James Cleverly’s one-night trip to Rwanda cost more than £160,000 on flights alone.

The Home Secretary visited the country’s capital Kigali on December 4 in a desperate bid to save Rishi Sunak’s failing deportation plan. According to official transparency data published on Thursday night, private charter flights for the visit cost £165,561.53.

Mr Cleverly was joined by an entourage of 14 officials to sign a new treaty with Rwanda after the UK’s Supreme Court ruled the scheme to deport migrants there was unlawful.

The costs of accommodation, travel in Rwanda and other expenses mean the total amount spent on the trip is likely to be much higher. Mr Cleverly became the third Home Secretary to visit the east African country, after Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, despite no deportation flights having taken off.

The flights alone of his trip cost more than four times the total cost of Ms Braverman’s “vanity photo-op” visit in March 2023. The ex-Home Secretary’s trip cost just over £40,000, with flights at £35,041, hotels £4,301, transport £248 and “engagement” £2,056, the Mirror reported last year. Ms Braverman took 11 staff, including eight civil servants, two Home Office special advisers, and a No 10 special adviser.

The Mirror revealed last year Mr Cleverly spent almost a million pounds of taxpayers’ money on private jets for two overseas trips when he was Foreign Secretary. The senior Tory ran up a bill of £561,531 last April as he attended G7 meetings in Tokyo before touring Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand and Indonesia.

Mr Cleverly was accompanied on the week-long trip on the Government’s own Airbus A321 by 13 officials. With 53 hours of flying time, the government jet cost £10,595 per hour to use.

A month later he hired a VIP plane usually used by Korean pop stars at a cost of £422,747.50 to take him and eighteen officials on a week-long tour of the Caribbean and Latin America. His chosen aircraft, the £40million-worth Embraer Lineage 1000E, was described as “one of the best luxury private jets money can buy”.

Questions have been raised more recently about the total cost of the Rwanda asylum scheme, with the bill running up despite the plan remaining in tatters. So far the UK has paid £220million, plus a £20million advance payment – with a further £50million due in April. And a report by the National Audit Office at the start of the month showed taxpayers could end up shelling out nearly £2million for every person the Tories send to Rwanda.

Mr Sunak’s Rwanda bill was hit by a fresh delay on Wednesday after suffering a string of defeats in the House of Lords and will now not return to the Commons until after Easter.

Last night the Times reported that the Home Office has still not found an airline to use for Rwanda deportation flights. Ministers are looking into using RAF aircraft but the Ministry of Defence is understood to be resisting the suggestion as they are in high demand.