Rishi Sunak has said “there’s nothing tetchy” about him and dismissed dissent among his MPs to the Rwanda bill as “debating society” behaviour.
In an interview with the Spectator, the prime minister also said that his Christmas reading would be Jilly Cooper’s latest novel Tackle!, whose tagline is “if you want to score, you’ve got to be a player”.
Sunak has been accused of being “tetchy”, particularly when he comes under pressure by the media but when asked about this by the Spectator’s Katy Balls, he said: “‘I don’t understand that,” later adding: “I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate.”
The interview comes as Sunak’s party is riven by in-fighting while he attempts to push through legislation to send people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda.
Centrist Tories are considering tabling amendments to the Rwanda bill to protect the controversial legislation against breaches of international law. Meanwhile, right-wing Conservatives have threatened to vote it down unless more draconian measures, such as denying asylum seekers individual appeals, are added.
Sunak would not commit to a timeline for when flights to Kigali would take off if he steered the legislation through the Commons and Lords, saying only that he was “keen to crack on with it”.
In a nod to his party’s civil war over the policy, he said: “What the country wants is a practical government that is making a difference to their lives and changing things for the better, not a debating society.
“People are frustrated that the pace of change is not fast enough. I get that. I am working night and day, tirelessly, to keep making a difference.”
The prime minister also said Rwanda would not accept deportees who had no legal recourse to Strasbourg.
Sunak said he did not regret using the slogan “stop the boats” to campaign for re-election. Small boat crossings have continued and it has been criticised for dehumanising refugees.
The prime minister said: “No, I think it’s a straightforward phrase. Everyone knows what I wanted to do. I do ultimately want to stop the boats, because there isn’t an acceptable amount of illegal migration.”
He added: “If someone had said to me, ‘You are going to have reduced the number of small boat arrivals into this country by a third’, after they had quadrupled in the last few years ... I think someone would have said: ‘What are you smoking?’”
Painting himself as an heir to Thatcher on tax, he said: “I have always said I’m a Thatcherite in the truest sense. As Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher said: cut inflation, cut taxes. That’s what we’ve done! We have delivered more tax cuts in one fiscal event than at any point since the 1980s.”
Sunak said he was making progress in the job and insisted he was enjoying it, despite a vast opinion poll deficit and managing a warring party. “Of course, it’s hard. I knew it was going to be,” he said. “I feel that I’m making progress so I can sit here and say: do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress. And that is fulfilling.’”
