Transcript: Rwanda plan reignites Tory civil war

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Rwanda plan reignites Tory civil war’

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Miranda Green
It is quite dangerous for Sunak, I think. It’s reminiscent of the kind of Theresa May era, almost — chaos in parliament.

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, the Financial Times essential insider guide to Westminster. I’m Lucy Fisher. The FT’s Miranda Green there talking about the shambles in the Tory party. Also in this episode, Boris Johnson in contrition mode at the Covid inquiry. But will it wash? We’ll catch up with the FT’s Laura Hughes, who’s been covering the evidence live. To discuss all of this and more. Miranda is here with me in the studio. Hello, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And also here is the FT’s Jim Pickard. Hello, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hi.

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Lucy Fisher
So the prime minister is on the defensive as his authority comes under increasing pressure over immigration. We’ve had a specific request on the podcast this week to bring it back to basics and to explain what is, frankly, a fiendishly complicated subject in a comprehensible way. So on that basis, Jim, I wanna tackle the issue first and then we’ll get into the politics of it. Last month, the Supreme Court said that the government’s Rwandan removals policy was unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe third country. That was because in the past, it has deported asylum seekers back to their country of origin, where they potentially face the risk of persecution. So Jim, just very briefly, explain what’s happened this week. The government has signed a new treaty with Rwanda. It’s published emergency legislation. What do those combined moves do to make this policy get over the line as being seen as lawful by the UK courts?

Jim Pickard
So James Cleverly, the home secretary, flew out to Kigali on Tuesday morning for a photo-op with his counterpart in Rwanda, and then legislation followed shortly afterwards on Wednesday. And the impact of this is, this is the British government deeming Rwanda a safe country in law. The legislation orders the courts to ignore the Human Rights Act and swaths of international law, and including the Refugee Convention, when considering whether Rwanda’s safe for asylum seekers.

And what the government says, what Sunak says is that if Britain had left the European Convention of Human Rights, if it had gone further and done that, then the Rwandan government would have pulled out of the agreement. And the interesting thing here is I think the ECHR is one of those institutions which very few people outside of the Westminster bubble really understand or think a lot about. It’s very easily confused with the EU, (inaudible) the Brexiteers coincidentally, or rather, otherwise are quite keen to leave the ECHR. But very important reminder here that the only countries in Europe that don’t belong to this are, of course, Belarus and Russia.

Lucy Fisher
Not a great club to be in. So Miranda, why is it that this package of fairly substantial measures, which seems quite rightwing, is decried by the rightwing flank of the Tory party?

Miranda Green
Yeah. It seems extraordinary to outsiders, but Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly, whilst trying to steer a course through the middle that would please both the Tory moderates and the Tory right, has succeeded in irritating both sides, actually. And the Tory right are particularly angry because they say that the new version would still allow for the right to appeal for individual asylum seekers. And the government is saying, and Number 10 is saying very strongly, this is really in only very exceptional circumstances. This would hardly ever happen. But in principle, the right do not like that idea. They do not like the idea of the courts making decisions.

And so it’s turned into a sort of weird replay of a lot of the arguments about Brexit over sovereignty and where power lies. And they’re saying, look, if we as parliament have decided that this national problem of illegal immigration needs firm action and firm legislation, we cannot allow loopholes in that legislation that would mean that decisions were being overturned in the future by the courts. And that seems to be the key problem. That’s the reason for the Jenrick resignation. That’s the reason for Suella Braverman all over the airwaves again. And meanwhile, the moderates are kind of accepting Cleverly’s package. But of course, this is a lot further than actually I think a lot of the Tory party would like to go from the sort of centrist wing anyway.

Lucy Fisher
I’ve also been struck that both some MPs on the centrist, moderate One Nation wing and some MPs on the right wing, notably the European Research Group, have kept their counsel so far, haven’t they? Their sort of star chambers, so-called, on both camps, that sort of legal experts getting together to really pore over the detail of what is, you know, jargon-heavy, knotty draft legislation to really work out what it means to try and see round corners of any implications it could have.

