After yet another disaster of a week for Rishi Sunak and the Tory party, disillusioned Conservative MPs returned to all corners of the UK on Thursday and Friday to hear the verdicts of voters. Days of internal chaos and division over the government’s Rwanda deportations legislation had left the impression of a party in irreversible decline. The sense in the House of Commons had been one of fast advancing and predictable decay bordering at times on farce, rather than great drama. But was there still some residual hope for Conservatives, to be found out there, in the country? Martin Vickers, the veteran Tory MP for Cleethorpes, spent much of Friday morning, after the bruising events in the Commons, chatting to his constituents in a supermarket in Barton-upon-Humber, most of whom he judged to be still “instinctively Conservative voters”. Vickers, a grandee who sits on the executive of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, is by nature an optimist, and a loyalist. “I would say all is not completely lost,” was his considered assessment afterwards. “It is certainly the case that people are disillusioned,” he conceded. “But these people don’t want Starmer. I think quite a few of them will just stay at home, but some will think ‘better the devil you know’ and stay with us. It is my job to motivate those people. There is a path to victory, but it is a very narrow one.”
On the other side of the country in Carlisle, the city’s Tory MP, John Stevenson, had been having similar conversations with his constituents. Conservative MPs these days have trained themselves to look out for positives. He, like his colleague Vickers, concluded that there was indeed a “very narrow path” to success, one along which everything had to go absolutely right for the government, all the way up to polling day. “Three things have to happen,” said Stevenson, who chairs the Northern Research Group of “red wall” Tory MPs. “First, we must stop squabbling, and find a degree of unity. Second, the economy must turn, which I think it will. And third, we have to expose the lack of plans, ideas, and vision in the Labour party. As we get closer to an election people are going to say to Keir Starmer, ‘Hey, you look like you could be prime minister. What do you actually believe in?’ Maybe I am delusional but it doesn’t feel to me like 1996, or 97 at the moment.” Elsewhere, however, as the week wore on and with apocalyptic opinion polls for the Tories appearing one after another, there was a growing sense at home and abroad that a Labour government was around the corner. On Tuesday, as Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt were preoccupied rallying Conservative MPs behind the Rwanda deportation scheme, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves headed to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
There she found herself in huge demand as she held bilateral meetings with finance ministers, business leaders and economists, interspersed with impromptu get-togethers with those just wanting to get on her radar. One of those who travelled with Reeves said: “Everywhere she went people wanted to see her, talk to her. They were saying ‘good luck’, ‘we hope to see you next year’, people wanted selfies with her, to exchange cards. They were saying it is so great to see you, and it’s such a shame that the UK prime minister and chancellor are not here.’” Hunt eventually turned up on Thursday after most business leaders and people from other governments had left, only to be asked by UK journalists how it felt that his Labour counterpart Reeves had been feted in his absence, and was now regarded the world over as the chancellor in waiting. Unhelpfully, former Tory chancellor George Osborne said from Davos, on his Political Currency podcast with Ed Balls, that “it really feels like here at this global gathering, it’s the Labour party rather than the Conservatives who have been kind of grabbing the microphone for Britain”. By Wednesday evening, back in the Commons, Sunak had seen off the Tory rebellion, and his controversial Rwanda legislation headed for more problems in the House of Lords. Only 11 Tory backbenchers voted to actually kill off the bill, among them former cabinet ministers and likely future leadership contenders Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, but more than 60 backbench Tories had supported amendments to alter it. If ever there had been a pyrrhic victory it was this: the painful progress of the Rwanda bill through the Commons had merely exposed, yet again, the very ill-discipline and disunity that Stevenson and others say it is now so essential to avoid.
