No more Mr Nice Guy. That was the message from Rishi Sunak as he struggled to reassert his authority over a fractious Tory party with a hardline immigration bill.
This was the political equivalent of mild-mannered Dr David Banner muttering “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry”, before turning into the Incredible Hulk.
It was the Parliamentary version of those 40s Charles Atlas adverts where a seven-stone weakling is sick of sand being kicked in his face on the beach and returns with bulked-up biceps to prove he’s “a real man after all”.
As Sunak declared “my patience has worn thin” from repeated legal challenges to his plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, he boasted he was introducing “the toughest anti-illegal immigration law ever”.
But the problem with talking tough is that it can often betray weakness. When Ed Miliband famously told a 2015 election debate, “Am I tough enough? Hell, yes, I’m tough enough”, the resulting ridicule confirmed that real strength doesn’t need to shout its presence.
Sunak is already repeating Iain Duncan Smith’s mantra that the Tories must “unite or die”. The difficulty is that he sounds like he’s also echoing Duncan Smith’s line that “the quiet man is turning up the volume”, when all the voters can hear is the noise of another Tory civil war.
And as Sunak was addressing an emergency press conference about “emergency” legislation, on the back of an emergency mini-reshuffle, the sense was of a man boxed in by his party rather than leading it.
Tory insiders say the PM was bounced into producing his new bill by Suella Braverman’s looming personal statement attacking his failures on migration.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick’s decision to quit, announced just as Home Secretary James Cleverly was on his feet unveiling the legislation on Wednesday night, could ensure that some of the party’s Right may conclude the bill is just not tough enough.
The bigger risk is that instead of the PM’s desired sense of urgency, the voters just get a sense of chaos and infighting.
George Osborne, an admirer of Sunak’s in many ways, suggests that the Tory bloodletting is with us again. “Rishi Sunak’s big claim was, ‘I’ve come after the chaos of Boris Johnson and the chaos of Liz Truss … I’ve stabilised things.’ He can’t now claim any more to have stabilised things. His government is fragmenting around this immigration issue.”
Osborne may not be quite right about that, at least in the short term. It appears that the Right of the party may well keep its powder dry this side of Christmas and come back again in the new year.
The centrist “One Nation” wing of the party has its own concerns but it looks like most of them have reluctantly accepted the new legislation. Given that Attorney General Victoria Prentis is one of their own, and has ensured Sunak has not reached for the nuclear option of withdrawing the European Court of Human Rights, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
What’s more surprising is the way Jenrick has moved from that One Nation camp. As I’ve written before, he and Sunak and Oliver Dowden all claimed in 2019’s leadership race that they were the moderates backing Boris Johnson rather than Jeremy Hunt.
The joke in Tory circles is that Jenrick has been “radicalised” by just how dysfunctional the Home Office is on migration policy. But what’s more significant is that the One Nation wing of the party didn’t have a strong enough “Prevent” programme to stop his drift rightwards – or Sunak’s.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is indeed the most hardline immigration legislation for many years. And the One Nation MPs, long Westminster’s herbivores compared to the carnivores of the European Research Group, are rolling over in keeping with their nature.
To be fair to Sunak, he at least framed his argument in terms of fairness, of a sense of migrant families like his own waiting their turn, paying their fair share. Splitting the immigration minister role into two new jobs, one for legal and one for illegal migration, may have merit too.
But the fundamental problem may be that both he and Jenrick, to different degrees, have been infected by the virus of populism, of lurching for simplistic answers to frustratingly complex problems. The real “tough stuff” of politics is not macho posturing, it’s finding policy solutions. It’s not the desperately hoped for flight from Heathrow that worries some moderate Tories, it’s their own party’s flight from reality.
The Tory tradition of pragmatism, of evolutionary change, of reforming to conserve, just hasn’t kept pace with populism. Yet in vowing to “stop the boats” (rather than promising to “reduce” crossings as he should have done), Sunak has set himself a virility test he can never pass. And his latest legislation may not pass that test either.
Still, while overpromising is bad politics, the root of the PM’s troubles is bad policy. Convincing himself that he will get a plane to Rwanda off the ground before the election may turn out to be a delusion if the whole policy is bogged down in the courts.
Yet the greater delusion is that such a spectacle would have any deterrent effect at all on the number of migrants who want to come to the UK. If the public see 100 migrants leave on a plane one day, yet see 300 migrants arrive in their local hotel the next weekend, they won’t be fooled.
Sunak is playing a dangerous game of raising voter expectation with little evidence he can satisfy it. In poker, there’s a truism that “strong means weak”, in that someone who bets too hard too often is revealed as a bluffer. In politics, that may end up being Sunak’s fate too.
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