Officials race to find cause of blackout in Spain and Portugal

Travel chaos has continued into Tuesday in Spain and Portugal, after one of Europe’s most severe blackouts plunged the Iberian peninsula into darkness.

Around 500 flights were cancelled due to the blackout, according to an estimate by The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder. Large crowds remained at Madrid’s main train station on Tuesday.

Power has now returned to households in Spain and neighbouring Portugal. Investigators still looking into the cause of the blackout which remains unclear, but authorities denied foul play and rumours of a cyber attack.

“What happened yesterday cannot ever happen again,” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday afternoon, vowing to hold private operators to account.

A power blackout hit most of the Iberian Peninsula on Monday around 12.30pm local time, forcing the two countries to declare a state of emergency.

The mass blackout upended the lives of tens of millions of people for hours as traffic and transport came to a standstill and left leaving many without water, Wi-Fi or mobile network.

Portuguese grid operator REN said there was a “very large oscillation in the electrical voltages, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system”.

Russian attack kills child hours after ceasefire offer: Ukraine latest

A major Russian drone attack on Ukraine killed a 12-year-old child this morning and wounded three others just hours after Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a fresh 72-hour ceasefire next weekend.

The girl was killed after one of 100 drones fired by Russia overnight hit a residential building in Samarivskyi district in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine’s emergency service said.

Shortly before the attack, Volodymyr Zelensky accused Mr Putin of “another attempt at manipulation” with his latest offer of a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine.

The Kremlin announced Russia would observe a 72-hour ceasefire next weekend, starting from 8 May and lasting until the close of 10 May, as Moscow wants to mark the 80th anniversary of victory in the Second World War.

“For some reason everyone is supposed to wait until 8 May before ceasing fire – just to provide Putin with silence for his parade,” Mr Zelensky said on X last night. “If Russia truly wants peace, it must cease fire immediately,” Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said.

The Institute for the Study of War said Mr Putin was leveraging unilateral ceasefires for informational and battlefield advantages in Ukraine.

Huge fire erupts at London substation

A large fire broke out at a London substation just weeks after a similar incident at Heathrow airport which caused travel chaos.

Black smoke and flames were seen erupting in rush hour today near Warwick Avenue station.

Fifteen fire engine and around 100 firefighters were called to the fire at an electrical substation on Aberdeen Place in Maida Vale, according to the London Fire Brigade.

Officers received more than 170 calls alerting them to the blaze at 5.29am on Tuesday.

Part of a neighbouring residential block of flats was also alight and about 100 residents have been evacuated from surrounding buildings and a rest centre has been set up by the local authority. There have been no reports of any injuries at this time.

Station Commander Paul Morgan said: “This is a very visible fire and producing lots of smoke. Residents are advised to keep their windows and doors shut and avoid the area where possible.”

Fire crews from Paddington and Euston and surrounding fire stations are also at the scene.

Videos on social media show large amounts of dark smoke following what appears to be an explosion.

Residents have gathered outside the cordon, many watching as firefighters continue to work to fully extinguish the blaze and assess the damage to the substation and the nearby residential building.

One resident who was evacuated during the fire has described it as “an inferno”.

Alice Bazzi, 36, said her mother Fatima, 71, woke her shortly before 5.30am saying she could smell fire.

Speaking outside the Wharncliffe Gardens Community centre where evacuated residents have gathered, Ms Bazzi said: “You felt it on your face, I felt the heat.

“That’s why they said our block has now been impacted because where the flames got so high, higher than these trees, the fire then went onto our roof.”

Westminster City Council has reiterated advice urging residents to keep their doors and windows closed as firefighters tackle the blaze in Maida Vale.

In a statement on social media, the council said: “The London Fire Brigade are dealing with a fire at an electrical substation on Victoria Passage NW8 in Westminster.

“Residents are advised to keep their windows and doors shut.”

UK Power Networks confirmed the fire did not interrupted power supplies.

A spokesperson said: “UK Power Networks was called to a fire at a substation in St John’s Wood early this morning.

“This has not interrupted power supplies. Our teams are working with the fire service to make the equipment safe.

“This is an isolated incident and customers’ supplies were not impacted.”

The fire brigade is working closely with UK Power Networks and the Metropolitan Police to investigate the cause of the fire.