So, Jim, I was struck by, on Wednesday, there seemed to me potentially in Sunak’s favour this pause where some MPs were saying, look, we really wanna see the detail before we comment. And, you know, we saw that after Sunak introduced the Windsor framework. Again, we had this star chamber process. In fact, then it came back several weeks later from the rightwing MPs bringing up questions, doubts, problems with that plan. But by then it was already a fait accompli. This time round it looked like Sunak could benefit from that same pause. And yet, as Miranda mentioned, we saw Robert Jenrick quit. How has that gone down? How much clout does he have? He’s been on a real journey, hasn’t he? Some people doubting his motives here, over quitting.

Jim Pickard
So Robert Jenrick used to be known as Robert Generic because he seemed kinda sort of bland, centrist Tory MP who didn’t really stand out much. The only thing most people remembered him for, of course, was that whole Richard Desmond scandal involving a planning decision in east London several years ago.

Lucy Fisher
And remind our listeners who Richard Desmond was.

Jim Pickard
Richard Desmond was a big magnate who was redeveloping some kind of printworks. And he got a favourable planning wind and things were pointed about as to whether there was sort of political influence there. And it was something that damaged Robert Jenrick temporarily. He was also very importantly, a key ally of Rishi Sunak, along with Oliver Dowden, who’s now the deputy prime minister. And the three of them together published an op-ed in The Times when Boris Johnson was running for Tory leader. And it was seen as the sort of the young guns putting their weight behind Boris Johnson to help him get over the line then. And so there’s a kind of personal betrayal of Rishi Sunak by Robert Jenrick. And of course, people are pointing fingers and saying, well, maybe this Jenrick guy has ambitions of his own.

The most sympathetic theory, I think, is that when you have the role of immigration minister and you have a very clear purpose in your life and in your job, which is to get immigration numbers down, and you find yourself surrounded by other departments, the Treasury, Department of Health saying, you know, we need more immigration. And so you find yourself beset. Now, I would say, Lucy, is that if there was political expediency at play here, I think the Conservative party would get behind Rishi Sunak, because you would have thought this was the kind of compromise which is not perfect for anyone. But it kind of, you know, if it manages to get some asylum seekers flown to Rwanda, which is what they are trying to achieve without leaving the ECHR, which would antagonise large numbers of more centrist Tory MPs, then surely this is the solution. But I think it’s a symptom of the fact that we appear to possibly be in the dying months of this regime. There’s no discipline, loads of people fear for their seats. They’re sort of fed up with each other.

And what it means in terms of politics and the voters is that equally, you have 50 per cent of the country — I’m making up these statistics — who think that the whole Rwanda scheme is distasteful and unpleasant and you’re sending people off to this kind of totalitarian regime that they shouldn’t be doing it at all. So they’re not happy. And then you’ve got the other 50 per cent or whatever the fraction is of the public who think asylum seekers should be sent to Rwanda, but it’s not happening and the government’s unable to do it. So that makes Rishi Sunak look weak. So it’s not pleasing either set of voters, whatever their relative population might be.

Lucy Fisher
And so off the back of this Miranda, we are hearing these swirling rumours about people putting in letters of no confidence. On Thursday, I went to a press gallery lunch with Richard Holden, the newly appointed chair of the Tory party, and he said he warned his colleagues that another leadership contest before the next election would be, as he put it, insanity.

Jim Pickard
It’s amazing he has to say that, really.

Miranda Green
It really is.

Lucy Fisher
Well, quite. You know, sometimes you ask the question in that kind of environment or you hear the question asked and it’s dismissed as being ridiculous. But, you know, I guess he gave it credence in a way by warning colleagues not to do that. He admitted that the biggest challenge facing the party, in his view, is party unity. How much danger is Sunak in, Miranda?

