The regime survives! And by a majority of 44! No need, as it turns out, for that minister to fly back from the COP summit in the Gulf.
But there was still danger in the air. During the vote Sir John Hayes sat in the Chamber with his corps de ballet of total abstainers, a line-up including Suella Braverman, Miriam Cates, Natalie Elphicke, Sarah Dines, Marco Longhi and David Jones.
They were joined by Mark Francois, and behind them sat Jonathan Gullis, Danny Kruger, Tom Hunt and Chris Green.
The bearded Gullis, MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, slumped disconsolate on his bench, looked peculiarly like a late-19th-century Spy cartoon.
The abstainers are playing a longer game: have named their terms, which are unlikely to be met, and reserve the right to take sterner measures.
During a division, which lasts perhaps 12 or 15 minutes, MPs can wander pretty much wherever they wish in the Chamber. There is a convivial mingling, a hubbub of talk, any number of conversations between parliamentarians whom one might not have known were on quite such friendly terms.
Rishi Sunak came in just before the result was declared and seated himself on the Treasury bench between James Cleverly and Michael Tomlinson (pictured above), Minister since last Thursday for Illegal Migration.
Tomlinson had summed up for the Government at the end of the debate, looked nervous before he started, but in the event did it very well.
Yvette Cooper, from the Labour front bench, intervened and invited him, in three different ways, to agree that in view of the decision by various Tory factions to abstain in the forthcoming vote, the Government’s policy was “a total failure”.
“The answer is No, No and No,” Tomlinson replied with commendable brevity and vigour. He spoke of the moral case for stopping the “modern-day slavers” who run the people-smuggling business.
But as Disraeli said, a majority is better than the best repartee. Most Conservative MPs had recognised that the Government is condemned to succeed, the Rwanda policy must be made to work, and if it does actually work, this will distinguish them with wonderful clarity from the scornful, laughing Labour Party.