Ding ding! Suella Braverman is back for another pop at the Prime Minister over his failure to get the Rwanda deportation plan up and running. The former Home Secretary delivers her damning verdict in today’s Telegraph, warning that he will fail to send any migrants to the African nation before the next election.
Sunak, she says, is guilty of ‘magical thinking’: ‘tinkering with a failed plan’ will not be enough to deter migrants from crossing the channel. ‘The plan outlined by the PM will not yield flights to Rwanda before an election if Plan B is simply a tweaked version of the failed Plan A,’ she wrote. Ouch.
Instead, she sets out five tests, with accompanying instructions for him to, er, helpfullyfollow, in order to ‘achieve what the PM says he wants’. They include ignoring all the UK’s human rights obligations in their ‘entirety’ and removing the right to legally challenge any detentions to ‘avoid burdening the courts’. Already this suggestion has her party’s moderates spitting feathers, with Damian Green warning that ‘giving the state the explicit power to override every legal constraint is what Putin and Xi do.’
Under Braverman’s plan, these suggested changes would be coupled with amendments to the Rwanda agreement to answer the criticisms by the Supreme Court, new rules to deport migrants more quickly, tougher powers to detain illegal migrants and a commitment to deliver the legal changes by the Christmas recess. Tough stuff but would No. 10 really go along with it?
With Tory tensions running high, Steerpike suspects that this won’t be the last we hear from the former Home Secretary…
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