? Is there, somewhere in the world, a Braverman counterpart reminding a parliamentary chamber that their voters are notoriously capricious and demanding?

“But,” the Home Secretary went on, “their sense of fair play has been tested beyond its limits as they have seen the country taken for a ride.” Well, maybe. If there really are 100 million people bearing down on Britain, we’ve done pretty well only to have 45,000 of them – less than 0.05% — arrive last year. Put it like that, and it’s a triumph of public policy.

“Their patience has run out,” Braverman said. “The law-abiding patriotic majority have said, ‘Enough is enough.’” It is, of course, only Britain-hating criminals who want to help asylum seekers. The Refugee Council, for instance, is notorious for mainly being staffed by house-breakers and bank robbers.

Yvette Cooper, responding for Labour, was icily dismissive. The government had lost control of the Channel, smuggling was up and convictions of smugglers were down. “There is no point in ministers trying to blame anyone else for it,” she said. “They have been in power for 13 years. The asylum system is broken, and they broke it.”

Conservatives fear their constituencies will be swamped with Labour voters

She quoted the Home Secretary saying that anyone arriving in Britain illegally would be sent back, and Tory MPs cheered, before she went on: “That was not this Home Secretary. It was the last one. And that was not about this bill. It was about the last one, passed only a year ago and which did not work.” Of the 18,000 people the Home Office had deemed inadmissible under that law, a mere 21 had been deported. “What is different this time?”

There’s clearly no love lost between Braverman and Cooper. The Home Secretary described her Labour shadow’s questions as “five minutes of hysteria, histrionics and criticism” and completely ignored them. But then we got to the heart of why we were there. “Labour is against deterring people who would come here illegally, against detaining people who come here illegally and against deporting people who are here illegally,” Braverman said. “Labour is for this situation getting worse and worse.”

The Home Secretary’s statement lasted nearly two hours. Labour MPs raised refugee cases, especially Afghans whose desperate state is at least partly Britain’s fault. Conservative MPs were pretty much universally supportive of the government. There were some who insisted that their motivation was only compassion, speeches along the lines of: “My constituents are warm and welcoming people whose hearts overflow with love for the needy and vulnerable. Specifically, they would love them to go somewhere else.” Jonathan Gullis gave a caring plea for the hotels of Stoke-on-Trent to be emptied of asylum seekers “as soon as possible”.

By the end it was clear that Conservative MPs are certainly worried about people crossing the Channel, but that it is very far from the only movement that’s troubling them. In recent months, growing numbers of voters have been making their way across the political divide from the Conservative Party to Labour. It started as a trickle, and has become a flood. Conservatives fear their constituencies will be swamped with Labour voters, putting the traditional way of life of Tory MPs under threat. It is this tide, as much as the flow of refugees, that Braverman is determined to stop.