It seems like only a week ago that Lee Anderson and Rishi Sunak were all smiles, videoing themselves having a bromantic conversation about the news. “People axing the national anthem from graduation ceremonies,” Sunak exclaimed, in his tiny, indignant voice. “You have got to be kidding me,” Anderson boomed in.
For a real Conservative party broadcast, it looked a lot like a deepfake from the Labour party; but more incredible still is that it was under a week ago, and the two men were in perfect harmony, singing their love of being British with one voice. Now Anderson has resigned, Brendan Clarke-Smith and Jane Stevenson with him, citing irreconcilable differences around immigration and the Rwanda policy.
As the so-called safety of Rwanda bill goes into its third reading tonight, Sunak is expected to prevail, though the headcount of possible rebels is being constantly refreshed. It would take only 29 for the bill to fail, and there are already 15, 11 of them named in the Telegraph, though none of them apparently certain what they’ll do. The entire spectacle – wasteful, meaningless, vindictive legislation, held at knifepoint by the Conservatives’ emboldened right wing, for whom it isn’t vindictive enough, their appetite for unpleasantness being insatiable – is like watching Brexit all over again.
The logic of parliamentary process requires us to pick a side, and therefore deny the reality of our own experience: that both sides are trash. Whatever its final shape, the Rwanda plan will fall foul of the European court of human rights. None of it represents value for money or any serious answer to the asylum backlog. “Stop the boats” has that distinctive “take back control” finality, the full stop to any debate, the curtain call on any possibility of compromise.
The Rwanda question, which is to say, Sunak’s government – it’s not as though they talk about much else – is dreamlike and discombobulating. In the rich fictional world it has created, a rhetorical wheeze is paraded as a policy. Yet at the same time, it’s incredibly boring, like watching two underpowered lorries try to overtake each other down a cul-de-sac.
Arguably, the most important lesson of the past near-decade is not to underestimate the right of the Conservative party. I’ve made this mistake so many times, thinking that just because they’re in chaos, they make no sense and they’re obnoxious on the radio, the nation will recoil from them and they’ll make no impact. That’s not how it works: to change the centre of gravity and to make immigration and small boats the only thing we talk about, the only force the Tories need to exert is on each other.
So let’s say Sunak gets his bill through without amendments, ignoring the Anderson tendency: it’s doubtful the prime minister will feel especially victorious after this desperate, last-minute infighting, but at least his government won’t have collapsed. The challenge from inside the Conservative party temporarily thwarted, this will look like a great time for Nigel Farage to make his “they’re not serious about the small boats” comeback. Support for the Reform party was already at 10% by last August, without a figurehead and before the Rwanda debate had reached this pitch.
It is actively painful to imagine what this will look like on a current affairs panel: Farage or someone like him (let’s be honest, probably him – Nigel doesn’t share) accusing the government of losing control of our borders; illegal migration minister Michael Tomlinson, or someone like him, saying, “I’ll tell you who you really can’t trust with the borders: the Labour party!”; and a Labour MP, who probably once upon a time felt pretty solid on issues related to fundamental human rights and international responsibilities querulously deciding in the moment just how racist they have to sound to remain in the conversation at all.
Today’s Tory rebels may, if they’ve lost by tonight, have made themselves irrelevant in their own party, having proven their ineffectiveness and refreshed the Reform fringe. But that won’t have deflated their agenda, merely ventriloquised it into different, noisier mouthpieces. Whether or not that will feel like a win for Anderson is a moot point; it will represent a loss for his opponents.
On the counterfactual: say Sunak’s bill fails. Sense and decency would require him to accept that he may be in post but not in power, and call a snap election. In another powerful echo of Brexit, what sense and decency require are the last things you can rely upon, and the dramatic make-or-break moment will be somehow patched up just to resurface later.
It was fashionable for a while, five years ago, to say the only way to stop talking about Brexit was to stop Brexit. That turned out not to be true: in the end, we managed to stop talking about it thanks to a heady cocktail of despair, resignation and the arrival of fresh events that were worse. But the real question is, how do we stop living Brexit?
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
