A Wish Called Rwanda: How Rishi Sunak Veered the Conservatives Badly off Course
Paul Connew gives an inside view on where the Prime Minister first went so badly wrong - and how nothing has gone right for the Conservatives since
Every editor envies the headline they would love to have written. But this punning, prophetic classic wasn’t produced by the redtops, but by the Conservative Home website on 24 April, just after Rishi Sunak finally forced his toxic, divisive Rwanda Bill through the Commons.
What came underneath made uncomfortable reading for the Prime Minister: “Spoiler alert: the Rwanda policy will not stop the boats. I know this. You know this. One hopes Rishi Sunak knows this. He is not an idiot. If he does know that his signature policy on illegal crossings will not work as an effective deterrent, he is being disingenuous. If he does not, he is being delusional.” So wrote William Atkinson, Conservative Home’s assistant editor and regular columnist.
Presumably, Sunak read it but shrugged it off, publicly clinging on to the Rwanda plan he saw as his life raft that would turn the polling tide.
Certainly, migrant boat hardliner Tory MP Natalie Elphicke read it before her theatrical PMQs defection to Labour that not only humiliated Sunak but proved part coup, part own goal for Sir Keir Starmer as many of his stunned MPs and frontbenchers resented his embrace of the right-wing Dover MP.
Why Sunak Changed Course
But what neither Starmer nor Elphicke and possibly not even Sunak himself knew on 10 May was that 12 days later the Prime Minister would shock and anger his MPs and most of his Cabinet by abandoning HMS Rwanda by announcing the snap 4 July General Election and not the October or November date they were counting on. The Cabinet’s anger and dismay exacerbated by being presented with a fait accompli as the Prime Minister had already secretly asked the King for consent to dissolve Parliament before he met them.
There were two key reasons. One was the advice from government law chiefs that legal challenges and operational hurdles meant there was no chance of getting migrant-laden planes off the ground by his much-trumpeted July dateline.
The second key reason? Warnings from the International Monetary Fund, and others, that the UK economy couldn’t afford the major autumn tax giveaway the Prime Minister and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had been counting on as the other weapon that might just bail them out and at least salvage a dignified defeat from a near wipeout electoral landslide.
Wetter not better
But when your luck’s out, it’s out. Sunak’s election announcement at the famous open-air No.10 lectern wasn’t just a washout but a nightmare scene Armando Iannucci wouldn’t have dared dream up for an almost beyond satire edition of The Thick Of It. A Prime Minister in a £3,000 suit, resembling a drowned rat who’d emerged from falling into the English Channel himself rather than from No.10, announcing a general election with as much dignity as he could muster while protesters loudly taunted him by playing Tony Blair’s 1997 victory anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. Even the Torygraph couldn’t resist the ‘Things Can Only Get Wetter’ line. If the Immortal Bard had been around he’d have come up with ‘An umbrella, an umbrella, my premiership for an umbrella’.
Farage weighs in
It was no surprise, then, that on 29 May Nigel Farage, Sunak’s populist bête noire, chose Dover to make his initial entry onto the campaign trail. For once, I couldn’t argue with Farage when he declared Sunak’s Rwanda plan collapse was the prime motive for his early election gamble.
Farage embodied further bad luck for a Prime Minister bedevilled by misfortune and misjudgement. By gambling on 4 July, it meant Farage would be around to attack Sunak and the Conservative government via his TV studio and personal trips to constituencies Reform was targeting. Had Sunak and his team stuck to their November election plan, Farage would have prioritised his profile-raising, financially rewarding role supporting Donald Trump in the US presidential election and Reform’s damaging vote share would have been reduced.
As it was, Farage blindsided everyone by announcing, at his 3 June press conference, that he would not only take over from Richard Tice as leader of the Reform party but also that he would stand as the party’s candidate in the Clacton constituency.
Realigning the Right?