Assistant Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade Pat Goulbourne, said: “Firefighting operations will continue for some time on the transformer at the substation. To combat this technically complex fire, crews have been deploying foam to suppress the flames. The foam works by smothering the fire and cutting off its fuel source, preventing reignition.”

It comes after a massive fire ripped through an electricity substation near Heathrow in March.

Thousands of passengers had their flights cancelled or altered in mid-air and forced the airport to close for more than 15 hours.

The blaze which caused the power outage erupted at a high-voltage electricity substation in Hayes, five miles north of the airport, leaving around 67,000 households suffering power cuts.

Everyone is experiencing them but what is an ‘ego death’?

David Harbour is the latest celebrity to experience ego death. At least, that was what he said in a recent interview with the Stranger Things star published in GQ. “It’s all just ego,” he told the magazine during a conversation about his own fame. “It seems kind of silly to say this, but the art that I’m creating is about you. It’s not about me. It’s about your experience of life. We get hung up on [the person themselves], and I think we get lost in the idea of, like, what it’s really about. And I think, for me, it’s dangerous, too, to get lost in the personality in any way.”

The 50-year-old actor went on, serving up further word salad: “That’s part of the problem – people believe the hype, they get into the image, they forget that it’s all just… I mean, I’m not the same person I was this morning. It’s all impermanent. It’s all gonna change. It’s all gonna die. And that’s very, very much deeply in my heart now. At 20, [life] was gonna go on forever.”

Harbour might not have referenced the phrase “ego death” himself (it’s in the article’s headline) but frankly, he didn’t need to. Because by now, an ego death is an established part of modern-day parlance. On TikTok, there are myriad videos on the subject, featuring so-called “experts” delivering short, snappy sermons about the importance of undergoing an ego death as some form of spiritual awakening. “When people ask what I’ve been up to but I can’t say I’ve been rewiring my whole nervous system, had an ego death, and unlearning cycles of toxic behaviours so I just say, ‘working a lot’,” reads the caption over one viral clip featuring a man walking alone at sunset with the hashtags: “#relatable” and “#selfcare”.

It’s something celebrities talk about particularly frequently, so much so that it’s one of many punchlines in Apple TV’s critical hit, The Studio, a razor-sharp satire of Hollywood’s movers and shakers. At one point, a famous actress accidentally overdoses on magic mushrooms and must deliver an important speech while talking in tongues. “She’s having an ego death!” one person shouts, successfully ameliorating any concerns.

Going off these slightly ambiguous references, the term “ego death” itself could literally mean anything. It’s having an existential crisis and coming out the other side. It’s having a long conversation with a family member or close friend and feeling changed by it. It’s realising the world doesn’t revolve around you and using that as evidence of spiritual enlightenment. It’s a particularly potent trip on psychedelics. It’s the revival that comes after an anxiety-inducing hangover.

This rhetoric forms part of a long line of pop psychology that has been dominating online discourse for some time now. Therapy-speak has become so widespread on social media that it’s almost impossible to know what any of it means, if anything at all beyond a bid to hack Instagram’s algorithm and go viral.

“Terms like ‘ego death’, ’narcissism’, ’trauma’, and ’triggered’ have all become social media terms that get hollowed out to the point that it is not always clear if they are used in an informed way or thrown around without much meaning at all,” says Dr Greg Madison, an existential psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society. The first thing people are getting wrong about “ego death” is that it shouldn’t be spoken about as fact. “It is a hypothetical construct,” says Dr Madison, noting that its psychological use originated from Freud, for whom the term originally simply referred to someone’s sense of self.

“It was a pivotal part of his way of conceptualising the dynamics in the human psyche: the pull between our instincts, our conscience and our socialisation,” explains Dr Madison. “The ego tries to keep us rational and functioning according to convention. It wants to keep us out of jail and earning a living. However, in everyday language ‘ego’ has also come to mean grandiosity and the constant need to accumulate esteem to prove our superiority, ironically in order to assure ourselves we are good enough.”

It’s because of this contemporary understanding that has given rise to the concept of the “ego death” aka the constant need for one’s ego to be quashed so as to make space for other, more benevolent, parts of ourselves, like empathy, tolerance and compassion. “An ‘ego death’, therefore, can seem like a liberation from the confines of a too-small and constantly managed sense of identity or freedom from parochial forms of the conventional,” adds Dr Madison.

