Has Rishi Sunak come up with a cunning plan in the manner of a latter-day Blackadder? Or is he, like Baldrick, a bit of turnip with all the political skills of a pumpkin? Which is what recent evidence suggests because he upsets everyone.
Before we decide which vegetable our Prime Minister most resembles, let’s consider whether the whole Rwanda debacle is not quite the mess it seems but instead part of a clever wheeze to wrongfoot Labour and win an early election.
The Rwanda Bill passed its Commons second reading easily by 44 votes despite the grumblings and abstentions by the “five families” of Tory right-wing groups.
Although it could still run into trouble next month from both the right, led by the Mark Francois European Research Group, and the moderate One Nationers headed up by Damian Green, Sunak has an ace up his sleeve.
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If either side threatens to scupper the Bill in its later Commons stages, Sunak can turn it into a confidence vote. Any Tory MP who then defies the whips and fails to support the Government would be banned from standing as a Conservative at the subsequent General Election.
The tactic worked for Boris Johnson.
MPs can just about stomach losing their jobs at the whim of the electorate over which they have little control, but less so for willingly trooping through the wrong voting lobby in Parliament on a point of principle.
The House of Lords is quite another matter where the jobs are for life.
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Sunak was slammed over the emergency Rwanda Bill
PA
Peers will have no hesitation in ripping the Rwanda Bill apart knowing their own P45s are not in the post.
As things stand Sunak cannot use the Parliament Act to force the Bill through until at least a year of ping-ponging between both Houses because it was not a 2019 manifesto commitment. So, on the face of it, no chance of getting Rwanda flights off the ground before an election.
Now here’s the cunning bit. The PM goes to the country on a platform of Who Governs? Unelected peers or democratically elected MPs? Sounds like a vote winner. Rwanda would become a 2024 manifesto promise which the Lords could no longer block.
That would throw Labour into a quandary because Keir Starmer has already committed his party to scrapping Rwanda and using the money saved to set up a special police unit to combat cross-Channel people-smuggling gangs.
Conservative MPs are assessing whether Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill will stop the boats or not
PA
The Labour leader would be left dusting off his own proposal to scrap the Lords which he was hoping to kick into the long grass.
But that would mean implicitly supporting the Rwanda plan – leaving him with a dilemma in which he could be spiked by either horn.
All the indications are that Rishi Sunak is laying the groundwork in case he wants to opt for an election on May 2nd next year, the same day as local authority polls.
The National Insurance cut is being rushed through in January which means workers will have three months of benefitting from it before polling day. More tax-cutting sweeteners are expected in a March Budget.
And councils not due to hold elections next year are being quietly asked what the availability of their polling stations is. Only a PM thinking of using them would need an answer to that question.
A lot of this, of course, will depend on just how much weight voters put on immigration. Opinion polls still show it lags behind the cost of living or the NHS as their major concern.
Seeing inflatables chugging across from France is infuriating, but only Holiday Inn staff and those living on the Kent coast are likely to be directly affected by it. Anyone with a dodgy hip or a knackered knee will put a higher priority on hiring enough surgeons to carry out repairs.
But the Tories are in a panic because nothing they do seems to be shifting Labour’s double-digit lead. On current projections, they could be down from 365 seats in 2019 to just 120 and they are in dire need of a wedge issue. Rwanda could be it.
It might be instructive, though, for Sunak to watch reruns of Blackadder in which many of the hero’s ever more desperate cunning plans come a cropper.
And just like the long-running comedy series, whatever Sunak does, 13 years of Tory rule seems to be coming to an end in the trenches of public opinion.
