Normally when a select committee hearing or interview is described as ‘wide-ranging’, it’s because a lot was said, but none of it of much note. Today’s Liaison Committee session with Rishi Sunak was wide-ranging, but in an unusually newsy way. The Prime Minister was grilled by select committee chairs on immigration, Rwanda, Gaza, defence spending, China, online harms, pensions and local government. Almost all the topics yielded a line of note – though admittedly some of the lines were notable for what Sunak did not say.
On defence, for instance, an issue that is heating up again in the Tory party, the Prime Minister refused to go beyond the holding line that he and ministers (bar James Heappey, who used his last Defence Questions as a minister yesterday to make yet another call for more funds), have stuck to of spending rising to 2.5 per cent of GDP ‘when conditions allow’. He told Defence Committee chair Jeremy Quin that the government was investing in its defences, and pointed to the announcements made yesterday in Barrow about civil and military nuclear. But Quin responded:
I absolutely take the point that we are investing, but clearly a lot has happened since 2020, including Ukraine to which the chair referred, the Defence Secretary has referred to us entering into a pre-war world. Against that backdrop, when do we expect to be hitting our 2.5 per cent ambition?
Sunak replied: ‘We’ve said we will do that when the conditions allow.’ After a few more exchanges, Quin remarked politely: ‘I would have liked to have heard a date on 2.5: we will persist on that.’ Bernard Jenkin did so shortly after, asking Sunak whether he would put 2.5 per cent in the manifesto along with the triple lock, but the Prime Minister demurred, saying ‘I think we’ll try not to write too much of the manifesto in the here and now’.
The reason Jenkin framed the question that way was that Sunak had already committed to the pensions triple lock being in the manifesto and in place for the whole of the next parliament. He had also insisted that the triple lock was affordable.
Those were questions from Tory MPs, who were all polite – there is an election coming up, after all, even if many of those on the Committee are standing down. Similarly, the Prime Minister had rather testier exchanges with opposition MPs. On Rwanda, he was politely irritated by Diana Johnson pointing out uncomfortable problems with the Rwanda policy such as the difficulty in finding an airline to fly people.
The chair of the Home Affairs Committee asked whether the government was instead going to use the RAF. Sunak refused to answer that, pleading commercial confidentiality, but he did insist that ‘all preparatory work to operationalise the Bill has been in place for a while’. He also answered in general terms about the overall efficacy of the deportation policy, dodging the question of what was going to happen to the 33,000 people who had arrived in the UK irregularly since the Illegal Migration Act came into force last July. He did, though, reject the suggestion that Downing Street had blocked the reappointment of David Neal as the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, saying this had been explained by the Home Secretary already. Two more of Neal’s reports were published while the session was running, and they’re not comfortable reading for the government.
But Sunak was then properly annoyed by Joanna Cherry asking him repeatedly whether he was ‘proud’ of his Rwanda policy being used by other leaders to justify their own treatment of asylum seekers, and of whipping his own MPs against an amendment exempting people who had helped the British forces in Afghanistan from being deported to Rwanda. Sunak rejected that last in the strongest terms, telling the SNP MP that he felt the characterisation was the sort of thing that fed into threats against MPs.
One of the striking things about the session, whether Sunak was responding to questions on the backlogs in the courts or funding for local government, was that he repeatedly referred to his experience in previous government roles as chancellor and local government minister. In fact, he praised his own record as a minister far more than he did his party’s record in government. This was not the most uncomfortable session he has had before the committee: perhaps the delaying of the election until the autumn has granted him a bit of a reprieve from that.
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