Patrick O’Flynn

Why do very smart people so often do very stupid things? Possibly it is because they cannot see how their actions look to those not similarly bestowed with such cerebral gifts. Yet when you are an elected politician, it is the average Joes who ultimately get to decide your fate. The latest case in point is Rishi Sunak’s decision to grant an effective amnesty to up to 54,000 migrants who entered the UK illegally before March 2023.  Yet another promise of jam tomorrow is meant to sweeten a meal of mud pie today. That simply won’t work Unlawful arrivals after that date will in theory soon be subject to a standard removals regime once Sunak’s Illegal Migration Bill is on the statue book and the Rwanda scheme is up and running.

These are testing times indeed for longstanding members of the 'Boris Johnson is nothing like Donald Trump' fraternity. Once again, the British blond bombshell is at the centre of a giant political controversy in lock step with the American one. And once again he seems perfectly happy to make politics all about himself. As a longtime Brexiteer, I am one of those who will always be grateful to Johnson for the courage, vision and single-mindedness he showed in getting Brexit over the line following its attempted betrayal by Theresa May and hundreds of MPs in the 'rotten parliament' of 2017-19. Boris recognised that British democracy was in very great trouble.

Being a Brexiteer these days is like being Kenneth Williams playing Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo. Far too often we find ourselves crashing around the place bellowing: 'Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.' Last month Nigel Farage made waves by declaring that Brexit had 'failed' thanks to wilful Tory treachery. Prior to that, the Windsor Framework was interpreted as a conspiracy between Brussels and Rishi Sunak to bury Brexit. Let’s stop being so jumpy whenever Rejoiner fanatics seize on opinion polls showing a degree of Brexit regret The latest betrayal is said to be the decision by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch to curtail the scope of the Retained EU Law Bill.

When Rishi Sunak replaced Liz Truss in Downing Street last autumn, fundamentalism gave way to incrementalism. So far, the results have been suitably unspectacular: a nudging down of the inflation number more slowly than anyone envisaged; the bare avoidance of outright recession; debt at best stuck as a share of GDP; NHS waiting times that are only very slightly less appalling than they were. According to new polling from Ipsos UK, the electorate is so far unimpressed with these baby steps and generally believes Labour could do a better job.  Today Sunak travelled to Dover to give us an update on the last of his five key pledges – to 'stop the boats'. In short, he hasn’t.

Rishi Sunak’s pet theory that voters are relaxed about the level of legal immigration – so long as the government is in charge of it – and only really care about illegal immigration has just collapsed. New polling from YouGov shows that among 2019 Conservative voters, concern about immigration and asylum is now running nip and tuck with the state of the economy as their number one political issue (61 per cent include the economy and 60 per cent immigration when asked to name the top three issues). A vague undertaking from the Prime Minister about reducing immigration from the astronomical levels he has inherited isn’t going to cut the mustard The NHS lags far behind in third place, mentioned by 43 per cent.

Tessa Jowell once ignited a furious political row by claiming that inner-city youths active in criminal gangs were exhibiting a misdirected spirit of enterprise. ‘These people have very formidable entrepreneurial skills which they have put to bad use,’ she claimed. I was put in mind of her observation when watching the teenage TikTok miscreant Mizzy being grilled by Piers Morgan on television this week. For the benefit of the vanishingly small number of people still unaware of the exploits of Mizzy, real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, this youth has become notorious for videoing himself carrying out extremely unpleasant and traumatising ‘pranks’ on unsuspecting members of the public.

Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.  As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the big league now.

Back in the early days of the Blair governments, Alastair Campbell was reputed to have a rule for resignations: once a scandal had been in the news for ten consecutive days, a minister had to go. It was a stupid rule because it merely encouraged parliamentary lobby journalists to keep a story going until the limit was up in the expectation of claiming another ministerial scalp. Since then Alastair has claimed, possibly truthfully, that he cannot remember imposing this rule and had probably come up with it when the Tories were still in power as a means of further stoking up the atmosphere of crisis around John Major.

Despite the Conservatives having broken all their promises to bring down immigration volumes for 13 years in a row, conventional wisdom has it that migration is Labour’s Achilles' heel. However high the Tories have allowed immigration to go, the public has generally suspected that Labour would push it still higher. Brits have long memories about the party 'sending out the search parties' for immigrants under Tony Blair – nor have they forgotten Gordon Brown’s dumbfounded reaction to the migration scepticism of the redoubtable Gillian Duffy on the campaign trail in 2010.

