Of all the essential tasks facing Rishi Sunak when he became Prime Minister, bringing down the level of legal immigration should have been by far the most straightforward.

This is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders

All he had to do was tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson.