Rishi Sunak has won the Rwanda vote but lost his credibility

The government has seen off a threatened rebellion over its plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, writes John Rentoul. But the prime minister should not view this as a win for his leadership

Rishi Sunak’s policy survived a rebellion after would-be rebels announced they would not vote down an unchanged Bill (Reuters)

The rebellion fizzled out slowly during the day. When Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading member of the GB News faction of the Conservative Party, said he was going to vote with the government on the third reading – the important vote – on the Rwanda bill, we knew it was over.

At the rebellion’s peak yesterday, 70 Conservative MPs opposed the government when there was no chance of it being defeated. Tonight, forced to choose between passing the bill and having no bill, only 11 opposed it, while a few more bravely abstained.

So the government will get its bill on the statute book. The House of Lords will huff and puff, but it won’t blow down the convention that the unelected chamber – once it has made its points – defers to the elected one.

But everyone knows two things by now. One is that the bill will not work in deterring small boats from crossing the Channel. Robert Jenrick, until recently an unlikely leader of the pitchfork tendency, has spelt out in two articulate speeches on consecutive days precisely why it won’t work. The attempt to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda will become bogged down in lawyers and courts, he said. It wasn’t good enough simply to declare Rwanda safe, parliament had to legislate to prevent lawyers and courts from contradicting it.

As what he is proposing is not possible, all his rebellion succeeded in doing was further advertising how difficult it is for any government to deal with the small boats – and how divided this particular government is. Jenrick must know that his plan is impossible, because the whips will have told him when he was the minister responsible. They would have said that there are 100 Conservative MPs who regard the idea of setting aside the European Court of Human Rights as outlandish. They will not vote for it. There is no majority in the House of Commons for such a thing.

The point about deterrence is that it has to be credible: those thinking of attempting the Channel crossing have to believe that they are extremely unlikely to be able to stay in the UK

He would also have been advised by government lawyers that his plan was almost certainly unlawful and that there would be difficulties in persuading civil servants to carry it out. Legal advice is always flexible – but political reality is less so: it is the advice from the whips that should have counted.

The other thing that everyone knows is that the prime minister agrees with Jenrick that the Rwanda policy won’t work. Rishi Sunak’s doubts about the deportation scheme when he was chancellor, revealed in a damaging leak on 6 January, handed Keir Starmer another easy win at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier today. The Labour leader ridiculed Sunak, saying that his MPs were in “open revolt against his policy, each other and reality – when the prime minister himself doesn’t believe in it”. And Sunak couldn’t deny any of it.

When challenged in interviews, he says he believes in the principle of deterrence, and gives the example of the agreement with Albania as an example of it working. But the agreement with the Albanian government means that any Albanian who makes it to the UK risks being returned to Albania. That is not the case with the Rwanda scheme, which, even if it did work, would only take a tiny fraction of small-boat arrivals. The point about deterrence is that it has to be credible: those thinking of attempting the Channel crossing have to believe that they are extremely unlikely to be able to stay in the UK. For two whole days in the Commons, the Conservative Party has put on a free show explaining why they should believe no such thing.

The last two days have been disastrous for the prime minister. He has got his bill through, but at the cost of provoking a large rebellion in his own party. The rebellion could never threaten the progress of the bill, but it could and did succeed in advertising the ineffectiveness of the bill, and in parading Tory divisions over it.