Some political disasters take a very long time to live down, as the Tories will discover over the coming years. One thinks of Labour’s winter of discontent during which, as folklore records, rubbish piled high in the streets and bodies went unburied. Or Black Wednesday, subsequently renamed White Wednesday, when the pound sterling crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism, shattering the entire economic rationale of John Major’s Tory administration.

Long exiles to the naughty step followed each of those disastrous episodes for the party that oversaw them. This week we were presented with another: the true scale of immigration presided over by the Conservative party between 2019 and 2024.

The most shatteringly memorable statistic among many several on Thursday was that net immigration for the 12 months to June 2023 had been revised upwards by the Office for National Statistics from 740,000 to 906,000. A city the size of Birmingham added to the population by immigration, even net of emigration, in a single year. Even Keir Starmer, that great mass migration apologist, said he had done a double-take when that number came through.

There were other numbers almost as drastic. Net immigration in the year to December 2022 revised upwards from 764,000 to 872,000. And net immigration of 728,000 in the year to June 2024 – after Tory measures supposedly designed to bring numbers down to sustainable levels had been implemented. Not even a slow-boiled frog could fail to notice that this ‘new normal’ is anything but.

All this from a Conservative party that went into the last parliament knowing it had for three terms in a row broken a pledge to get annual net migration down into the tens of thousands. The 2019 manifesto merely said there would be a new emphasis on high-skill migration and promised that ‘overall numbers will come down’.

In fact, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak more than trebled them. And they did not, in the main, import high powered economic super-contributors, but low-skilled people from non-aligned cultures many of whom can be expected to be a net drain on the public finances.

As Tory MP Neil O’Brien noted:

Over the last six years only 500,000 out of net non-EU migration of 3,100,000 came from main work applicants… The rest are dependants, students, family, asylum and humanitarian.

This catastrophe clearly needs a name to cement it fittingly in public consciousness like the two mentioned at the outset. The Tory Flood seems a suitably straightforward description.

And its disastrous consequences and knock-on effects have spread into almost every aspect of our national life: acute housing shortages, overloaded public services, soaring welfare bills, pressure for blasphemy laws, ethnic minority sectarian violence on the streets of London, Leeds and Leicester, growing public disillusionment with two-tier policing, politicians regarding their jobs as being to mediate between competing ‘communities’ rather than advance an over-arching national interest.

O’Brien and Reform party MP Rupert Lowe meanwhile seem locked in a race to extract the most official data via written parliamentary questions about the impact of the Tory Flood. This week, Lowe discovered that a staggering 8 per cent of all NHS e-referral letters are translated into a foreign language, up from under 4 per cent in 2020-21. A couple of weeks back he ascertained that 50,000 foreign nationals a month are passing habitual residence tests to facilitate universal credit claims.

And remember, this Tory betrayal is on the issue that those who voted Leave in the EU referendum and Conservative in 2019 rated as their top political concern. That the last government also allowed the annual costs of the asylum system to increase five-fold to more than £5 billion and failed to end the small boats fiasco just adds insult to injury.

Perhaps the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch got an advance whisper that Thursday’s immigration stats would spell big trouble for her party. That would explain a hastily-convened press conference on Wednesday afternoon at which she admitted her party had ‘got it wrong’ on immigration.

If anyone can point to a more compelling nomination for understatement of the year, I will be impressed. Badenoch seemed to think it sufficient to set vague limits on future Tory migration policy – some kind of ‘hard cap’ on numbers and a review that will consider withdrawing from the European Convention in order to better tackle illegal immigration.

Her vanquished leadership opponent Robert Jenrick put matters in starker terms, declaring on Thursday evening: ‘Today is a day of shame for the Conservative party. Our handling of immigration let the country down badly. The public are right to be furious.’

After the winter of discontent, the rubbish got collected and the dead got buried. Thatcherite reforms slashed days lost to strikes. After Black Wednesday, interest rates and exchange rates returned to sensible levels and an economic recovery ensued.

It is far harder to conceive of British society recovering from the Tory Flood – we will live with the consequences for the rest of all our lives. Perhaps we should set the term of exile on the naughty step commensurately.