Following last minute appeals, the deportation flight to Rwanda was grounded by European judges. An out-of-hours European Court of Human Rights judge made the dramatic 11th hour intervention, informing the crew that the Boeing 767 could not take off as scheduled.

The ECHR has not ruled that the policy is unlawful, rather it has decided no-one should be deported before the lawfulness of the policy has been decided. The details, though, will fall through the cracks. After much fanfare and repeated promises that economic migrants would be removed, voters will see that our borders are still porous and foreign judges are calling the shots. We will no doubt see demands to quit the ECHR.

Naturally, the NGOcracy and the Twitterati are cock-a-hoop tonight, but they’ve gone too far this time. There will be repercussions. It’s giving Johnson exactly the cause he needs to recover the Tory Party. Boris Johnson has hinted that the UK could withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.

But then anyone could have anticipated this sort of challenge. We saw it coming a mile off. It’s likely that the Tories have deliberately engineered this situation for political advantage. For starters, the reaction from Labour MPs is a stark reminder of their attitudes to immigration. The Tories can once again position themselves as the anti-establishment party keeping the far left Labour at bay.

Of course, you’d have to be born yesterday to believe that the Tories will quit the ECHR or the Refugee Convention. If they were sincere they’d have done it already. Now we’ll see a policy review tabling more timid tinkering for some time in the future, for after the next election so they have a platform to run on. Meanwhile, the government is tripling non-EU immigration under their points based immigration system. The Rwanda policy always was a decoy.

In any case it’s as well that the flight was grounded. The number of passengers before this intervention was already down to single digits – which is hardly good value for taxpayers. For context, 138 illegals were brought into our country yesterday. The Rwanda policy was never going to make a meaningful impact. The fine print of the Rwanda agreement suggests the UK may even be a net recipient of refugees from Rwanda.

Everything about this is a massive con. The NGOcracy is playing cynical games and the Tories are no better. The first order of business for this government should have been to junk the Refugee Convention and put the NGOcracy out of business – but the NGOcracy is too politically useful. The balance of sympathy is now back with the Tories against an unaccountable blob blocking the very immigration controls the Tories were elected to implement.

But then there’s a certain familiarity about all this. We’ve been here before with Brexit. Rather than accepting that Britain had voted to leave the EU and attempting to shape Brexit, the remainers played double or quits, snubbed the Norway compromise option and ended up with Brexit far harder than they wished for. A similar dynamic is playing out here.

The smarter ones among the human rights law fraternity will no doubt realise their victory this evening will come at a cost. They’ve now cemented the view that this isn’t really about the human rights of refugees. It is a legal jihad to bring about open borders. They’ve been seen and even if the Tories won’t act, forces on the right will no doubt begin to mobilise. There is already a demonstration set to take place in York in July to protest the asylum facility at Linton on Ouse. This latest outrage may well resurrect the EDL or groups like it. When politics is this dysfunctional, real politics will take to the streets.

What’s clear now is that the question of who governs us was not decided once and for all by Brexit. Unaccountable technocrats and lawyers are still dictating policy and British sovereignty, as most understand it, is still compromised. Vast sums of public money are being channelled into the coffers of millionaire QCs and the will of the people is still subordinate to a feral elite. This has become a festering sore and this latest episode will not go unanswered. The NGOcracy has started a war they won’t win – and they’re too stupid to realise it.