Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Future students of British politics may yet write theses on Rishi Sunak’s upcoming week. It starts today with bizarre torture over his 2020 Covid performance, dives on Tuesday into a shambolic vote on his Rwanda bill and may well end with a crazed plot to topple him. All three events reflect the collapse of the central institution on which the British constitution rests: the cohesion of a stable parliamentary majority.
At this moment in time, for Sunak to spend an entire day being questioned on what is being staged as the crime of “eat out to help out” is humiliating and absurd. The Covid inquiry is a farce. It is a bunch of clever lawyers seeking newspaper headlines after spending half a million pounds on media consultants. The real question – whether lockdown was worth it – never gets a look-in. The inquiry should be stood down and handed over to proper historians.
This week’s Rwanda bill is equally indefensible, but that is Sunak’s doing. He is ostensibly a thoughtful and liberal man, if poorly advised. Why he should have saddled himself with a policy he must know is rubbish is a mystery. A government’s capacity to order its own immigration policy needs protecting. But the Rwanda bill is both ineffective and wildly expensive, again just aimed at headlines.
Britain has a proportionately lower immigrant population than Germany, Spain and much of Europe. Immigration is not the biggest electoral issue, merely big on the Tory right. What is a scandal is Britain’s high number of illegal immigrants. But that is the fault of executive government, not of national or international law.
Britain clearly needs immigrants, who are a net benefit to the economy. . While Sunak should do what he can to process illegal immigrants before they arrive, his currently soaring net migration figure has saved the care sector, the NHS, agriculture and housebuilding from catastrophe. To stifle it is madness. Labour has no other answer. Nigel Farage has no other answer. Brexit has made dealings with France over small boats all the more difficult. And who was in favour of that?
As for Sunak’s future as prime minister, we have been suffering for the past five years from a Tory flirtation with Johnsonian populism. The Tories were once a party of clubbable middle-class professionals, bonded together by loyalty and competence rather than ideology. That party has disintegrated. Boris Johnson sacked its entire upper echelon of experience and talent in 2019. He left a rabble of self-seekers and WhatsApp outsiders, led now by Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick.
The latest lunacy trailed in the rightwing press is that British voters would somehow respond to a populist duumvirate of Johnson and I’m a Celebrity contestant Nigel Farage, neither currently active in politics. The scheme is for a group of latter-day Guy Fawkes to infiltrate them into parliament and “crash” Sunak. This consists entirely of anonymous quotes “reported” by Johnson’s current employer, the Daily Mail.
When he became leader in 2022, Sunak was on a hiding to nothing. After nearly 14 years of his party in government, the best he could have hoped for was a cautious economic recovery and a dignified progress to a period in opposition. Now he has chaos. If he loses the vote on the Rwanda bill this week or even next year, Sunak should put himself and the country out of misery and call an immediate election. At least we can then have something new.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