Miranda Green
I mean, this is extraordinary, isn’t it? You know, when Sunak got the job of prime minister and Tory party leader without, you know, getting the mandate from the membership, crucially, he did turn to his party at that point and remind them, you know, it’s unite or die. And he’s had to say it again this week: unite or die. Are they getting the message? It seems unclear whether they have or not.

And I completely agree with you. He does actually seem in some danger, which is, as Jim says, is crazy when you think that there’s a compromise on the table, which is quite sellable to the public as, you know, a crackdown on a problem that is an acknowledged challenge for the country. You know, letters of confidence going in and out, which, of course, are secret; questions over whether actually to get this legislation through parliament — will it get through the Commons and then can it get through the Lords? You know, if you enter the last few months of government this becomes quite difficult. Before there’s a general election called, will any asylum seekers even be sent to Rwanda? It is quite dangerous for Sunak, I think. And also because it’s sort of, it’s reminiscent of the kind of Theresa May era almost — you know, chaos in parliament, which Johnson, of course, managed to win the 2019 election off the back of promising to put an end to that chaos and sclerotic parliamentary fight over Brexit. If Sunak looks as if he’s completely enmired in a similar parliamentary kind of trench warfare with his own MPs and then with the Lords and then back to the Commons, etc, I think it could look really bad for him again.

Lucy Fisher
And just a word on how you think he’s handling this. I mean, on Thursday morning he called this emergency press conference. Did you think that was successfully seizing control of the agenda or did that just look panicky and reactive?

Miranda Green
I don’t think you should ever call an emergency press conference unless you’ve got something really dramatic to say. And I think that actually just heightened the rumours about his status and authority as leader. So I think he’s got to be a bit careful. And I think also in recent weeks, I mean, we had a reshuffle which seemed to be, you know, steering the Tory party in a more moderate direction again. And then we’ve had this kind of equal and opposite reaction to the right to try and convince people that Cleverly is a home secretary who will get a grip on illegal and legal migration, because of course, there’s that whole crackdown as well. So it’s a bit as if he’s steering all over the road, which again, I think doesn’t give people confidence in his leadership. I remain amazed, actually, that someone who appears to be or appeared at the start to be a kind of positive change from the Johnson/Truss era seems to be stuck back in a chaotic situation again.

Lucy Fisher
We do wonder if the Conservatives are just so much in the habit of this infighting, if they’re so used to, as one Tory insider put it to me, so used to fighting in public, they’ve forgotten the key thing, the number one thing the public hates is to see politicians of the party fighting in public. Jim, just to finish on this subject for now, can we fast forward to next week? On Tuesday, we’re expecting the second reading of this bill. That is the first time the MPs get to debate it. What do you sort of foresee happening? We’ve already heard Rishi Sunak deny that this should be considered a confidence vote in any way, but it really is a moment of danger for him, isn’t it?

Jim Pickard
Yeah, and I’ve seen the number of 29 rebels is what is needed for this to not go through, presuming that if the other parties oppose it, which he’d expected them to. It’s not a very big number, really, is it? And I think this is lower than we had a few years ago, presumably because the Tory party just lost through attrition and scandal quite a few MPs along the way. And if you add to that kind of quite sort of dangerous situation, some of the numbers, the fact that loads of MPs don’t really care any more because they think they’re gonna lose their seats or they have an eye on the prize of a potential leadership contest, which could only be a year away. I mean, it doesn’t feel very long since the last Conservative leadership contest, but literally, it could only be a year away. And therefore, that could focus their minds on personal ambition, as we might have seen with Robert Jenrick quite recently. So I think it’s gonna be quite an awkward week for him. And if he loses on this, I have no idea what will happen. If he wins, he still faces, as Miranda said, a very difficult time in the House of Lords.

Lucy Fisher
Well, it’s Christmas come early for us as reporters, isn’t it?

Miranda Green
Well, also Christmas has come early for the Labour party because they are able to focus on the mess of the government policy and whether it can actually deliver or not, thus avoiding the conversation on their own immigration plans. And actually, I think they are doing that quite well. And you’ve got Yvette Cooper, who’s a sort of safe pair of hands, as shadow home secretary, who’s just able to do that kind of show don’t tell calm, you know, demeanour and insisting that she also views immigration levels as too high. So it’s a gift for them.