As for how the ego death became a part of the pop psychology pit, that’s thanks to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist for whom the term was synonymous with “psychic death”, referring to a transcendental shift within the psyche. Nowadays it’s more commonly associated with spirituality practices, whether that’s meditation or within psychedelic communities. “It can be associated with an expanding consciousness, a greater appreciation of life from accepting our human frailties, insecurity, vulnerability, uncertainty, and our existential condition as something to embrace rather than cure. It can feel positive, but it can also feel frightening if our sense of self expands without our intention. Is it a breakthrough or a breakdown.”

The complicated thing is that there is no single meaning for an ego death. How it’s defined will differ person to person, though many people online seem to be using it as a stamp of honour in some way. “I suspect it has accrued a degree of kudos, ironically ego-death as another accomplishment that ego can claim to assert its standing,” posits Dr Madison.

Harbour has faced cheating allegations since splitting from his wife, musician Lily Allen. Neither he nor Allen have spoken about the rumours but Harbour refused to go into details of the breakup in his GQ interview, telling the publication only: “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”

Harbour went on to allude to the breakdown of his marriage, implying that he was on a spiritual journey. “You know, it’s not that things ending aren’t hard, but it’s just that I’m choosing to make it a period of growth,” he said. “And I feel like having the opportunity to be busy and work is really good, and also to delve into this deeper spiritual quest.”

Several famous men have spoken explicitly about undergoing an ego death after being levelled with allegations of various kinds. Consider Shia LaBeouf, for example, who was accused of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress in a lawsuit filed by FKA twigs, whom the actor dated for around a year in 2018. At the time the suit was filed, LaBeouf denied many of the allegations but in 2022 told Jon Bernthal on his podcast Real Ones: “I f***ed up bad. Like crash and burn type s***. I hurt a lot of people, and I’m fully aware of that. And I’m going to owe for the rest of my life.”

Without naming twigs, the actor continued: “I hurt that woman. And in the process of doing that, I hurt many other people, and many other people before that woman. I was a pleasure-seeking, selfish, self-centred, dishonest, inconsiderate, fearful human being.” He went on to express gratitude for her: “Had she not intervened in my life and not created the avenue for me to experience ego death, I’d either have a really mediocre existence or I’d be dead in full.”

Armie Hammer also claimed to have experienced an ego death. In 2021, the Call Me By Your Name star found himself at the centre of an online firestorm after direct messages allegedly sent from Hammer detailed graphic sexual desires and cannibalistic fetishism. The 38-year-old actor was subsequently accused of rape and abuse. Hammer has consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing and said that all of his relationships with women were consensual. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office decided against prosecuting him due to a lack of sufficient evidence.

Speaking about the allegations on a podcast last summer, Hammer said: “I’m actually now at a place where I’m really grateful for it because, where I was in my life before all of that stuff happened to me, I didn’t feel good.” He went on to reveal that he joined a 12-step programme after the allegations surfaced as they caused both “an ego death” and “a career death”.

We don’t know whether these men experienced an ego death or not. What we do know, however, is that use of the term is becoming more widespread, which might be cause for concern when they inevitably become watered down, rendering the concept entirely meaningless.

“These terms very readily move from specialised language communities to social media, where the motive for using them can be to garner interest or secure ‘likes’,” says Dr Madison. That said, there is still a way to use it to kickstart some important self-reflection, which is ultimately what all this is supposed to be about.

The best way to draw meaning from an ego death is to ask what it means to the individual experiencing it. In other words, to ascertain if this is something you are saying simply because you feel like you should, or if you really are experiencing some sort of internal transformation. It’s a way of seeing if there’s any substance to the phrase: if you’re undergoing an ego death, what are the parts of yourself that you are letting go of? And what might they be replaced by? These sorts of conversations are likely to be far more interesting when approached like this.

“Because you’re engaging beyond assumptions, entering a generative terrain where we are willing to go into what we have not previously thought about,” says Dr Madison.

That’s something we can all practice, though, as with almost everything, it’s probably best carried out away from our screens.

Mushroom murder trial begins for woman accused of killing family members

The trial of Erin Patterson, who is accused of murdering three of her relatives by serving them a poisonous beef Wellington in 2023, has started in Australia.

