Controversially, however, the new legislation would require voters to show identification to cast their ballots at a polling station.

While the government claims that this will give voters "confidence that their vote is theirs, and theirs alone, by tackling electoral fraud," the reality is that such offenses are extremely rare in the UK.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg, reader in politics at the University of Liverpool, explains that what gets recorded as an allegation of electoral crime is wide-ranging and often based on archaic laws. "This can range from offering voters free food or refreshments, something which became an issue during the EU referendum when pro-remain campaigners offered croissants to voters, to the address of a printer being left off a leaflet."

In the vast majority of these cases, no action is taken.

At the more serious end of the scale -- such as impersonation at polling stations, destroying ballot papers and intimidation -- the number of allegations of such incidents reported to police that are then reviewed by the electoral commission is tiny.

Matt Hancock, Johnson's health secretary, was forced to admit on Sky News that there were only six instances of voter fraud at the country's last general election in 2019, a poll that over 47 million people were registered to vote in.

Why, then, is Johnson and his government doing this? A simple explanation could be that the UK government is putting on a performance for its core voter base: socially conservative voters in England.

Election crimes have taken place in several areas with high populations of black and minority ethnic voters.

More than two-thirds of Tower Hamlet's population are from ethnic minority groups. Of course, Rahman is the guilty party here and the population of Tower Hamlets were the people he defrauded, but that doesn't necessarily stop people from falsely conflating minority groups with electoral crime.

It doesn't take a huge leap to see that socially conservative English voters see a policy tackling election fraud and view it as a policy aimed at punishing ethnic minority groups.

However, even this provides evidence to suggest that the way the policy was announced was designed to cause controversy in a way that would play to Johnson's debate. While the Queen's Speech and accompanying documents were vague in what counts as identification, the Cabinet Office quietly issued a press release saying that a very broad range of documents, that in some cases are more likely to be held by these groups, would be acceptable.

Engineered storm or not, some members of Johnson's Conservative party are appalled by the proposal. "It's a form of passive discrimination and a bad solution in search of a problem that seems not to exist," says David Davis, a former Conservative cabinet minister. "It seems to me that stripping hundreds of thousands of people of their right to vote because they don't have ID with them on election day is far worse than a handful of people casting fraudulent votes."

Leaving aside the fact that the Queen has no input on the Queen's Speech and simply reads out the words placed in front of her by the government of the day, if the measures did suppress minority voters, it would benefit Johnson as these groups on the whole do not vote Conservative.

Since Biden's election of Joe Biden, the states of Georgia and Florida have signed into law rules that would suppress the votes of minority voters. As we learned through the numerous times Trump's claims of electoral fraud were rejected, it is also not a major problem in the US.

Voter suppression is a sinister reality of the divisive politics that many Western democracies are now living through. And the more that like-minded groups join up in their efforts to stop people they don't like from voting, the more valid their actions might seem to onlookers.

So, perhaps Johnson should have thought twice before sending one of the most popular figures on the planet to read out policy that was catnip to US politicians who are seeking new and creative ways to smooth their path to victory in the future.