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Lucy Fisher
Let’s move on. Boris Johnson slipped in early to his first session of the Covid inquiry this week, arriving before 8am, possibly in the hope of avoiding protesters. And then he was put through two quite exhaustive days of examination by KC Hugo Keith and others. The FT’s Laura Hughes is following the inquiry and joins us from there. Hi, Laura.

Laura Hughes
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
So, Laura, I just wanted to ask you first up, what’s been your overall assessment of how Johnson has performed in the past two days? And in particular, you know, he’s a Marmite figure. People either love him or loathe him. Will what he’s said, how he’s performed move the dial for anyone, do you think?

Laura Hughes
Well, it felt like a very different Boris Johnson We didn’t get his normal bluster, his more verbose statements. It really felt as though he had been briefed by his lawyer to keep his statements short, to try and avoid those phrases he normally deploys which catches our headlines. My overall impression is that whilst he at the very beginning did apologise and accepted responsibility, throughout the last two days it has felt that where he accepts there were mistakes made, he says nobody brought them to his attention soon enough. So when we discuss the Eat Out to Help Out programme, he said, well, I didn’t know there were any issues with it. I assumed that the scientists had been consulted. When it came to questions over locking down later, he suggested the Whitehall mindset machine had not come to him blowing the klaxon, warning him about the impact this virus is going to have.

Lucy Fisher
So do you think he’s coming across as disingenuous, do you think? I mean, you mentioned the apology he made right at the beginning and immediately he was asked by Hugo Keith, well, what are you apologising for? And I personally thought his answer slightly blustering. He alighted on devolution and how conflicting messages from Wales and Scotland could have undermined the Westminster message. And of course, you know, Downing Street communications, having been one of the tools at his disposal to curb the transmission of the virus, it felt quite a niche thing to alight on when you’re apologising in a sort of holistic way for the government handling of the pandemic.

Laura Hughes
Yes. So when they honed on him personally, it felt as though he often did try and deflect. So when he said I should have twigged earlier when I saw the images coming out of Italy, we have heard from key participants in this inquiry so far that when those images were coming out of Italy, senior officials were sat around in meetings laughing. We have heard that the alarm was raised, that data was shown and it was just not acted on soon enough.

And again, there were contradictions there. So, for example, when he accepted that some of the comments he made about old people specifically, this idea that at meetings he advocated for letting the virus rip, that he suggested old people had had their innings, that the virus was nature’s way of dealing with old people, he accepted that that would have caused a lot of hurt. But at the same time, he seemed to defend that in saying that he spoke bluntly in meetings and spoke in layman’s terms to encourage others in meetings to express what they felt. So there was often this sort of tension between the apology and then the justification, which at times felt a little bit farfetched.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. I was also keen to get your take on how you think Hugo Keith is doing. I’ve been interested watching him counter Johnson’s narrative. You know, for example, I think Johnson claimed, well, the UK ended up mid-table when it came to excess deaths. You know, he said he’d seen a table suggesting the UK was 15th or 16th out of 30-odd. Hugo Keith drew up a graph that said actually the UK was second after Italy — you know, one of the worst in western Europe for excess deaths. I mean, it does feel to me that the council is doing quite a good job of countering some of the claims Johnson is making.

Laura Hughes
Yes, definitely. And as well as that example, which was right at the beginning of the first day of testimony and I think set the bar for Johnson and (inaudible) the fact that he was gonna say things and of course, the lawyers were going to have evidence to back up the questions they were posing to Johnson.

And it was interesting, too, he was asked a lot about this toxic culture we’ve heard so much about during the pandemic, about the behaviour of officials who were seen in Downing Street, the parties that we now know took place, and Hugo Keith sort of saved some of the messages that we hadn’t seen before until right at the end of the inquiry that did show him messaging Simon Case, cabinet secretary, when the stories about parties were coming out to say we really should have probably clamped down on this, we should have known how it was going to look. So it showed that he did have an awareness of how things were going to be perceived.