Charges regarding the attempted murder of Ms Patterson’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, have been dropped by prosecutors, Justice Christopher Beale told the court on Tuesday, even though she still faces charges over the fatal mushroom lunch that killed three and left one critically ill.

A jury of 15 has been selected and the trial is taking place in Morwell, about 150km southeast of Melbourne, near the town of Leongatha, where the lunch was organised. Jurors in the highly anticipated trial are scheduled to receive directions from Justice Beale at 3.00pm on Tuesday afternoon.

On 29 July 2023, Ms Patterson hosted a lunch for her estranged in-laws and another couple at her home in the small, rural town of Leongatha in Victoria, about 85 miles (136km) southeast of Melbourne.

She invited her ex-husband’s parents Don, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, and her 68-year-old husband Ian Wilkinson.

Ms Patterson prepared a beef Wellington dish that included mushrooms for the meal which was organised as a reconciliation effort for the sake of the two children she shared with her former husband.

In the following days, all four lunch guests fell ill with food poisoning-like symptoms and were hospitalised. Medical staff later confirmed their symptoms were consistent with death cap mushroom poisoning – a claim that forensic tests later confirmed.

Following the lunch, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson died in hospital on 4 August. Don Patterson died the next day, while Ian Wilkinson was critically ill but eventually recovered.

Ms Patterson, 50, was charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

She has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Ms Patterson has also said that she loved her in-laws and was devastated by their deaths. The prosecution, however, alleges that the meal was deliberately laced with poison, making this a highly contentious and emotionally charged case that has captured global attention.

The detectives investigating the case have earlier described the case as extremely “complex”.

According to 1News, accommodation in Morwell has been completely booked as the trial gets underway, as authorities step up security measures around the courthouse.

The case has drawn widespread attention in Australia and abroad, with the courtroom’s six media seats allocated via a daily ballot. Dozens more are expected to follow the proceedings from an overflow room at the court.

The trial, expected to last five to six weeks, is being covered by ABC through a daily podcast, while streaming platform Stan is producing a documentary on what it calls “one of the highest profile criminal cases in recent history”.

The prosecution, led by senior counsel Nanette Rogers, is set to deliver its opening address to the jury on Wednesday morning. Ms Patterson’s barrister, Colin Mandy SC, will follow with the defence’s opening statement, ahead of the first witness taking the stand on Thursday.

Ms Patterson had earlier said that she didn’t mean to harm anyone. “I didn’t do anything. I loved them and I’m devastated they are gone.”

She added that she was “so devastated” that her children have lost their grandparents. “They’ve lost their grandmother,” she continued. “I’m so sorry that they have lost their lives.”

In another earlier statement, she said: “I really want to repeat that I had absolutely no reason to hurt these people whom I loved.”

How online schools can help children form friendships as they learn

When thinking about the best education for your child, it’s naturally not just academic success that comes to mind. A good quality school experience is made up of many parts and one key element is the socialising opportunities that school can provide. Socialisation is crucial for building social skills, growing emotional intelligence and helping children form their own individual identity, as well as giving them an additional incentive to attend a place where they have fun and feel part of a community.

While it might be assumed that the social options are reduced when children attend online school, this is not the case. In fact, there are a number of advantages in terms of the structures, support and diverse social opportunities offered to children who join online schools.

Online schools give students the opportunity to form connections with a much more diverse community of students. The online model allows schools to welcome young people from around the world and this gives pupils a chance to make friends with students from differing backgrounds and cultures. Furthermore, this means they can meet more like-minded individuals and form stronger bonds and more meaningful friendships. This access to such a big and vibrant community also ensures that students can really find ‘their people’ and avoids situations where students are stuck in small circles or forced to engage with classmates that don’t share the same interests or passions.

This is something that Grace, who is now in year 13, has experienced since moving to online school. At her previous school, she was struggling with socialisation and felt that she didn’t really have a self-identity. At an online school, she has found she can be more herself. “A lot of people think that online school is about being alone, but I’ve found that without the physical element, I can express myself better,” Grace explains.  Subsequently, the majority of her closest friends are from her online school and many she has met offline too. “I feel like I’ve met my people,” she says.

