by There is an ingenious remedy for Rishi Sunak’s deepening crisis. The Prime Minister could pass an Act of Parliament declaring that the Conservative Party is united under his leadership and popular with a grateful nation.
Since neither of those things are true, this Sunak security bill would have to include clauses restricting the publication of opinion polls to polls showing Tory enthusiasm.
Such a plan has two flaws: it would not work and it would look ridiculous. But that need not stop Sunak. The same shortcomings applied to the petty plan to declare Rwanda a “safe country” for the purposes of deporting asylum seekers, when the Supreme Court has ruled – as a fact, not an opinion – that it is not. .
The sinister absurdity of an attempt to legislate the existence of an alternative reality has been lost in the breathless theatricality of a parliamentary scene: the briefings and counter-reports; Whispering whips and emergency conclaves of parliamentarians in self-aggrandizing “star chambers.”
The passage of the Rwanda bill at second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday night spared Sunak a spectacular humiliation. (No government has lost a vote at that stage since 1986.) But the pain is only postponed. At the time of writing some 24 Conservative MPs were believed to have abstained. A full-fledged, devastating rebellion was postponed pending concessions on a scale that Downing Street is unlikely to grant. The prime minister keeps alive a fiction of leadership, pretending that he can appease his critics, who in turn pretend to be appeasement.
The whole spectacle has been grimly reminiscent of Theresa May’s failed efforts to get her Brexit deal through the House of Commons. Furthermore, the underlying questions about what sensible policy might look like were submerged in a froth of fantasy politics. The framework of the argument was distorted by hardline conservatives who applied impossible tests of ideological purity and demanded concessions that were incompatible with the duty to govern responsibly.
In these strange internal conservative civil wars, the very process of reporting on events becomes a kind of complicity with the stupefaction of public debate. To explain what is happening it is necessary to treat absurd proposals as if they were serious and spread the opinions of exaggerated opportunists as if they were eminent jurists.
A reliable indicator that the Conservatives have succumbed to the old disease has been the reappearance of Mark Francois on the news channels. The chair of the Conservatives’ European Research Group (ERG) has been delivering his callow verdict on the Rwanda bill, shining with sickly prominence like a gigantic bead of sweat on Westminster’s feverish brow .
The peak of the Brexit delirium was the conviction that the best alternative to May’s imperfect deal was to leave the EU without any deal. Now, in the same mind-bending spirit, the ERG wants Sunak to legislate to exclude Britain from international treaty obligations that could give asylum seekers any feasible reason to resist being flown to Rwanda.
Downing Street has already agreed to close almost all avenues of legal recourse. That is not enough for a faction that sees intolerable gaps formed from the most tenuous threads that could still connect the UK to the European human rights convention.
To understand this pathology, it is useful to distinguish between the political issue that has caused the current inflammation – how to stop the traffic of boats transporting immigrants illegally across the Channel – and the underlying neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty.
The two things are closely intertwined because the idea of boatloads of uninvited foreigners landing in Kent feels to many people like a systemic border violation. The power to take those people directly to another country, where they will be gladly received (for a hefty fee), seems like the kind of thing a sovereign nation should be able to do.
But if it were just a question of how to stop the boats, Rwanda’s plan could be incorporated into a rational cost-benefit equation. Works? It’s worth it? The answer would be no. It fails all practical tests, even before ethical and legal judgments intervene.
There are not enough places in Kigali for people already in Britain waiting for their asylum claims to be heard. There is no evidence that the threat of deportation will deter more people from crossing. The tens of millions of pounds that all this is costing would be better spent on measures closer to home and more likely to deliver results: cooperation with other European countries; resolve the backlog of existing cases; have a functional asylum process, which includes safe and legal routes so that refugees are not forced to jump into the water.
Sunak is familiar with that analysis. Rwanda was never his idea. When he is asked about it, he irritably draws attention to other aspects of immigration policy. Last month’s Supreme Court ruling was the moment for the prime minister to put an end to a moribund plan, salvage some credibility as a pragmatist and pivot towards an evidence-based approach. It would have been a disaster. There would have been fierce protest from Conservative MPs, perhaps ministerial resignations. But that was going to happen anyway and at least the fight would have started on the terms chosen in Downing Street.
Sunak’s easy mistake was to think there was a third way between adhering to the rule of law and reducing to zero the possibility that an asylum seeker could appeal against his forced removal to Rwanda.
The two positions are incompatible. Stifling every conceivable recourse to justice would extinguish a pilot light of democracy. And any compromise that maintained even a theoretical submission of the government to judicial authority would be rejected by hardline conservatives. It would offend their fundamentalist vision of national sovereignty: politicians acting according to what they consider the will of the people, not only free from meddling continental judges but elevated beyond the reproach of national courts, populated by leftist lawyers of questionable patriotism.
The militant Conservative trend is no more willing to dilute that ideological elixir in relation to asylum appeals than it was willing to blur the clear line of separation from the EU with a “soft” Brexit.
Sunak is a fool if he thinks he can change that attitude through persuasion or tactical concession any more than May could. The category error is believing that the leader and the party are on the same side and do not agree only on the means to achieve a common end.
There is no such alignment. Sunak is stretching the rule of law as far as he believes he can take it, while staying within the bounds of international respectability of a country that has independent courts and respects treaties. To achieve this, he needs the support of parliamentarians who see that border as the line where proper conservatism begins and despise the hesitation to cross it.
Related: It’s Rishi Sunak’s Twilight Zone: a recreation of the Brexit battle that never ends | Marina Hyde
The prime minister believes he is keeping his party on track by turning to the right. His deputies will continue to pull the wheel harder, towards the ditch from where they will blame the collapse on a weak leader who followed erroneous liberal instructions.
The course is set. Only the time and magnitude of the accident are unknown. Sunak chose this fate when trying to legislate the removal of inconvenient facts. That’s when he passed the point of no return on the path of ideological deception that is riddled with the abandoned hopes of past conservative leaders who once thought they could return to sanity.