And I think he was definitely uncomfortable and most uncomfortable when some of the diary entries from Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the chief scientific officer, were shown to him because it was very difficult for him to bluster his way out of that. The only point of tension actually, in the two days that I really, really felt was when he did get a little bit scrappy about these diary entries and suggested that they were the musings of someone, they’re private notes, and that they shouldn’t be part of this inquiry.

Lucy Fisher
And what did you make of his sort of bouts of emotion? I mean, there were more than one episode where he really did seem to be choking back tears. Let’s hear a clip.

Boris Johnson in clip
What I’m trying to tell you, in a nutshell, the NHS, thank God, did an amazing job and helped me survive. But I knew from that experience what an appalling disease this is. I had absolutely no personal doubt about that from March onwards.

Lucy Fisher
Laura, we just had a clip there of one of those moments. What did you make of it?

Laura Hughes
I mean, a cynical observer would suggest that he became emotional when he was talking about himself and what he experienced. But at the same time, I think it was part of his overall pitch to the public, really, to remind everybody that this was an unprecedented time. These were huge decisions that he had to make, they’ve never been made before by a government and that he personally, at times, he nearly lost his life. And we sometimes do forget that. You know, you’ll remember covering it at the time, it felt like a real moment.

And the reason I think he was keen to stress this point is that we have heard about his oscillating on decisions, changing strategic direction. We’ve heard that he wasn’t always on top of the detail, the kind of callous remarks that we’ve heard about old people. And he was really trying to make the point on Thursday very clearly that it was not true that he ever pursued a strategy of just letting this virus rip through the country and killing old people, and that at all times he had tried to protect all ages.

Lucy Fisher
We know Rishi Sunak is up in front of the inquiry next Monday. What are the main claims he’s got to answer?

Laura Hughes
I think that the biggest issue and the biggest questions Rishi Sunak is gonna face is over this Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which was his brainchild, his idea, his flagship programme. And we have heard from a number of participants so far that key scientific advisers were not consulted before this policy was announced by the government. And we heard from the likes of Sir Patrick Vallance that there is no doubt it would have increased transmission of the virus. And he said he would be very surprised if any minister at the time had not known that.

So there was a lot of concern within government, especially around the advisers at the time, that this was a really quite stupid thing to do. Johnson on Thursday defended it, saying, well if you’re opening up hospitality, why not try and ensure they’ve got some customers? But we’ve heard some real concern. We know that Matt Hancock himself warned against it as it was going on. He said it was creating some real problems. Rishi Sunak was nicknamed Dr Death by some of the advisers working around government, and there are also some handwritten Patrick Vallance notes that referred to Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, suggesting that at one point Rishi sort of embraced the idea that people might die in order to protect the economy. I’m sure he will deny that, but there will be some quite challenging questions for Sunak.

Lucy Fisher
Sounds like it’s going to be a pretty tough day for him. Miranda?

Miranda Green
I just, I struggle to see what the inquiry is actually for at the moment, to be honest with you. You know, if this is about how would we handle a similar crisis if it happened again, I want there to be much less who was to blame, who said what and much more how are we equipped in terms of, you know, understanding the science, understanding best practice internationally in order to sort of leap into action with similar sorts of challenges? I’m not sure there’s very much of that so far.

Lucy Fisher
Well, look, I think that’s a really interesting point. And Laura, I mean, you’ve been there day in, day out. Yes, you’ve been writing up the most headline-grabbing, eye-catching moments of testimony from some of the most high-profile figures. But you’ve also waded through, I’m sure by now, hundreds of pages of documents. Are we learning enough about how things worked under the bonnet of government? Do you think that this is getting to grips with how the handling of a zoonotic pandemic or another crisis that’s comparable in future could be improved?

