Rishi Sunak’s first public words after the Supreme Court struck down his plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda barely reflected the scale of political crisis he was facing. A new treaty would solve the problem, the British prime minister told a packed House of Commons on Wednesday, and if it didn’t, he suggested he would look at changing UK laws to ensure the plan goes ahead.
At a sudden press conference that afternoon, his tone changed dramatically. Sunak had taken his Conservative Party’s temperature during a tour of the Commons tearoom. In Westminster meeting rooms, right-wing MPs were talking about ousting him unless he ripped up the UK’s human rights laws so that no court — domestic or international — could stop deportation flights taking off.
In those few hours, Brexit-style Tory divisions returned at full throttle to British politics, and appear once again on the verge of tearing the party apart.
“I will not allow a foreign court to block these flights,” Sunak said at the televised briefing, a line meant to reassure restless Tory populists that he would be prepared to renege on Britain’s international commitments, including the European Convention on Human Rights, if events demanded.
But it was also a line that risks giving Sunak the same nightmare that haunted his predecessors. His strategy to legislate around the Supreme Court’s ruling is likely to be held up in the House of Lords, even if Sunak’s bill doesn’t go as far as overriding the UK’s membership of the ECHR, which many MPs suspect.
It all points to months of delay and dangerous frustration in his party. Dozens of Tory lawmakers will try to force Sunak to take a more hardline position if the legislation doesn’t satisfy them, people familiar with the matter said.
A supporter of Sunak described this as his worst week in office, compounded by the opposition Labour Party extending its lead with some pollsters to over 20 points. It sets up a clash on borders policy — and more broadly the UK’s place in the world — which some Tories view as existential. It’s also left voters with a question that could define the run up to the general election: just how far is Sunak willing to push the UK’s international relationships for domestic gain?
Sunak “desperately needed something that would make wavering Conservatives — those who voted Conservative in 2019 but have not switched to Labour — sit up and listen,” said Scarlett Maguire, director at pollster JL Partners. “Instead the chaos of the past week means they have likely tuned out further.”
Behind the scenes, 10 Downing Street has been wrestling with the same fundamental question since Sunak came to power just over a year ago. The prime minister’s top team has faced disagreement and confusion on policy and strategy, according to interviews with more than a dozen senior Conservatives familiar with the government’s internal deliberations.
From the outset, there were differing views among Sunak’s closest allies on how he should approach immigration, the people said. Some confidantes on the right always wanted a nuclear option if judges blocked the Rwanda plan: a willingness to change Britain’s interaction with the ECHR and other international conventions, or even campaign to leave them at the election if necessary.
Another group of more centrist advisers agreed a tough approach was needed but thought threatening to leave the ECHR was not viable. That convention and others are integral to some of Britain’s most sensitive commitments, not least the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland.
Sunak himself has never been keen on the idea of leaving the ECHR, according to people familiar with his thinking, and prizes what he sees as his achievement in improving Britain’s international reputation since Brexit.
Yet in order to become prime minister, Sunak knew he needed the support of the right. He lost out to Liz Truss in the summer 2022 leadership campaign in large part because Tory activists blamed him for his part in the downfall of Boris Johnson. So when an unlikely Johnson comeback threatened his second chance, Sunak agreed to appoint hardliner Suella Braverman as home secretary, paving his way to power.
In January, he made the vow to “stop the boats” carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel, one of five pledges he asked voters to judge him by. It gelled with a Sunak-Braverman alliance and pleased right-wing Tories.
But in recent weeks, they’ve concluded that Sunak’s willingness to embrace right-wing, culture war rhetoric doesn’t go beyond words. As the government’s lawyers began to warn that the Supreme Court could rule against the Rwanda plan, that faction privately sought assurances that strong measures on the ECHR would be taken. They went unanswered, and the anti-ECHR group in Sunak’s team was sidelined, a person familiar with the matter said.
A frustrated Braverman dialed up her rhetoric on a range of issues, including immigration and homelessness, putting her on collision course with Sunak.
Faced with a seismic decision on whether to keep her, the premier’s aides calculated that the Tory right did not have the numbers to challenge his leadership. On Monday, the premier shifted his Cabinet to more centrist ground, firing Braverman, moving the more moderate James Cleverly to the Home Office and recalling ex-premier David Cameron as foreign secretary.
That was the moment he revealed the true direction of his government, a Tory official said. A Cabinet with Cameron in it would never leave the ECHR, George Osborne, who was Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, said on his Political Currency podcast. “I think that’s basically now off the table,” he said.
But days after a seismic move that should have defined the path to the election, the Supreme Court effectively kickstarted the battle again.
Sunak’s officials had hoped that even if the ruling went against them, it would be a nuanced verdict setting conditions that could be met without having to break the UK’s international commitments. A new treaty with Rwanda was being worked on that aides thought would answer the judges’ concerns.
Instead, the court delivered a unanimous verdict that was far more damning than expected, criticizing wide-ranging aspects of Rwanda’s asylum system and warning that Britain would be in violation of multiple domestic laws and international conventions. One official called it a punch in the face.
By mid-afternoon Wednesday, it was clear Sunak’s treaty gambit in the House of Commons hadn’t bought off the right. His hardened language in the press conference, as well as an insistence by No. 10 that Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt offer red meat to the Tory right in the form of a big ticket tax-cutting announcement in next week’s fiscal statement, showed just how concerned Sunak was about his position, several Tory aides and lawmakers said.
Options Hunt is considering include cutting inheritance tax and stamp duty, according to people familiar with the matter.
Even so, it’s clear that some members on the right of his party don’t trust him. He had promised tough action on immigration but did not want to take the steps required to follow through, one official said. Promising a new law is an attempt to tread water until the election, they suggested.
Still, one Tory lawmaker pointed out that Sunak is capable of surprises. “When I said I was going to stop the boats, I meant it,” the premier said on Friday.
The major problem, though, is that delivering the Rwanda flights could mean doing something close aides say he doesn’t want to. Writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper on Friday, Braverman said the UK would have to “disapply” Britain’s commitments to international agreements and block “all avenues of legal challenge” if deportations to Rwanda are to go ahead.
Damian Green, a former Conservative deputy prime minister, called that “the most unconservative proposal I have ever heard,” in a post on the social media platform X. “Giving the state the explicit power to override every legal constraint is what Putin and Xi do. We absolutely cannot go there.”