Rishi Sunak is on the brink, and at any moment now he may topple over. If that happens, there will be yet another snap Tory leadership election and yet another weak Tory prime minister to eke out the months until the next general election must be held.
How did it come to this?
The current bill on shipping asylum seekers across the high seas to Rwanda is more the occasion than the cause of Sunak’s woes. His acute weakness is a function of political incompetence, political ambition and recriminations on the bitter right wing of the Tory party—and being consistently 20 points behind Keir Starmer’s Labour party in opinion polls for many months. All mutually reinforcing.
After initially steadying the ship following the Liz Truss economic meltdown a year ago, Sunak has got a string of big calls wrong. It was a spectacular misjudgement to allow the NHS strikes to run on and on, when cutting waiting lists was one of his five priorities; and to cancel HS2 to Manchester—at the Tory party conference in Manchester.
But even by these standards, pledging to “stop the boats” entirely in a matter of months, and persisting with Boris Johnson’s madcap Rwanda asylum scheme, were monumental mistakes. They left him increasingly trapped as the courts and reality closed in. This was despite a substantial fall in the number of boats crossing the channel this summer, thanks in no small part to successful, patient work on failed asylum seeker returns agreements with Albania, among other countries.
It was entirely to be expected that hard-right Suella Braverman would up the stakes and demand even greater investment in the Rwanda scheme as her home secretaryship disintegrated at roughly the same rate as her political ambitions to replace Sunak increased. Less expected was the defection of Sunak’s “friend” Robert Jenrick, who resigned as immigration minister last week over Sunak’s failure to agree to a complete dispensing of international law and judicial oversight to reverse the latest ruling of the Supreme Court. But having been repeatedly passed over for promotion to the cabinet, Jenrick probably fancies his chances under a new leader, and he is clearly trying to bring that about.
The hard Brexit right of the Tory party has never forgiven Sunak for his role in Johnson’s downfall and his hostility to tax cuts at any price. The last ministerial reshuffle, sacking Braverman and bringing back David Cameron, deepened the wound. It is no surprise that it is weaponising the European Convention on Human Rights, and its court in Strasbourg, to try and bring Sunak down. How much this is about conviction, and how much about personal ambition, varies from person to person across the sectional groups of populist right-wing MPs. But the issues of immigration and international law are tailor-made for uniting high principle and low cunning among Tory Brexiters.
Then there are the polls and Sunak’s inability to eat into Labour’s 20-point lead month after month, initiative after initiative. Maybe someone—anyone else in the cabinet—could do better, the Brexiters hope. Particularly if they have populist right-wing credentials.
And there happens to be just such a candidate advertising herself—Kemi Badenoch, the culture warrior, who came fourth in last year’s leadership election. Badenoch shrewdly distanced herself from Liz Truss’s madcap economic plan and backed Sunak’s eventual succession, but without toning down her war on woke, so if Sunak should fall, she could hope to be tolerable to the warring factions.
It’s desperate stuff. But desperation is the rawest emotion in today’s Tory party, as standards of decent political behaviour are trashed in the post-2016 Brexit revolution which has devoured not just its children but now its grandchildren too.
Would Badenoch prove any more popular than Sunak in the dying months of this parliament? Any increase in popularity might save some Tories their seats, so hope springs eternal. And hope is about all the Tories have left if they decide to crown their sixth leader in seven years—and put the country through yet another Tory government relaunch after 13 pestilential years.