Laura Hughes
Well, I think the key thing is this is an inquiry that’s going to last until 2026. And at the moment it feels like a bit of a blame game, but that is because of who is up giving evidence and the attention it is getting from the media, because these are all characters that we know well and some of the language has been so extraordinary. It has grabbed a lot of the headlines. I think some of that is relevant now to this inquiry because the big question here really is if we had had different people in Downing Street at the time, would we have had a different result or do we just not have the structures in place to respond to a crisis of this kind? And those two things are potentially linked. And that is why the inquiry, I think, has taken this track during this particular module, because remember, there are up to six modules and this one is all about political governance and decision-making.

I think overall by 2026, this is just going to feed into it and the results of it will be recommendations for how you improve in the future. I actually can’t get out of my head an analogy that Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, made when he said to the inquiry that if a counter-terrorism official had walked into Downing Street and said 100,000 people are at risk of dying in a terror attack, he says that there are structures in place that would respond immediately to protect the public. But he felt that when he and others were going in and warning about potential deaths in this country as a consequence of an unknown virus, there just was not that response. And I do defend this inquiry, but probably because it’s taking up so much of my life that I you know, I think . . . 

Lucy Fisher
You’ve made a good case for it.

Laura Hughes
You know, there’s a lot of hot air at the moment. There is a lot of finger-pointing. I do believe that by 2026, there will be some serious questions answered and recommendations made. And this is a cathartic process for a lot of people involved. And you saw it from the bereaved outside the inquiry, the last few days, that it’s giving them something to help make sense of what happened to them.

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Lucy Fisher
Laura Hughes, thanks for joining.

Laura Hughes
Thanks, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And just to round up this week, who are we picking for the Political Fix stock picks portfolio, Jim?

Jim Pickard
This is kind of very self-interested, but I’ve just come from King’s Cross, where I was interviewing Matthew Pennycook, who is Labour’s shadow housing minister. He’s a very serious-minded, intelligent guy who I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in the shadow cabinet or the actual cabinet pretty soon.

Lucy Fisher
OK. He’s won you over. Miranda?

Miranda Green
I’m gonna buy Kemi Badenoch because I’ve been trying to, in a sort of Monopoly board-type way, buy up all the potential leadership challengers in the Tory party for a sort of post-election showdown. And I don’t hold Kemi . . . 

Lucy Fisher
OK, very strategic.

Miranda Green
Yeah. And whilst poor James Cleverly having gone from incredibly popular as foreign secretary to trying to clear up appalling messes in the Home Office, we’ll probably see his ratings go down with the Tory party membership and while Suella Braverman is felt to have gone too far and probably screwed up her own chances to a certain extent, Kemi Badenoch — who’s also in the most popular three — is just quietly plugging away. So I want to be . . . 

Jim Pickard
He’s very expensive you could be buying at the top.

Miranda Green
Yeah, maybe, maybe.

Lucy Fisher
Also, she got into hot water this week, didn’t she, when she said that there was an epidemic of gay children being told they’re trans. Language that you . . . Do you think she wanted to pick that row weighed into that?

Miranda Green
I’m not sure she was picking a row. I think she was probably doing her job but it’s a bad word to use. But on that topic, she’s probably where the public is.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. I’m also buying this week and I’m going for Leo Docherty. Who that, you may ask. While he had the pretty big front and centre role in the Commons on Thursday of announcing this major cyber operation by the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency, against hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, academics, journalists. And of course, you might ask, well, why wasn’t the foreign secretary announcing that? Of course, David Cameron is in the Lords. So he’s a junior foreign minister who I think is gonna get a lot more airtime down to that decision.

Miranda Green
Hmm. Smart pick.

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Lucy Fisher
Jim, Miranda, I’ll be seeing both of you at karaoke later. But for now, that’s it.

Miranda Green
Which will not be recorded.

Lucy Fisher
No videos, no pictures. But thank you for sharing your thoughts in public on the podcast.

Jim Pickard
Pleasure.

Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. So do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating. It really helps spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Andrew Georgiades and Petros Gioumpasis were the broadcast engineers. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next week.

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