There is an ingenious remedy to the deepening crisis engulfing Rishi Sunak. The prime minister could pass an act of parliament declaring that the Conservative party is united under his leadership and popular with a grateful nation.
Since neither of those things are true, this Sunak safety bill would have to include clauses restricting the publication of opinion polls to surveys that show enthusiasm for the Tories.
Such a plan has two flaws: it wouldn’t work and it would look ridiculous. But that needn’t stop Sunak. The same deficiencies applied to the tinpot scheme for declaring Rwanda a “safe country” for the purposes of deporting asylum claimants, when the supreme court has ruled – as a matter of fact, not opinion – that it isn’t.
The sinister absurdity of an attempt to legislate an alternate reality into existence has been lost in the panting theatrics of a parliamentary set-piece: the briefings and counter-briefings; whispering whips and emergency conclaves of MPs in self-aggrandising “star chambers”.
Passage of the Rwanda bill on second reading in the Commons on Tuesday night spared Sunak a spectacular humiliation. (No government has lost a vote at that stage since 1986.) But the pain is only postponed. At the time of writing about 24 Tory MPs were believed to have abstained. A full-blown wrecking rebellion was deferred in expectation of concessions on a scale Downing Street is unlikely to grant. A fiction of leadership is kept alive by the prime minister pretending he can placate his critics, who in turn are pretending to be placable.
The whole spectacle has been grimly reminiscent of Theresa May’s doomed efforts to steer her Brexit deal through the Commons. Then, too, underlying questions of what a sensible policy might look like were submerged in a froth of fantasy politics. The framing of the argument was warped by Tory hardliners applying impossible tests of ideological purity and demanding concessions that were incompatible with a duty to govern responsibly.
In these weird internal Tory civil wars, the very process of reporting events becomes a kind of complicity with the stupefaction of public debate. To explain what is happening it is necessary to treat preposterous proposals as if they were serious, and to broadcast the opinions of bloviating chancers as if they were eminent jurists.
A reliable indicator that the Tories have succumbed to the old malady has been the reappearance on news channels of Mark Francois. The chairman of the Tory backbench European Research Group (ERG) has been pronouncing his inexpert verdict on the Rwanda bill, glistening with unhealthy prominence like a giant bead of sweat on Westminster’s fevered brow.
The peak of Brexit delirium was the conviction that the best alternative to May’s imperfect deal was leaving the EU with no deal at all. Now, in the same hallucinatory spirit, the ERG wants Sunak to legislate Britain out of the international treaty obligations that might give asylum claimants any feasible grounds to resist being flown to Rwanda.
Downing Street has already acquiesced to the closure of almost every avenue of legal recourse. That is not enough for a faction that sees intolerable loopholes formed from the wispiest threads that might yet connect the UK to the European convention on human rights.
To understand this pathology, it helps to distinguish between the policy question that has caused the current inflammation – how to halt the traffic in boats carrying migrants illegally across the Channel – and the underlying neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty.
The two things are intimately tangled because the idea of dinghies loaded with uninvited foreigners coming ashore in Kent feels to many people like a systemic border violation. The power to whisk those people straight to another country, where they will be gladly received (in exchange for a hefty fee), feels like the sort of thing a sovereign nation ought to be able to do.
But if it were only a question of how to stop the boats, the Rwanda scheme could be fed into a rational cost-benefit equation. Does it work? Is it worth it? The answer would be no. It fails on every practical test even before ethical and legal judgments are involved.
There aren’t enough places in Kigali for people already in Britain waiting for their asylum claims to be heard. There is no evidence that the threat of deportation deters more people from making the crossing. The tens of millions of pounds it is all costing would be better spent on measures closer to home and with a better chance of getting results: cooperation with other European countries; working through the existing case backlog; having a functional asylum process, including safe and legal routes so refugees are not obliged to take to the water.
Sunak is familiar with that analysis. Rwanda was never his idea. When questioned about it, he tetchily draws attention to other strands of migration policy. Last month’s supreme court ruling was the moment for the prime minister to kill off a moribund plan, salvage some credibility as a pragmatist and pivot to an evidence-led approach. It would have been messy. There would have been a ferocious outcry from Tory backbenchers, maybe ministerial resignations. But that was coming anyway and at least the fight would have been picked on terms chosen in Downing Street.
Sunak’s facile blunder was to think there was a third way between adherence to the rule of law and reducing to zero the chance that an asylum claimant might appeal against forcible removal to Rwanda.
The two positions are incompatible. Suffocating every conceivable recourse to justice would extinguish a pilot light of democracy. And any compromise that retained even a notional submission of government to judicial authority would be rejected by Tory hardliners. It would offend their fundamentalist vision of national sovereignty: politicians acting on what they consider to be the will of the people, not only free of meddlesome continental judges but elevated beyond the reproach of domestic courts, populated by lefty lawyers of questionable patriotism.
The militant Tory tendency is no more open to dilution of that ideological elixir in relation to asylum appeals than it was willing to blur the crisp line of separation from the EU with a “soft” Brexit.
Sunak is a fool if he thinks he can change that attitude by persuasion or tactical concession any more than May could. The category error is believing that leader and party are on the same side, disagreeing only about the means to a common end.
There is no such alignment. Sunak is stretching the rule of law as far as he thinks he can take it, while just about staying within the limits of international respectability for a country that has independent courts and honours treaties. To achieve this he needs backing from MPs who see that boundary as the line where proper Conservatism begins, and despise the hesitation to cross it.
The prime minister thinks he is keeping his party on the road by steering rightwards. His backbenchers will keep tugging harder at the wheel, towards the ditch from where they will blame the crash on a weak leader who followed faulty liberal directions.
The course is set. Only the timing and scale of the wreck is unknown. Sunak chose this fate by trying to legislate awkward facts out of existence. That was when he passed the point of no return on the road of ideological delusion that is strewn with the abandoned hopes of past Conservative leaders who once thought they could navigate back to sanity.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