But there is another intriguing subplot to the Farage GE2024 story. Allies of Farage and Boris Johnson (like it or not still Two Big Beasts of British politics) have held preliminary talks about a post-election ‘realignment of the Right’ without, so far, direct contact between the pair. Somehow I struggle to see two such egos ever really working together effectively, but that it’s even under discussion speaks volumes.
It's no great secret, however, that Farage would probably prefer to rejoin, in a suitably leading role, a Conservative party reshaped much closer to his image and beliefs than be at the helm of another minority party. If the right offer comes along in the wake of a Conservative ballot box massacre, don’t discount Farage abandoning the Reform ship, regardless of its election performance. There are also fixers behind the scenes exploring the case for a Conservative/Reform merger if the Conservatives suffer a catastrophic defeat and Reform rack up substantial votes while winning no more than a couple of seats.
Plotting the Succession
Clearly resigned to defeat, the Conservative party was already engaged in barely-concealed machinations to succeed Sunak within the first weeks of the election campaign. With the One Nation faction rallying around Penny Mordaunt (presuming she could even hold her own seat against the poll swing) ahead of what they fear will be a hard-right takeover with or without Farage on deck.
Indeed, with up to 80 Conservative MPs, including such luminaries as Gove, May, Raab, Wallace, Javid, Zahawi, Leadsom, and Redwood quitting Parliament and a steady flow of defectors to Labour and Reform, this has been a campaign fought by a government in the electoral equivalent of an intensive care ward. Whether it survives at all could prove a bigger media story over the coming weeks and months than the Starmer government’s first 100 days.
Not so Cleverly
A sign of Conservative desperation came with its tactical switch to focusing heavily on its older core support base, with its sudden National Service at 18 gimmick that only succeeded in uniting every opposition party, including Reform, against it, along with military top brass and the majority of teenagers themselves and more parents and grandparents than the government had bargained for. It didn’t help that Home Secretary James Cleverly, charged with unveiling it, looked as if he was making it up as he went along doing the TV studio rounds.
The other switch came with its Triple-Lock Plus announcement where the arithmetic didn’t seem to match the sales pitch. It didn’t spook Labour into instant cut-and-paste mode.
Desperately Seeking Boris
What about that other Big Beast — Boris? Some Conservative ministers declared at the start of the campaign that he would be taking up an active campaign role. Only for the Johnson camp to swiftly brief out, ‘Oh, no, he isn’t’. The former Prime Minister, who had already delayed starting his own highly lucrative GB News programme to concentrate on completing his equally lucrative multi-million-pound memoir deal, would also be out of the country for a slice of the campaign, it was revealed.
The best Sunak could expect from Johnson, it seemed, was stinging attacks on Starmer and Labour via his Saturday Daily Mail column rather than ringing personal endorsement of the man he blames for his own Prime Ministerial downfall.
The Times, They are A-Changing
Well-placed sources briefed me weeks before the campaign began that the Rupert Murdoch stable of The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun would back Starmer and Labour unless the polls shifted dramatically. It would be on the basis of the public’s ‘Time for a Change, give the other lot a chance’ mood music. Murdoch always wants to back winners and even in official retirement he still influences the big political calls.
The Mail titles have been noticeably and intriguingly more schizophrenic: at times desperately trying to boost Sunak’s hopes, at others seemingly resigned to a hefty Conservative defeat and seeing their mission simply to try and limit the scale of it.
Classic example? The front page of Saturday 25 May split between a positive interview with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves headlined: ‘Reeves: I’ll Never Play Fast and Loose with your Money’ promoted as ‘EXCLUSIVE Shadow Chancellor makes pledge to Mail readers’. The other half of the front page? A big blurb for a double-page Johnson column headlined ‘BORIS: Starmer would be the most dangerous and left-wing Labour PM since the 1970s’.
Rumour has it that, apart from constantly lamenting its beloved Boris’s downfall as Prime Minister, it was a Page 1 influenced by proprietor Lord Rothermere’s desire to build bridges to the Labour leader, and private polling revealing that around 50% of Mail readers planned to vote Labour.
