There is a scene in the film Reservoir Dogs where three gangsters are pointing guns at each other and one suggests they should put down their weapons and ‘settle this with a conversation’. Instead the trio create the ultimate bloodbath by all pulling their triggers. The absence of trust can do that to people. Just look at the goings on in the Conservative parliamentary party this week.
Not content with spraying reputational ketchup over Rishi Sunak by trashing his Rwanda Bill as a mendacious con job which he must know won’t work, the Tory right has gone on to shred its own credibility by, in the main, tamely assenting to the legislation’s Third Reading.
Most of the MPs who rubbished the Bill went along with it in the end
Just as in an earlier rebellion before Christmas, most of the MPs who rubbished the Bill went along with it in the end, but not before informing Tory-leaning voters that it amounted to so much wool being pulled over their eyes. So the Bill now goes off to the House of Lords on the back of a comfortable majority of 44, but with millions of voters having heard it being rhetorically ripped to pieces. Just 11 of the 60+ Tory MPs backing various failed amendments to the legislation went on to vote against the whole package, although that list included former cabinet ministers Simon Clarke, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick.
The rationale on the right for the late cave-in, according to what one ‘rebel’ told BBC Newsnight political editor Nicholas Watt, ran as follows: ‘It is the only horse in town. Don’t shoot the horse. If you do that you don’t have a horse.’ Yet after the wounds they have inflicted upon it, this Tory nag is surely now limping towards a glue factory.
It is, for a start, hard to imagine a more perfect springboard for the Reform party, which is now contesting both of the by-elections due to be held in Tory-held constituencies on 15 February. The party of Richard Tice and Nigel Farage does not even have to come up with its own quotes about the cynicism and failure of the Tories. It can just go through the Hansard pulling out choice phrases from the party’s own MPs.
On Monday, Sunak’s elections guru Isaac Levido reportedly told Tory MPs that ‘divided parties fail’. And yet the Conservatives are these days not merely divided but completely hamstrung due to a basic lack of ideological coherence that Sunak is apparently quite comfortable with. It was, after all, the Prime Minister who heralded a ‘broad church’ as the way forward when asked if Nigel Farage would be welcome in its ranks.
But you cannot expect a party to be successful if it is unable to take a reliable stance on the foundational issue of whether a nation state should have control – de facto and de jure – over which foreign nationals are permitted to enter and reside in its domain. At least a third of Tory MPs think a nation should not and should instead be constrained by obsolete international compacts entered into after the Second World War and weaponised since by the global citizenship brigade. Another third, made up largely by members of the ‘five families’ referred to by Mark Francois (another Spartan rebel last night), think that it should. The rest, like Sunak, bumble along in a no-man’s-land between these two trenchant positions hoping just to get through another day.
The Rwanda Bill is the product of such gimcrackery. It’s a little bit sovereigntist but a little bit compliant with international law as well, we are told. Perhaps the House of Lords will do the government a favour by blocking it for so long that it never gets tested and ministers can then seek to dodge public ire by claiming it would have worked a treat and blaming the unelected chamber for thwarting them.
I don’t think that will suffice either. As one right-winger told me after an outburst by a figure on the Tory left who seemingly did not wish to take any further action to stop the boats: ‘It is ridiculous that we are in the same party as these people.’
Most of the electorate surely by now agrees with that assessment: Don’t try and settle it with a conversation chaps, just all pull your triggers.
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