In the Commons chamber there were surreal scenes as rightwingers demanded that the UK should in effect ignore international law to get flights to Rwanda off the ground, while senior Tories on the other wing of the party gently mocked the legislation and the contradictions in the government’s approach to current international crises that it highlighted. The most devastating contribution came from former attorney general Jeremy Wright, who said the government’s assertion that it could be the judge of whether Rwanda was a safe country to which to deport asylum seekers was legally and intellectually problematic to say the least. “As I say, there is a good practical reason why we should be nervous about this: because we do sometimes rely on international law to discharge our own policy intents and purposes,” he told MPs. “Not more than 48 hours ago in this place, we were doing exactly that. We were saying that it is important to criticise the actions of the Houthis in the Red Sea because they contravene principles of international law. We were saying too that we justify our own response to that because it is in accordance with the principles of international law, and quite right, too.” Wright added that such a position “runs the risk of, first, other states finding comfort in our example and, secondly, undermining our own messages in other situations. That makes this not just bad law, but bad foreign policy.” While Sunak was expending so much political energy on the symbolic objective of getting flights to Rwanda airborne by the spring, even the Rwandans were having doubts about whether they would happen and whether it was all a good idea after all. Asked by the Guardian in Davos about the plans, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, expressed frustration, saying: “There are limits for how long this can drag on.” Kagame added that it was “the UK’s problem, not Rwanda’s problem”.
When it came to the final vote on Wednesday evening, the main reason the prime minister avoided defeat on the bill as a whole, was not that his MPs approved of it, but that they decided to step back from committing political suicide. In the Commons corridors Jenrick was parading himself – with an eye on the future – insisting he would vote against. But a former Tory cabinet minister and veteran of Maastricht rebellions in the 1990s, who had voted for several rebel amendments, articulated the view of many that to do so en masse would be terminal for the party and for individual MPs’ chances of surviving at the next election. “I have done my bit [voting for amendments] but I can’t bring the whole house down over this. We know if we did what the consequences would be. Disaster. It is not great [the bill] but we have made our point. If this is what they want to do, it is their problem, not ours.” It was hardly a vote of confidence in Sunak: rather a vote to avoid facing the wrath of the electorate and the risk of losing their seats before they had to. Only a few weeks ago, in both the Labour and Tory parties, there had been a strong, though minority, view that Rishi Sunak might go for a general election in early May, off the back of a tax-cutting budget in March. The idea was that he could control the agenda, surprise Labour with tax cuts, and catch Starmer’s party off guard. Last week’s events, including a surprise rise in inflation, and opinion polls predicting a Labour landslide, make that early election ever more unlikely. Starmer and his troops appear and sound increasingly confident. Last week Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s head of campaigns, was busy briefing senior figures across the party about the way ahead and the need to stay disciplined, united and avoid mistakes. “People ask where the big ideas are. They will come,” said one Labour peer. “But the operation is brilliant, the most professional I have known. It is about winning. For now we just watch the Tories implode.”
The task for the Tories now is to try to rediscover some reason for hope. Only a handful of his MPs want Sunak out of Downing Street – so on that score he can rest easy. But ominously there are more rather than fewer obstacles appearing on what his MPs describe as that “narrow road” to recovery. The party faces three byelections in the next few weeks, all of which it could lose. The Rwanda legislation will hit turbulence in the Lords from Monday. Its legislation on awarding annual oil and gas licences for the North Sea, which has enraged green Tories, is in the Commons next week. Then there are local elections in May at which the Conservatives face another mauling. Tory strategists say their own private polling indicates there are an unusually high number of “don’t knows” showing up in their data and that a lot of these are former Conservative voting women. “It is a question of how many of those come back to us as to whether it is a small Labour majority, or a very big Labour majority indeed,” said one senior Tory insider. Increasingly, Conservatives are pinning their fading hopes of recovery on tax cuts. In Davos, Hunt suggested again that he would act in the budget in early March to put more money back in people’s pockets. Having already cut national insurance and with the prospect of more tax cutting in the autumn before an election, the chancellor hopes he can create a story of economic success and a year of tax reductions, over three successive “fiscal events”. One senior backbencher said: “We know we are going to get tax cuts and they will be important. The big question, however, is after everything else whether the public will give us any credit for them.”