On Tuesday morning, the roof of Parliament’s Portcullis House began falling in. Even for fans of metaphor, this was a touch heavy-handed. Water poured through the glass panels onto unsuspecting coffee-drinkers below. Word spread that the glass ceiling panels were about to drop.

Those of us who work in the Palace of Westminster have long wondered when someone would be killed by a piece of falling Victorian masonry. This would at least have a touch of class. It would be tremendously infra dig to be the victim instead of a piece of millennial glazing.

Still, for more than a decade there has been intense discussion in Parliament about how to bring the older parts of the building up to modern standards. Finally we can see a way forward: taking the new bits of the building down to nineteenth century spec. This of course parallels the government’s solution to the “levelling up” conundrum. 

Speaking of prime ministerial promises that no one knows how to keep, in the Commons they were discussing the government’s latest plan to Stop The Boats, by making it really and truly against the law to come to the UK illegally. 

The new bit of this is the plan to send new arrivals to that leading safe place Rwanda, a country where democracy flourishes so strongly that the president won 98.8 per cent of the vote in the last elections, and his opponents are so sure that he’s right about everything that many choose to simply move abroad out of embarrassment and then die mysteriously.

The Illegal Migration Bill had returned from the Lords, where soft-hearted peers had inserted clauses limiting the length of time that children and pregnant women could be detained. Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick was at the despatch box to try to unpick compromises on some amendments, and broker compromises on others. It wasn’t straightforward: he faced as much hostile questioning from his own side as from the opposition. 

Curious alliances have formed on the Tory benches

Curious alliances have formed on the Tory benches. Theresa May sat across the aisle from Iain Duncan Smith, with whom she’s working to restore protection for victims of trafficking. They spent much of Jenrick’s speech offering a coordinated glower, before taking him on with a one-two of interventions. Sir Bob Neill, an amiable knight from Chislehurst, is working with Tim Loughton to keep protections for children.

Some Tory MPs are convinced that if Britain could just be unpleasant enough, the asylum-seeker problem would go away. Others have spent so long arguing for the Rwanda policy that they may actually have convinced themselves it will work. For all the time they spend denouncing lawyers, it is only the judicial rulings stopping the Rwanda flights that are protecting them from what is likely to be a cruel encounter with reality.

Labour MPs meanwhile know what they’re against, but it’s far from clear whether their proposals would work any better than the government’s plans. As with the fabric of parliament’s buildings, pointing out the problems are the easy part of the process.

So the opposition focused several questions on Jenrick’s recent demand that cartoons on the walls in a children’s reception centre be painted over. It is claimed that this is because he thought they made the place too friendly. Yvette Cooper was suitably outraged. “Nobody believes that Mickey Mouse cartoons either encourage or deter the boats to arrive,” she said, possibly overestimating some on the Conservative benches. “They simply think that this is the minister not showing common decency.”

This story has been running for a few days now and so the Home Office has had time to get its story straight. The minister gave us his best version. “We provide very high quality care,” he began, a touch nervously. “We didn’t think that the setup in that particular unit was age appropriate, because the majority of those individuals who were unaccompanied passing through it last year were teenagers.”

Now it all makes sense. Jenrick’s demand that Donald Duck be painted over was only the first step. Presumably he subsequently demanded some Taylor Swift posters, which have yet to arrive. 

“We support anyone who comes to this country with decency and compassion,” Jenrick went on, as though it was outrageous to suggest anything else. But this is the confusion at the heart of the policy: are we trying to treat refugees well, or badly? Is the flight to Rwanda supposed to be a deterrent, or something they will welcome? 

Over in Portcullis House, the atrium had been cordoned off, and for MPs the journey to their offices now involved a dangerous crossing. Will stripy tape be enough to deter them, or will they, too be threatened with a flight to Africa?