It was another clear win for Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions today. The Labour leader decided to take a mocking tilt at the latest iteration of the Rwanda policy.
He asked Rishi Sunak how successful it had been: ‘If the purpose of the Rwanda gimmick was to solve a political headache of the Tories’ own making, to get people out of the country who they simply couldn’t deal with, then it’s been a resounding success. After all, they’ve managed to send three Home Secretaries so the whole country can be grateful. Apart from members of his own cabinet, how many people has the Prime Minister sent to Rwanda?’
The mockery from Starmer sticks because so few of Sunak’s backbenchers are prepared to cheer him along on this
Sunak’s response was that this was the right policy and the Labour leader was ‘on the side of the people smugglers’. Starmer then became rather lawyerly and started reading from sections of the treaty that James Cleverly signed yesterday in Kigali.
He said that the treaty included ‘arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom’, and asked how many refugees would be coming to the UK under the agreement. Sunak returned to the point that he and Cleverly have been making over the past 24 hours, which is that the treaty ‘addresses all the concerns of the Supreme Court’. He then added another one of his regular claims that Labour’s immigration policy ‘would see us accept 100,000 illegal migrants’.
Starmer went back to the treaty, while Sunak moved onto the government’s attempts to cut legal migration and whether Labour supported the measures announced this week. In later answers, Sunak accused Labour of not being ‘interested in stopping the boats’, while Starmer depicted the Rwandan government as enjoying the benefits of the deal without actually taking in any asylum seekers.
The Prime Minister then quoted David Lammy, saying ‘this is the week that the shadow foreign secretary I think didn’t rule out rejoining the European Union!’ Starmer had a good retort: ‘Forget the private jets. He’s on some sort of private planet of his own.’
The problem for Sunak is that the mockery from Starmer sticks because so few of his backbenchers are prepared to cheer him along on this: either because they think the Rwanda policy is inherently wrong, or because they suspect the Prime Minister isn’t going to be tough enough in the emergency legislation that is due ‘soon’.
The real drama of the afternoon will be Suella Braverman’s Commons statement. This will underline quite how bad tensions are in the Conservative party. And it is those tensions that make Starmer’s mocking of the Prime Minister sound so potent.
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