Former Conservative ministers could probably be forgiven for having a sly chuckle this week at the political car crash that is the official start of Labour's partial returns deal with France.
After all, the Tories were constantly frustrated, not just for weeks or months, but for years in their efforts to get the Rwanda deterrent scheme off the ground.
Court challenge after court challenge meant the last government never quite got to the point of sending flights off to East Africa before they were kicked out of office.
The UK's new deal with France was never expected to see anything other than a very modest number crossing this week, with no more than about 40 migrants earmarked for a trip back across the Channel.
But the inevitable legal challenges by the lawyers, NGOs and charities meant that the modest first week of returns was reduced even further, to not even a trickle.
In fact, by Friday lunchtime, just two small boat migrants, an Indian national and another man from Eritrea, had been flown back on Air France flights to Paris.
Adding insult to injury, Mother Nature intervened to bring better weather conditions to the Channel and with it, many hundreds of small boat migrants.
Sir Keir Starmer's Government has been fortunate that unseasonably poor weather for August has stopped crossings for the past nine days.
Mark White's Migration Monitor: Labour's returns deal defanged by legal challenges and Mother Nature | Getty Images
But all that ended overnight into Friday when the winds dropped off and the waves in the Channel began to calm down.
By the early hours today, the inevitable response came from the criminal gangs.
Emerging from the river tributaries around Dunkirk, multiple small boats headed out into the open sea.
These so-called taxi boats hovered just offshore, as hundreds of migrants waded waist-deep into the water to clamber on board.
And that's the kicker for the Labour government. Even when the Home Office eventually overcomes the multiple legal challenges, the number of returns is not expected to be any more than about 50 a week.
Today has brought it home in stark terms how those 50 returns can be outnumbered many times on a single day, weather permitting.
Ministers have said their eventual aim is to ramp up the numbers they can send back to France.
In reality, the number of returns would have to be close to 100 per cent of arrivals to become an effective deterrent that could end up breaking the people smugglers' business model.
No one I know with insight into this long-running crisis believes there's any appetite among the French for accepting much more than the very modest numbers currently envisioned.