Priti Patel's decision to stand by a planned deportation is a welcome move after years of her predecessors prioritising criminals' human rights over those of their victims, says Allison Pearson

Seventeen rapists, killers and drug dealers were deported in the small hours of yesterday morning.

Not that Priti Patel was allowed to expel all of the 50 or so Jamaican-born criminals who were supposed to be on the Home Office flight. Lawyers representing some of the detainees applied for a judicial review and a judge ruled that the deportations should not go ahead if the offenders had been unable to make phone calls from detention centres because of “problems with an O2 phone mast”. A lawyerly loophole if ever I heard one.

More than 170 MPs urged the Government to stop the flight. Campaigners claimed that the deportation risked repeating the errors of the Windrush scandal when migrants from the Caribbean, who arrived in the UK before 1973, were wrongly deported. What a hateful comparison.

Most Britons were appalled to learn that West Indians who settled here, raised their families and made a terrific contribution, had been treated in such a cruel way. Just as most Britons will be appalled to learn that, once again, some judge has seen fit to put the rights of serious criminals who, between them, had been jailed for a total of 300 years, before the safety of the general public.