Isabella, who is in year 10, has also found that her experience of socialising at an online school has suited her much more than previous bricks and mortar schools. With her father’s job meaning the family moves country every three years, she has always previously struggled forming new friendships at the schools she joins. “I’m always the ‘new’ student, and it’s tough,” she says. After experiences with bullying, she found that online school is an environment she can thrive in. “You don’t have to turn on your camera or use your microphones if you’re not feeling comfortable. I’m not really a ‘social’ person, but I have made some friends here because we have these breakout rooms where we can talk to each other,” she adds.

While young people might not be meeting their fellow students physically every day, online schools put in place extensive measures to ensure that socialising is available for those who want to. This can be seen clearly at King’s InterHigh, the UK’s leading global online school which welcomes children aged 7 to 19 from across the world. Here, students join a warm and welcoming community with a huge range of opportunities for socialising. There’s dozens of clubs and societies for students across all year groups, representing a vast range of interests from chess to technology, sculpture to debate. Throughout the yearly student calendar, there are a number of events, showcases, and competitions of all kinds that provide a chance to socialise in different settings. Some happen internally, like the King’s InterHigh Arts Festival, while others allow students to interact with peers from outside their school when attending events like the International Robotics Competition.

Assemblies bring students together on a weekly basis and give them the chance to celebrate each other’s achievements, hear from their Student Council representatives, and find out what’s coming up at school. Each student is also assigned to one of the school’s eight houses and these smaller, tight-knit communities bring students a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Additionally, inter-house competitions are a fun and friendly way for students to engage and bond.

Although much socialising can come as a result of activities organised by the school, students at King’s InterHigh who are aged over 13 can continue building these relationships in a more informal setting thanks to the in-house, monitored, social media platform. Restricted solely to school students, the platform is safe, secure, and monitored to ensure a positive socialising environment for all those who choose to use it.

Online schools don’t just offer opportunities to socialise online but also offer ample opportunities to cement these connections in offline settings. At King’s InterHigh, there are global meet-ups throughout the year which bring together families allowing both children and parents and guardians to connect in real life. Regular educational school trips, from Geography excursions to science practical exams at other Inspired schools (the group of premium schools of which King’s InterHigh is part of) also allow children to socialise and have fun together in different settings.

Meanwhile, the annual summer camps, themed around a variety of interests and passions, including adventure sports, fashion, football, and tennis, are open to students across all Inspired schools and are held at spectacular Inspired campuses worldwide. Furthermore, the Inspired Global Exchange Programme offers a range of school exchange opportunities, lasting from one week to a full academic year.

Choosing where to educate your children is a big decision for any parent or guardian that involves many factors. However, when it comes to the social benefits, for the right child, online schools offer something truly transformative. To find out more about King’s InterHigh and whether it might be the right learning choice for your family, visit King’s InterHigh

Meghan Markle says she struggled to find work because of her freckles

Meghan Markle has said that not looking “cookie cutter” affected her ability to find work during her career as an actor.

The 43-year-old shot to fame for her role as Rachel Zane in the popular legal drama Suits, starring in the series from 2011 to 2018 before leaving following her relationship with Prince Harry.

However, the entrepreneur says that her appearance, including her freckles, race, and not fitting what was considered the industry beauty standard at the time, affected the opportunities she was presented with.

Speaking to IT Cosmetics’ founder Jamie Kern Lima on Duchess of Sussex’s new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, Markle related to the rejections Lima faced due to her rosacea, a skin condition that causes redness and bumps on the face, and passion for including more diversity in advertising campaigns.

“I was an auditioning actor, auditioning for commercials and I remember my commercial agent could not submit me for beauty or skincare ads because I had freckles,” said Markle.

“They were like: ‘No, no, it’s just never going to work because freckles aren’t a sign of beauty’. It was just, you couldn’t see yourself reflected there.”

Markle, who is of African-American and Caucasian heritage, also explained her challenges finding work as a mixed-race woman in the industry.

“What was I doing before? I was acting,” she continued, reflecting on her career.

“Oh my gosh, oh please. I heard ‘No’ all the time, especially because I wasn’t cookie-cutter for a specific type.

“And, at the start of my auditioning career, you were either the Black girl or the white girl or the Latina girl. Everything was typecast so being mixed I could get into a lot of rooms that meant as a numbers game I heard ‘no’ even more.”

