Is everyone alright at the Home Office? Did someone accidentally delete hundreds of thousands of records or email Boris Johnson’s bank details to the Russian embassy?
The only rational reason behind the government’s surprise announcement on asylum seekers last week was that it was designed to cover up some other monumental mess - worse than the Windrush scandal.
Why else would the prime minister announce, seemingly with a straight face, that some asylum seekers who arrive in the UK on small boats will be sent to Rwanda - that well-known bastion of human rights?
He couldn’t possibly have announced a bizarre, cruel policy to detract attention from his own Covid rule-breaking, could he?
The announcement came as a surprise to the minister tasked with helping Ukrainian refugees.
Lord Harrington insisted no one from the Ukraine would be sent to Rwanda. But he also claimed he hadn’t been informed of the plans.
"If it's happening in the Home Office on the same corridor that I'm in they haven't told me about it," he said.
In the World Freedom Index, Rwanda ranks 120th out of 168 countries - higher than Syria but lower than Belarus, which is subject to UK financial sanctions over its appalling record on human rights.
Rwanda's own president has been accused of trying to assassinate his opponents - a perfect champion for traumatised migrants.
The new asylum policy sounded like it was dreamt up in a Thick of It-style ‘thought camp’ of ‘no bad ideas’ where junior staffers sit cross-legged in a circle and shout out “free thermals for the elderly”, “pay the unemployed to drive ambulances” and, presumably, “send refugees to Rwanda”.
The ridiculous social media video the Tories used to announce the change was accompanied by an insane beat which sounded like an extra-enthusiastic drummer on the Twelfth.
“The Royal Navy will now patrol the Channel,” the advert bellowed.
“Only Conservatives have a plan to take back control of our borders.”
The new policy will certainly appeal to those Tory voters who get their kicks from haranguing Indian call centre workers and complaining you ‘can’t say anything these days’ while clogging up the phone lines of every major talk radio station.
Of course for Nigel Farage, the policy didn't go nearly far enough.
"The new Royal Navy presence in the Channel off to a terrible start," he tweeted on, of all days, Good Friday.
"The gunwhales on the vessels are too high to pick up migrants, so the RNLI & Border Force are doing the job instead!"
Who could have predicted that warships are not ideally suited to rescuing migrants from dinghies?
The Tories claimed that people traffickers are costing taxpayers £5 million a day - an odd way to frame an argument about basic human rights.
But if money is the focus, the new £1.4 billion plan doesn’t stack up.
As shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper pointed out, sending asylum seekers to Rwanda will be more than a hundred times more expensive than the current system.
Australia's policy of sending just over 3,000 migrants to Papua New Guinea/Nauru has cost AUS$10bn since 2013.
A similar policy introduced by Israel was notable only for its complete ineffectiveness.
Of about 4,000 people estimated to have been deported by Israel to Rwanda and Uganda between 2014 and 2017, almost all are believed to have left the country straight away.
Many attempted to reach Europe using people-smugglers - the same group the new policy claims it will target.
The Home Office has such a poor record of dealing with asylum seekers that it's the last department you'd want to handle such a sensitive issue.
The department wrongly detained and deported dozens of the Windrush generation of British subjects, simply because they had migrated to the UK before 1973. Only a fraction of those wrongly targeted have ever received compensation.
And the Home Office's approach to the whole scandal has been so poor that three separate Parliamentary committees have called for the redress scheme to be taken out of the department's hands.
At the end of last year, around 100,000 asylum seekers were still waiting to hear from the department about their initial claims.
With such a wealth of poor management experience, the Home Office's forced migration of hundreds of vulnerable people should go without a hitch.