Priti Patel’s wish to send unwanted migrants to far-flung locations is no answer to a serious problem

Editorial: It makes little sense to be moving random individuals thousands of miles around the world

The home secretary is aping the hardline immigration policies of Australia (AFP/Getty)

Home Office civil servants are so horrified by the government’s plans to maroon asylum seekers in various offshore locations that they have leaked the plans not once but twice.

Last autumn and again now, some Whitehall blue-sky thinking about dumping asylum seekers in the most unseemly of places has again emerged, to the embarrassment of everyone except Priti Patel, who insists on pursuing her strange project.

If nothing else, it at least demonstrates Ms Patel’s tenacity. The home secretary’s refusal to compromise with common sense and reality is well-known, and hardly admirable, but in its own way it has a certain monumental “last days in the bunker” quality to it. We knew she was stubborn and forceful, but planning to send unwanted migrants to the Isle of Man and Gibraltar, or possibly Turkey and Ascension Island, or failing that the Western Isles and the Isle of Wight, would be taking the imaginative use of executive power a little too far.