Rishi Sunak has been blessed with interventions from two out of the three former prime ministers who are serving in the Commons today. Only one will be welcome: Boris Johnson made an unusually helpful contribution from the backbenches this afternoon at Home Office Questions when he asked about the Rwanda deportation policy. He said:
Isn’t it obvious from today’s exchanges that many of those who oppose the UK-Rwanda migration and economic development partnership have no idea about Rwanda, have probably never been there, and are wholly wrong to condescend and to disparage Rwanda in the way that they do. And above all they have not the ghost of an idea about how to solve the problem of cross-Channel gangs putting people at risk. And the difference between our side and them is we have a plan and they don’t.
The session was a pretty punchy one today: Home Office Questions is one of the few departmental sessions at the moment with any political energy. Suella Braverman regularly accused her critics on the opposition benches of being ‘on another planet’. But she and Sunak will be having plenty of meetings with their own MPs after the Prime Minister suggested he could take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights over illegal immigration. Ministers said again today that their new immigration legislation would be coming forward in the next few weeks. Sources briefed over the weekend that if the European Court of Human Rights rules the new policies are unlawful, they are prepared to withdraw from the convention because then it will be clear ‘the problem is not our legislation or our courts’. But not all Tory MPs are on board with this: Robert Buckland is one of the most vocal opponents of it, but others including Jackie Doyle-Price, Bob Neill and Alicia Kearns have been expressing concerns too.
The question is whether there are enough Tory rebels to make this an issue Sunak has to worry about. He will hope it is the latter, because immigration is one of the few areas the Prime Minister feels he can speak about with confidence: he has been using immigration and in particular the issue of small boats as a unity device for his fractured party. The row the ECHR briefing has sparked is a reminder, though, that there are limits.
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