It was framed as a perfect storm because nativists dearly wanted it to be. Looking on, progressives failed to meet the moment too
The live streams are still running, training their cameras on the beach at Ceuta, where nothing is happening. The self-styled citizen journalists are still pounding the streets, capturing their shaky smartphone footage. Zia Yusuf of Reform UK was out there at the weekend, wearing a crisp white shirt and smart tailored trousers, lest anyone confuse him with the other brown people there. The bad brown people.
Why was the migrant incursion at Ceuta, on the Spanish-Moroccan border, such a big story across the world? How did it manage to pique the interest of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to feature on NBC’s Nightly News, not – shall we say – a programme massively predisposed to spotlighting news stories from continental Africa? What about it so exercised Europe’s heads of government? What made it an irresistible front-page story in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph?
