Why won’t Rishi honour our £1,000 bet?

When I interviewed Rishi Sunak in February, I told him I thought his Rwanda plan for ‘stopping the boats’ was an expensive, unworkable dud and offered him a £1,000 bet to be paid to a refugee charity that he wouldn’t get any asylum-seeker planes taking off before the next general election. To my surprise, the Prime Minister clutched my outstretched hand and accepted the wager, sparking considerable revulsion. As the HBO comedian John Oliver put it: ‘Set aside the grossness on display here, imagine what a monster you have to be to put me in a position of genuinely wanting Piers Morgan to win something?’ Now Sunak has admitted no planes will leave for Rwanda before 4 July. Therefore, I told him on X that I’d like the £1,000 to go to the British Red Cross. But No. 10 responded that the PM won’t be paying up because a month ago, one failed asylum seeker, who didn’t arrive on a boat, volunteered to be put on a commercial flight to Rwanda with £3,000 of taxpayer money. This, as Sunak well knows, has nothing to do with his forced deportation plan. And the British public knows it, too: a YouGov poll revealed that 76 per cent of Tory and Labour voters and 80 per cent of Lib Dems say Sunak must settle up. His attempt to wriggle off the hook on such a disingenuous technicality leaves me in a quandary. The Red Cross expects £1,000. Is our wealthiest ever Prime Minister, worth an estimated £651 million, going to send it to them, or will I have to?