On Tuesday (29 April), representatives for the Duchess of Sussex were forced to deny that she was using the title “Her Royal Highness” after stepping back from royal duties in 2020 amid a fallout with the royal family.

The denial came after a gift card bearing the HRH title was shown in an interview with Lima on her own podcast, The Jamie Kern Lima Show.

During the interview, a gift basket sent by Meghan was seen on screen. A card on the basket read, “With Compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex”.

Kern Lima said the gift, which included homemade strawberry sauce and ice cream, was sent to her home “about a year ago”.

A spokesperson for the Sussexes said that the couple do not use HRH titles.

Britain tried to control migration and created the worst of all worlds

Given the primacy that successive governments have placed on irregular migration, it is somewhat surprising that the main beneficiaries of the various efforts to stop the boats seem to be a number of private companies contracted by the government on somewhat opaque terms.

The costs involved in the mismanagement of the migration crisis – no fault of the asylum seekers – are steep enough already; it would at least offer some respect to the tax-paying public if there was a fuller accounting of their money.

Even more worrying, it is not entirely clear that this subcontracting of migration and border control operations has had any discernible effect. There is certainly no obvious evidence of it.

As The Independent reveals, researchers from four universities analysed up to £2bn of contracts awarded since 2017, which were aimed at curbing clandestine travel across the English Channel and dealing with the costs of safeguarding Britain’s borders.

While the various databases for government contracts show the estimated value of the work, they do not publish the amount of money a company actually receives, making the actual revenues from border security harder to trace and profits more difficult to quantify. Often, the official sources of information offer minimal detail on where the funds are allocated – and to what practical effect.

The sums involved are considerable – and until now have attracted surprisingly little critical attention. Mitie Care and Custody, for example, was granted an award of £514m for managing short-term holding facilities for migrants and escorting them in the UK and abroad. Serco, meanwhile, was awarded a £276m contract to run two detention centres in Gatwick, as well as some £52m to search lorries and escort people in northern France. American defence tech company Leidos has a contract for helping develop biometrics, and finger-printing capabilities to support UK law enforcement and immigration, which is worth over £96m.

There is no reason to believe that anything untoward was happening in these and other examples; and governments have outsourced work for many decades now. The problem is that in such a sensitive area, and one where there has been such a high level of public concern, there is insufficient transparency about the application of the funds – and, moreover, the results achieved.

As is all too plain to see, Britain’s attempts to control migration seem to have ended up in the worst of all worlds; a determinedly hostile regime that can be unduly harsh, but one that has had minimal obvious effect on the numbers making that dangerous and desperate journey across the Channel.

The decision of the last government to designate anyone trying to gain entry to the UK to make a claim for asylum a crime was entirely counterproductive. Because the would-be refugees had arrived via small boats, they were automatically criminalised as “illegals”.

Therefore, their applications would not even be processed, let alone accepted – so they could not settle in the UK. Yet that left them marooned in legal limbo and in costly and unsuitable hotels. A “perma-backlog” of claimants was created; people who could not be processed and could not be removed.

The idea was that they’d eventually be sent to Rwanda to be dealt with, but, notoriously, that policy collapsed and had to be abandoned under the weight of its own senselessness. With no safe and secure methods to claim asylum, aside from a few limited special schemes for Hong Kong, Ukraine and Afghanistan, refugees have no choice but to make the journey.

Logically, though not morally or legally under international law, the answer would be to immediately deport them and return them to a place where they’d face torture or death. But that is not an option that any civilised government should or would want to take.

All of which leaves the asylum system in a mess – and forces governments to spend money on trying to make it work. The level of failure on every level is so gross that it is little wonder that some aspects of the system are so opaque.

The Starmer administration promised a new approach, replacing “stop the boats” with “smash the gangs”. Deportations of those whose asylum claims have failed have increased, but there is not yet substantial evidence that the national security approach to the Channel crossings has disrupted the smuggling gangs’ business model. Nor has the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, yet delivered on her promise to end the use of hotels and clear the backlogs.

No doubt, with an eye on the political potency of immigration, soon to be confirmed in the local elections, the government will publish a white paper on migration – but focused on potential abuses of the visa system, rather than the irregular migration that has proved such an intractable challenge.

In any case, it is far too early to declare that this government has failed to control Britain’s borders, but a greater degree of transparency about the cost of failing to control migration is the least the public is entitled to.