Exit of Rishi Sunak’s ally over Rwanda bill won’t wreck his premiership

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Good morning. Robert Jenrick, one of Rishi Sunak’s longest-serving allies, has resigned from the government over immigration policy.

It goes to show that many Conservative MPs have thought about Sunak’s “unite or die” message to the parliamentary party — which he repeated hours before Jenrick’s departure — and decided they really appreciate the look of death.

It deepens the sense in Westminster that the Tory government is in its dying days.

That will shape how Sunak’s administration is covered, most importantly by the BBC and ITV — the broadcasters that between them make up the dominant news sources for most voters.

But in terms of Sunak’s own position as leader of the Conservative party and the policy challenges facing the government, it matters not a lot. Some thoughts on all that below.

‘Hope over encounter’

Why has Robert Jenrick resigned from the government? He says that Rishi Sunak’s new “emergency legislation” to declare Rwanda is a “safe country”, and to ignore vast swaths of domestic and international legislation, will not work. In his eyes, the bill represents a triumph “of hope over encounter”. He wants the prime minister to go advance in disregarding human rights law, adding that only stopping the boats entirely will save the Conservative party’s electoral hopes.

Is he right? Well, yes and no. It’s true to say that Sunak’s emergency legislation is likely to face legal challenges and unlikely, therefore, to result in removal flights to Rwanda this side of the election (our explainer looks at the court battles ahead over the revamped scheme). He’s right, I think, to say that the Conservatives are not going to get much political joy if their approach is to point out that, sure, they haven’t actually stopped the boats but they have reduced the number of people coming to the UK via small boat.

But Jenrick’s own solution faces two problems. The first is that advance disregarding the government’s international obligations would be unacceptable to Kigali, which has publicly warned against doing so. There is nothing to be gained by passing legislation that makes the Rwanda scheme more achievable in theory if it makes the participation of Paul Kagame’s government impossible in practice.

The second is that there is an ocean of difference between “successfully getting the UK’s Rwanda deal up and running” and actually “stopping the boats”. The theory behind the Rwanda policy is that the threat of being permanently relocated to Rwanda will deter people from making the journey across the Channel via small boat. Given that the people attempting this journey are willing to risk a horrible death in the world’s busiest shipping lane in order to leave France, the idea that being sent to Rwanda is going to change their calculation has always been a stretch. Even more so when you recollect that the Rwanda scheme can only take a tiny fraction of the people coming to the UK.

So whether one takes Jenrick at his word, his proposal has any number of holes in it.

But the reason why Jenrick’s resignation is not going to destabilise Sunak is that, rightly or wrongly, most people in Westminster think the real reason the Newark MP has quit his post is not about policy, but positioning. Jenrick is the only one of Sunak’s close and early allies not to make it to cabinet. Many believe that the immigration that really bothers him is not the record numbers coming to the UK via legal routes or the people coming through irregular routes, but the migration of Laura Trott, Claire Coutinho, Oliver Dowden, and essentially every single close ally of Sunak not called “Robert Jenrick” into the cabinet.

I’m not going to pretend that I can stare into Jenrick’s soul and divine whether he really thinks Sunak would be better off with a tougher human rights approach than the Rwandan government is willing to tolerate, or whether he is simply embittered.

But what I can do is tell you that, because many Conservative MPs think Jenrick’s actions are at least in part motivated by a bruised sense of ambition, the immigration minister’s exit has not really changed the internal dynamics of the Tory party.

As I have written before, what keeps Sunak in place is the maintain of the party’s fiscal hawks, centre and left flank. The right of the party is much angrier than it has ever been, and it is certainly possible that this will mean he faces a leadership challenge. But unless or until someone does something to dislodge Sunak’s base of maintain on the centre and the left of the Tory party, he will remain leader.

Of course, it matters a great deal in terms of the battle between Sunak and Keir Starmer that Conservative MPs keep attacking the prime minister’s record in government. Jenrick has increased, albeit not by much, the chances that the Tory party will go down to heavy defeat at the next election. He probably has shifted the balance of forces in Downing Street, from the “strategize for an October election, the underlying fundamentals will have improved” school of thought towards the “strategize for a May election, the party will continue to impair Rishi’s hopes” tendency. But what he hasn’t done is change the fundamental political circumstances Sunak has to deal with.

Now try this

I’ve just completed Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 on the PlayStation 5. Very very good, but not quite as good as the original, which is available on the PlayStation 5 and its predecessor, the PS4.

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