The whole point about making five key pledges, as Rishi Sunak did at the start of the year, is to give the average voter a consistent message. The idea is that such pledges, which should have been judiciously drawn-up based upon extensive opinion research, are hammered home again and again until the typical person far away from the Westminster Village has digested them.
What is Sunak’s administration for? Surely everyone knows that: to halve inflation this year, grow the economy, make sure our national debt is falling, cut NHS waiting and stop the boats.
Braverman declined to confirm that the PM’s pledge means the boats will be stopped in their entirety
The last of those pledges induced a particularly vigorous round of derision from erstwhile Tory voters who have been let down as regards illegal immigration too many times already. They simply did not believe Sunak to be serious.
So for Home Secretary Suella Braverman to start throwing in caveats just a month or so down the line will be a cause of great exasperation in Downing Street. Braverman has just declined to confirm that the PM’s pledge means the boats will be stopped in their entirety. Instead she told ITV News she is aiming for a ‘dramatic reduction in the numbers arriving’.
She has also refused to set any deadline for our arrival at this happy juncture. ‘I’m not going to put a timescale on it but what I am going to say is it is going to take as long as it will take,’ she said. That’s like asking a builder how long a kitchen extension is going to take and being told in response: ‘How long is a piece of string?’
‘What do we want? To stop the boats a bit. When do we want it? At some indefinable point in the future,’ simply isn’t going to cut the mustard as a political sales pitch.
It is perhaps understandable that Braverman should wish to create for herself some wriggle room in pursuit of an objective that completely eluded her tough-talking predecessor Priti Patel. But her coining of a new formulation is bad politics on an issue where public confidence in her party is already at rock bottom.
The right answer would have been something along the lines of:
‘The Prime Minister has been very clear. Our objective is to stop the boats. Period. People will have an opportunity at the next election to make a judgment on how vigorously and well we have pursued that goal.’
Because if Sunak and Braverman do manage to reduce the boats by, say, 90 per cent over the next two years, so that 2024 sees around 4,500 arrivals compared to the 45,000 of last year, then the chances are that they will have massively exceeded expectations and be given credit for that.
But that will only work if, in the meantime, they are seen to have strained every sinew to have brought the people smuggling racket to an end entirely, rather than indulged in a pre-emptive bout of backsliding away from their original promise.
Think of Boris Johnson imposing a deadline upon himself in autumn 2019 to get Britain out of the EU. When he failed to achieve it because of the deliberate obstructionism of Remainers in Parliament and across the establishment, did the electorate turn against him? It did not. Because it could see, via the prorogation row, the withdrawal of the Tory whip from foot-draggers and numerous other episodes, that he had fought gamely to thwart the Brexit-blockers and was worthy of a bigger mandate to help him get the job done.
Sunak and Braverman do not have the political space to gulp and retreat from the absolutist nature of the PM’s pledge. They must summon up their courage and charge straight at the guns of their opponents in the Commons, the Lords, the public sector left and the legal establishment.
He appears to know this, but maybe she didn’t get the memo. On the other hand, her very punchy performance in the Commons when giving a statement on the review of the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme may indicate she is more interested in fulfilling her own memos than his.
At a time when there is a veritable stampede of senior Tories towards showbiz and TV presenting as alternative careers, Braverman at least shows no sign of losing her appetite for the job she has right now. But her ultimate ambition is more likely to be achieved if she concentrates on stopping boats rather than rocking them.
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