As the storm clouds gathered over Westminster on Tuesday afternoon, one of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet ministers looked up at the heavy grey sky and sighed: “It’s pathetic fallacy.”
Yet despite the dark mood among the prime minister’s allies – and grim warnings to the contrary – the first stage of his flagship Rwanda bill passed easily through the House of Commons.
Sunak spent the day trying to convince would-be rebels to vote for the legislation, starting with a pre-dawn meeting at No 10 where he told the rightwing New Conservative group of MPs that he wouldn’t pull the bill but was willing to discuss “tightening” it.
The Tory MPs were not all convinced, with some of those present questioning whether the government could amend the legislation at later stages when Sunak had suggested he could not move “an inch” for fear of the Rwanda deal collapsing.
Downing Street said the government was in “listening” mode, prompting one senior backbench rebel to complain that the prime minister was, in fact, in “transmit but not receive” mode in the determination not to make any substantial changes.
The One Nation group of centrist Tory MPs had already said it would back the law on the condition that Sunak made no concessions. One former minister suggested there was “a lot of shouting” from the right but predicted the bill would go through.
The Tory whips weren’t taking any chances, with a three-line whip, pairing and slips cancelled, and foreign trips scrapped. Climate minister Graham Stuart was summoned back from Cop28 in Dubai before the fraught negotiations there had completed.
Some Tory MPs even claimed they had been threatened with losing the whip. One senior Conservative, a Sunak loyalist, denied the government was panicking but admitted: “I’ve been be very clear with my colleagues, it’s either this bill or Labour wins the election.”
Just 29 Tories needed to vote against, or 57 abstain, for the Rwanda bill to fall. If it had, it would have been the first second reading vote lost by a government since 1986 – and an extraordinary humiliation for Sunak.
The meetings with different factions of Tory MPs continued throughout the day, with the location moving to Sunak’s Commons office as the vote approached. Rebels said he was “pulling out all the stops”, even holding some one-to-ones with wavering MPs.
But as the debate continued in the chamber, the nerves in Downing Street abated. Some of the fiercest critics of the legislation, including former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, indicated they would abstain for now and then try to amend the bill at a later date.
Others in the “five families” of the Tory right remained more sceptical, describing as “deluded” those colleagues who believed No 10 would meet their demands to toughen the bill once it returned to the Commons in early January.
Keir Starmer, who has said a Labour government would repeal the legislation if the Rwanda law passes, warned against over-dramatising the vote given the scale of the Tory majority.
“It will go through tonight I don’t doubt, with a lot of shouting and screaming but in the end it’ll go through,” he told reporters. “This is a government with a majority so I don’t think we should allow them the indulgence of pretending it is going to be tight.”
Even though the legislation did make it past its first hurdle, Sunak remains in deep trouble. He has stoked a civil war within his party despite promising stability. He has raised public expectations he would tackle illegal migration yet has so far failed to deliver.
The Conservative party’s obsession threatens to tear it apart. Sunak’s focus on small boats – which made up less than 4% of all immigration to the UK last year – looks tragically misdirected.
He may have got through the vote, but this is just the beginning of this particular battle. The storm clouds are still gathering.
