Good morning. Their noble lordships have inflicted seven defeats on the government over the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Will it press on with the policy? If so, why?
Then, Will Lloyd has written the best article on Keir Starmer’s chief of staff – and the former partygate investigator – Sue Gray. He has spoken to the civil servants who worked with her in London and Northern Ireland to piece together a picture of a radical, perhaps vengeful powerhouse.
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“Even if flights take off, we’ll still fight the election on the economy.” That was how one government source described the Conservatives’ strategy to me last month. Nonetheless, they said, the government would press on with the Rwanda plan because it was the only way to stop people crossing the Channel.
Last night’s series of defeats in the Lords means the government will not bring the bill back to the Commons until after parliament’s Easter recess, pushing the earliest take-off date to June.
This matters because there is a large rump in the Conservative Party that thinks the route to re-election (or simply non-annihilation) lies in intensifying the rhetoric on immigration and forcing Labour to confront an issue it does not want to talk about. Such a strategy would be confirmed by a commitment to leave the European Court of Human Rights, which many Tories see as the reason deportations cannot take place, and any other international agreement claimed to be stalling the scheme.
The pressure on Rishi Sunak to take this route is balanced by an equally forceful Tory faction that baulks at the prospect of ripping up the UK’s international agreements. Sunak, as ever, is being swallowed by a party that is fundamentally split on the core questions of the time.
That’s partly why Labour can duck and weave around the issue. No 10 cannot set up the narrative that would make Keir Starmer’s life difficult. The problem for Downing Street is that the absence of real, tangible achievements in how the government deals with the asylum system means the choice is not between tough, hard-line and effective migration policy on one side and high immigration on the other. Instead, the choice is between incompetent management and broken promises on one side and ambiguous but tough-sounding rhetoric on the other.
Ultimately, as the above source noted, voters are more concerned about the economy. It is what will drive – and is driving – the forthcoming election. That is not to say people don’t care about immigration. They do. And it would be bold to suggest that letting 1.2 million migrants into the country over the last two years – the net migration figures from summer 2021-23 – will not elicit some reaction in the future. But that is separate to whether the government can politically capitalise on an expensive and ineffective deportation scheme. For now, whatever happens in parliament, Rwanda is not going to save Sunak.
Freddie’s picks
“It looks like a set-up straight from the populist model: socially deaf elites on one side and a truculent populace on the other.” Yesterday, the Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced he would step down. Finn explains the reasons behind his decision and what it says about modern Ireland.
Anoosh takes us inside the asylum system and finds thousands waiting for verdicts on their future.
“The biggest strategic error Sunak made was his refusal to fully distance himself from Boris Johnson’s moral failings and Liz Truss’s economic ones.” I agree with this argument from David Gauke. He’s written an interesting column on Sunak’s fate.
Marina Wheeler on political chaos, decline and ethics in public life. Oh, and Boris Johnson.
And, not or – that’s our approach. While today we’re mostly in oil and gas, we increased the proportion of our global annual investment that went into our lower carbon & other transition businesses from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023. bp.com/AndNotOr
The revenge of Sue Gray
It was the latest unorthodox move in a career defined by originality. A small, unobtrusive, somewhat disappointed-looking woman stood in the Northern Irish sunshine with the wind blowing through her auburn hair. This was Sue Gray on 20 May 2021. With her was Gareth Gordon, BBC News’s Northern Ireland political correspondent. Gray was doing something unheard of for a senior civil servant – or for that matter, any grade of civil servant – before or since.
She was giving a pointedly political interview, bristling with on-the-record innuendos and stinging criticisms, to a major public broadcaster. Much of what you need to know about Gray, who has since become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (another move that left some of her old colleagues in the Cabinet Office astonished) is contained in her decision to talk to the BBC that day. After decades of slogging, silent obedience to the civil service, Gray, who has grown more, not less, radical with age, had decided to disrupt the system. A white blood cell was turning into a virus.
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