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Rishi Sunak on Wednesday tried to calm tensions in his fractured party over his Rwanda migration policy, as a poll showed the UK prime minister is now as unpopular as Boris Johnson in his final days in office.
Downing Street said Sunak would listen to proposals of “good faith amendments” to the controversial Safety of Rwanda bill, which many right-wing Tory MPs believe is too weak.
The bill passed its first Commons hurdle on Tuesday night with a government majority of 44, but 29 Tory MPs abstained and are demanding that it is toughened up.
Michael Tomlinson, the new illegal migration minister, met members of the right-wing European Research Group on Wednesday to discuss how the bill might be “tightened” to ensure asylum seekers can be swiftly removed to Rwanda.
The move was seen as an olive branch from Downing Street to Tory rebels. “We will definitely want to continue speaking to colleagues and listen carefully to considered views,” said a spokesperson for Sunak.
One member of the ERG said: “We are pleased the government are listening to what we are saying having previously told us it would not accept any amendments.”
Sunak’s attempt to calm his party may win him some respite as the year ends with the Conservatives trailing Labour by an average of 18 points and with his own popularity falling sharply.
A YouGov poll carried out before the Rwanda vote on Tuesday found that 70 per cent of Britons had an unfavourable view of the prime minister, compared with 21 per cent who had a favourable impression.
His net favourability score of minus 49, down ten points from late November, is comparable to the minus 46 score recorded by Johnson just before he quit as prime minister in July 2022.
Sunak is likely to face further ructions in January when the Rwanda bill comes back to the Commons for its detailed committee stage, particularly if he does not deliver the amendments demanded by the Tory right.
The prime minister joked about the plethora of right-wing Tory factions pushing him to strengthen the bill, including possibly pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“Christmas is also a time for families, and under the Conservatives we do have a record number of them,” Sunak said in the Commons referring to the so-called “five families” of Tory pressure groups on the right.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told MPs that Sunak should face them down. “Rather than indulging his backbenchers, swanning around in their factions and their “star chambers”, pretending to be members of the mafia, when will he get a grip and focus on the country?”
The problem for Sunak is that his room for manoeuvre in appeasing the Tory right when the Rwanda bill returns to the Commons in the new year is tightly circumscribed.
His spokesperson noted that the Rwandan government has insisted the migration deal with the UK must respect international law. Downing Street said it would not support any amendment that “collapses the deal”.
Meanwhile the One Nation group of Tory moderates, which counts over 100 members, has warned Sunak not to give any ground to the party’s right or damage Britain’s reputation as a defender of international law. The group may push its own amendments intended to underpin the rule of law.
James Cleverly, the home secretary, said this week there was a “narrow landing strip” for the bill, confirming that ministers are not about to radically rewrite it to satisfy the “five families”.
The next flashpoint will come in early 2024 when the Rwanda bill will enter its committee stage, when the government or MPs can table amendments.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister who quit because he felt the bill was not robust enough, has proposed two changes to try to ensure that migrants can be flown to Rwanda before the election.
The first involves restricting the circumstances in which an individual can appeal against being removed. Jenrick told MPs on Tuesday that “small-boat-chasing law firms” would exploit any loophole and that individual claims would soon overwhelm tribunals and courts.
The second would aim to ensure that ministers have “the full power of parliament” behind them if they ignore so-called Rule 39 injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights that would block individuals being removed to Rwanda.
Tweaks in either area would be legally contentious and could be opposed by One Nation Tories as well as Labour, even if the government agreed to back the changes.
If the five rightwing Tory groups fail to successfully amend the legislation at its committee stage, they say they have reserved “the option” of voting with Labour to kill the entire bill at its third reading — the final Commons stage.
Such a move would be a massive blow to Sunak’s authority and effectively blow a hole in the party’s migration strategy. Downing Street insiders hope that it will not come to that point.
One former cabinet minister who supported the bill said: “Some people have started to realise that you can’t keep self-harming without doing yourself some harm. The clue is in the name.”