Last month, Labour politician Vaughan Gething became the First Minister of Wales. This achievement has been rightly celebrated by many, for the reason that he now has the distinction of having made history as the first black leader of any national government in Europe.

Today, the three nations that make up mainland Britain are led by British people of colour, as is the country's capital: Mr. Gething in Wales, Humza Yousaf as First Minister in Scotland, Sadiq Khan as the Mayor of London, and Rishi Sunak governing the UK from Westminster. 

We have, as we should, a Cabinet and Parliament that are increasingly diverse, in terms of race and gender. Even the leader of Northern Ireland is no longer a white man – in fact, both its First Minister and Deputy First Minister are women.

So, is the United Kingdom now the world's most successful example of a multi-ethnic democracy, as Mr. Sunak has more than once claimed it to be? Or do xenophobic serpents still lurk beneath the surface of the apparently progressive paradise of British politics?

Yes – spoiler alert – it seems we don't have to look very far for those racist snakes slithering through the political undergrowth. Indeed, we don't even have to look much beyond the Prime Minister's own party.

Last month, for example, an independent legal report commissioned by the Conservatives found that one of their own former councillors – a British Muslim of Pakistani heritage – had been discriminated against by his local party on the grounds of his faith and ethnic background.

Meanwhile, also last month, a major donor to the Tories was accused of having articulated racist and misogynist slurs against a senior member of the Labour Party – Diane Abbott, the first black woman to have been elected to the UK parliament, a veteran campaigner who has served as an MP since 1987. Her white male detractor – who has donated at least £10 million to the Conservative Party – is alleged to have said that she made him want to hate all black women and that she should be shot. He is known to be a particular supporter of Rishi Sunak.

This may have been why it took Mr. Sunak rather longer than many might consider proper or decorous to denounce these comments as racist. Indeed, it was only when members of his own Cabinet did so that he felt obliged to add his own voice to the bipartisan chorus of condemnation.

Even then – and even when the police launched an investigation into the alleged comments – the Conservative Party still refused to distance itself from the embarrassment of its relationship with this troublesome benefactor by actually giving him his money back. Or by donating it to an appropriate charitable cause. Or by setting fire to it outside his front door alongside a crudely worded placard expressing its deep shame at their association and its sincerest lack of thanks.

At the same time, a former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party called Lee Anderson – a plain-spoken curmudgeon who’d recently lost the Tory whip as a result of his assertion that London Mayor Sadiq Khan was being controlled by Islamic extremists – announced his defection from the Tories and his decision to join Reform UK, a right-wing populist group formerly known as the Brexit Party. The Brexit Party had itself established with the support of the country's most famous Brexiteer, the chain-smoking, beer-swilling, Trump-loving Nigel Farage, after he'd tired of the UK Independence Party's limited capacity to serve as a vehicle for his overweening ego. Mr. Anderson is Reform's first MP.

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There's a very real fear among Conservatives that Reform UK will split the support of those people on the far right of the electorate who tend to vote for those who snarl and hate the most. There's a desire among some Tories to be snarling and hating rather more than they currently do in a bid to win back those votes for themselves, and a feeling among their more moderate colleagues that they're already doing so.

These unedifying dramas have played out against the backdrop of the tragic farce that the UK government's immigration policy has become. This tawdry spectacle has centred around the highly emotive issue of how to deal with that small minority of migrants who are so desperate to come to the UK that they attempt the perilous route of crossing the English Channel in small and overloaded boats. 

It's these people – many of whom are legitimate asylum-seekers – whom Mr. Sunak wishes to target, and specifically to deter from seeking the sanctuary of our shores by housing them in highly expensive and unwelcoming detention camps, or shipping them off to the central African nation of Rwanda.

When the country's Supreme Court judged that this plan would breach the UK's responsibilities under international law, as Rwanda was not deemed an appropriately safe destination to which to exile refugees, the government introduced legislation which declared that Rwanda was perfectly safe after all, and that therefore these people could be dispatched there forthwith. 

This has, after all, been one of Rishi Sunak's flagship policies, and it appears that if, in order to implement it, the Prime Minister had needed to pass a law which claimed that the streets of Kigali were paved with tempting yet wholesome marshmallow treats, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to do so.

Mr. Sunak is generally considered to be one of the less hate-fuelled figures on the government benches, one of the Tories’ diminishing number of relatively nice guys, a group who’d like it to shrug off the Conservatives’ reputation for being the nasty party. 

Yet his current insistence upon the most draconian responses to gradually rising immigration numbers may force some to wonder whether these policies expose the obscene extremes to which even Tory centrists will now go in order to cling onto power, and how these desperate measures might dent the future prospects of our admirably multi-ethnic democracy.

It was Theresa May who in 2002, fourteen years before she became Prime Minister, had told a Conservative annual conference that, if they were to avoid being condemned as the nasty party, the Tories would need to give up their “hypocritical finger-wagging” and “reach out to all areas of society”. 

A decade later, as Home Secretary, she famously announced her intention to make Britain “a really hostile environment for illegal immigration”. Over the course of the next few years, she was responsible for rolling out a set of policies which were eventually denounced by the United Nations Human Rights Council for promoting an atmosphere of xenophobia and “entrenching racism” across the country. 

The UK is still living with the immediate legacy of that mentality. Indeed, the self-serving cynicism of the administrations which succeeded Mrs. May’s has only served to make things even worse.

This is the ultimate achievement of a political party which has shown over the last fourteen years that it will stoop to virtually any level of unpleasantness to retain its grip on power. It’s a cruel inheritance which our next government will struggle to overcome.