The week opened with what could reasonably be read as an attempt by Lord Frost to oust Rishi Sunak by forcing a vote of confidence in his leadership if necessary.
“If the Tories don’t act, there will soon only be smoking rubble left,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph, explaining that the Conservatives need to be “as tough as it takes on immigration”. Which required amending the Rwanda Bill to make it more restrictive.
What if that didn’t happen? Lord Frost was shy of spelling it out; others were less so. ”Danny Kruger, Sir John Hayes and Mark Francois compared themselves to the Tory “Spartans” who sank Theresa May’s Brexit deal, urging colleagues to join them in “standing firm” against Downing Street ‘pressure’,” the Telegraph reported elsewhere.
The Spartans did more than sink May’s deal. They also sank May’s leadership. The point will not have been lost on the Telegraph – which ran Frost’s piece beneath the report of a YouGov poll commissioned by a mysterious “group of Conservative donors called the Conservative Britain Alliance and carried out by YouGov, working with Lord Frost”.
The poll was splashed on the paper’s front page, together with a series of related stories online: “Jeremy Hunt among 11 Cabinet ministers predicted to lose seats if election due today“; How Reform UK will shatter the Tories – without winning a seat, and “Sunak’s immigration ineptitude has caused Leave voters to ditch the Tories” (by our columnist James Johnson of JLPartnersPolls).
It was a crude but powerful ploy to put the wind up Conservative MPs, maximise the vote for restrictive amendments and then, when these failed (which they duly did), to stampede enough Tory backbenchers into the No lobby to defeat the Bill – so sparking yet another crisis in Rishi Sunak’s premiership and a leadership ballot.
The logic of such a coup is that a new leader, presumably Kemi Badenoch or Penny Mordaunt, could force conservative change through the Commons and present herself to the voters as a fresh new face, and the Conservatives as a revived, united force – in the wake of a leadership election during a time of war abroad and turmoil here.
“Is it possible? I suppose so. Is it likely? Frankly, I think the voters would view yet another leadership contest, given the gravity of current events here and abroad, as a masterclass in self-indulgence,” I wrote yesterday – explaining that there is no majority for the changes Frost wants in the Commons, and that the net result of a putsch would be to make a general election more likely than otherwise.
It would therefore bring about precisely the kind of apocalyptic result which the Telegraph‘s poll threatened. Yesterday evening, it became clear that most Conservative MPs, even those unhappy with Sunak’s leadership, agreed. “Spartans Two, the New Batch” (as we might call them, along the lines of the Gremlins franchise) weren’t helped by YouGov distancing itself from Frost’s interpretation of the poll.
Nor were they assisted by Sir Keir Starmer choosing Rwanda as his main subject at Prime Minister’s Questions. This had the effect of reminding dissident Tories that a vote against the Rwanda Bill at Third Reading would put them in the same lobby as Labour. That Sir Keir should have known this perfectly well is an intriguing point.
The Frost gambit had an effect. It helped to mobilise 60 or so Conservative MPs to vote for amendments, and trigger the resignation of Lee Anderson. Not all of these will have wanted a leadership ballot; I suspect not even most of them. But they and some who abstained wanted to signal their unhappiness with the Government’s drift. And in any event, some of amendments were robust, and worth voting for.
But, ultimately, Frost failed. Only eleven MPs became Spartans Two, four of them possible future leadership contenders: Suella Braverman, Simon Clarke (if he holds his seat), Danny Kruger (I would argue) and, perhaps above all, Robert Jenrick, who was a persuasive force for some of the amendments in yesterday’s and Tuesday’s debate.
Jenrick will have worked out that there was no danger of the Government losing at Third Reading, so it was best for him to signal beyond doubt his conviction that the Bill won’t work. The concession offered to the rebels over Rule 39 – namely, that senior civil servants will be prevented from blocking deportations themselves on legal grounds – may have helped Sunak.
Nonetheless, it was naked fear of an early election (not to mention taking the blame for the defeat of a Government measure) that swung most of those 60 rebels into the Government lobby or abstention when the big vote on Third Reading came, including John Hayes who, with Clarke, made the case for some of the amendments on this site.
It is hard to argue with David Maddox’s assessment in today’s Daily Express. “The harsh reality is that the European Research Group (ERG) is a shadow of its Brexit heyday. The Common Sense Group and New Conservatives have not yet reached the position to properly replace it. Meanwhile, completing the five families on the Right, the Northern Research Group and Conservative Growth Group have their own agendas.”
He writes that “it is now 99 percent certain that Sunak will lead the Conservatives into the next election and that there will be no leadership election before what many see as an inevitable crushing defeat”. We will now see whether or not the Rwanda Bill works; Henry Hill’s view is that it will “probably be effective”.
And Sunak will attempt to pivot political debate to the economy, abandon his attempt last autumn to present himself as an agent of change, and run a classic “better the devil you know” general election campaign – of the kind most governments run against most oppositions in most contests most of the time.
The Conservatives are like men on a raft heading towards the falls. Sunak’s hope is that fate somehow allows it to career into some bank or shallow from which its beleaguered crew can clamber out. Hoping that floating voters and electoral tightening will come to the Tories’ aid is a very long shot indeed.
But not so long as jumping up and down on the raft until it disintegrates – the likely effect of presenting Parliament and voters with a third leader in two years who hasn’t been endorsed by the voters. And who would then be unable to get the changes she requires through the Commons anyway.
Yesterday was the third time Sunak has seen off the rebels: first came the vote on the Windsor Protocol; then Second Reading of this Rwanda Bill, and now its Third Reading too. In Gremlins Two, the loveable creatures are electrocuted into putrified jelly. The film bears no report that eleven survived.