Was it TikTok wot won it?
But despite steadily falling circulations Britain’s national titles still carry significant influence. GE2024 is the election where that influence has been increasingly eclipsed by WhatsApp, the podcast explosion, YouTube, Facebook, X, Substack, and other platforms, particularly among disillusioned Gen-Z and Millennials torn over whether to vote at all. The size of the turnout, especially among these groups, will become a major post-election study. Hats off to the social media expert Sky guest who suggested that this could be the ‘TikTok Wot Won It’ election. Another line I wish I’d thought of.
Incidentally, my award for the best podcast title goes to Sky’s Beth Rigby, Ruth Davidson, Jess Phillips offering Electoral Dysfunction. It was also intriguing talking to Gen-Z/Millennials how often the name of Byline Times cropped up as one they took notice of. Breaking with conventional media thinking, Byline Times, funded by subscription and crowdfunding, has added a slick election-year print product to its established, influential, investigation and campaigning website and TV channel.
Fighting in the TV Studio, Fighting on the Beaches
The 4 June opening TV head-to-head between Sunak and Starmer proved a messy, bad-tempered affair. At times Sunak resembled a cocksure head prefect. When an immediate YouGov snap poll showed viewers declaring the Prime Minister a narrow 51-49% winner (statistically a dead heat), it sent the pro-Conservative newspapers, desperate for some good news, into hysterical OTT ‘Rishi KO blow’ mode.
The euphoria evaporated somewhat when a follow-up poll gave it to Starmer by five points. Worse still, The Treasury issued a denial of Sunak's repeated debate line implying his claim Labour would impose a £2,000 tax hike on every family was based on independent Treasury figures. The UK Statistics Authority followed its announcement of an official investigation into the Conservative claim by joining the Treasury in condemning it.
The Conservatives risked further trouble by continuing to use it in national TV political broadcasts and attack ads. But even Conservative Bible The Spectator debunked it in no uncertain terms, along with Conservative Home. All of which opened the floodgate to a Labour 'Rishi’s as big a liar as Boris' counter-attack strategy publicly spearheaded by Starmer that could well prove to be the defining Sunak folly of the campaign.
The TV debate fallout triggered another own-goal disaster by Sunak when he left the 6 June D-Day commemorations in France to record a self-serving liar-denial interview with ITV's Paul Bland. Not only did it leave Starmer as the man filmed and photographed alongside the other world leaders and welcoming Ukraine's President Zelenskyy it invited the wrath of political opponents and veterans’ groups alike.
Sunk by the Channel
If Penny Mordaunt repeatedly saying during an election TV debate on Friday 7 June that it was “completely wrong” for Sunak to have left the D-Day commemorations early wasn't bad enough for the prime minister the weekend Conservative papers piled on the agony. There was growing evidence of the Telegraph and Express becoming Farage cheerleaders, both doubtless reflecting signs that Labour was heading for a bigger than Blair 200-plus overall majority, 50-plus seats for a resurgent LibDems, and Professor John Curtice reporting 1 in 4 2019 Conservative voters switching to Reform after Farage seized the leadership boosted support by at least 4%.
But most damning of all was the Daily Mail. A stinging 8 June leader was amplified by an excoriating Andrew Neil column headlined ‘Sunak has let down our veterans. He has let down the King. He has let down the country. This is terminal and will haunt him through his last days in politics’. Debunking efforts to blame advisers, Neil rightly declared of Sunak's Normandy retreat: “If you don't realise that, if it's not just a natural in-built, non-negotiable part of who you are, then you are not fit to be our prime minister. No amount of apology can change that”, adding “He has made a crushing Tory defeat inevitable.”
If the migrant boats crossing the English Channel was the motive for Sunak's 4 July election gamble, then flying back over it for a self-serving TV interview was the gamble that sank him and maybe the Conservative party's survival along with him.
This is an extract from the book, GENERAL Election 2024: The Message and The Messengers
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Greta title and great article.