Everyone knew that the Conservatives were going to take a pasting in the local elections. Aside from deserving a particular kicking for the horror show of 2022, with its runaway inflation and two prime ministerial defenestrations, this is just what happens to long-serving governments deep into parliaments. So the question foremost in the minds of Conservative MPs – who naturally will be regretful about losing hundreds of conscientious councillors – is whether the English public have sent a message that they have already decided to get behind Keir Starmer and Labour at the next general election. In other words, is it over?

In British politics the first order effect of any report into a past furore is always about how it impacts current party leaders. So the various early inquiries related to the invasion of Iraq, for example, were not really about honestly learning from mistakes, but about the extent of the damage they would inflict upon Tony Blair. Equally, the public inquiry into the handling of Covid was most eagerly anticipated when it was supposed that Boris Johnson would still be in 10 Downing Street upon its publication, as his opponents looked for a political bomb to blow him up. Now he has gone it rarely gets talked about at all.

On any objective assessment, things are not going well for Rishi Sunak. Despite being praised for bringing a sense of calm back to the process of government, the criteria by which he asked to be judged tell us that he is a failure. His five key objectives for the year, chosen allegedly on grounds of their achievability, are simply not on course. The small boats full of illegal immigrants continue to land on England’s southern coast in roughly the same preposterous numbers as arrived last year; the NHS remains a horror show of delays. Even his economic metrics are refusing to come right, especially the one about halving the rate of inflation by the end of 2023.

Something significant happened in Westminster yesterday. The Immigration Minister made a speech which showed a thorough understanding of the damage done to British society by unchecked illegal migration. Given that combating illegal, or 'irregular', migration is Robert Jenrick’s core task, you may feel that such an occurrence should be treated as commonplace. But here’s the thing: it hasn’t happened before. To have a minister close to the PM make such a speech should be acknowledged as an important breakthrough It certainly hasn't since the small boats phenomenon got going in earnest four years ago. The likes of Caroline Nokes, who held the post under Theresa May, or Tom Pursglove, who sat in the chair for a few weeks under Liz Truss, never got round to it.

When the Rwanda migrant removals programme was torpedoed by a European judge at a hastily-convened hearing one evening last summer, the notion that Britain had 'taken back control' of its borders crawled away to die. The anonymous judge at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights issued a controversial 'Rule 39' instant order. This blocked the removal of the few failed asylum seekers who had not already been sprung from the proposed inaugural flight via appeals made to British courts in the preceding days. It is likely Sunak himself is genuinely convinced that the current global asylum regime is unsustainable One Tory MP on the cultural right of the party sought out the then-PM Boris Johnson.

Few observers of politics can by now be in much doubt about the defective nature of Keir Starmer’s antennae when it comes to picking up the concerns of the British public. The number of U-turns the Labour leader has made once it has been explained to him what most voters actually think – the latest being over trans issues – is quite striking. But we should keep in mind that Rishi Sunak’s antennae are not especially reliable either. He is neither an early period Thatcher with an innate understanding of the instincts of 'our people', nor an early period Blair with a natural popular touch.

The spouse of one of Britain’s major party leaders would be forgiven for feeling both queasy and furious about Labour’s wave of attack ads against Rishi Sunak. Not Akshata Murty, aka Mrs Sunak, who has already been through some very rough stuff about her and her husband’s tax affairs – but Victoria Starmer, wife of Keir, on the basis that those who dish it out must expect to have to take it back in kind and without complaint. Politics is the proverbial rough old trade at the best of times, but there is now every sign that the looming 2024 general election will be one of the dirtiest ever.

All politics is local, as the old saying goes. It is, of course, an exaggeration. But it contains easily enough truth to merit keeping in mind if you are, say, a government approaching the last year of its mandate and anxiously seeking a path to a new one. One lesson contained within the phrase is that a policy can lumber you with a net loss of votes or seats even if it is found to be nationally popular: it may just be that where it bestows a broad benefit the policy is of low-salience, while where it impacts negatively it becomes the overwhelmingly dominant issue. This might well prove to be true of the government’s new approach to accommodating Channel migrants.

A few weeks ago, Keir Starmer was told by his advisers that he would have to U-turn on his radical stance on trans rights or he would not win the next general election. One senior Labour source told the Times back then: 'If Keir is still being asked by the time the election campaign begins what a woman is, then he’s lost on day one. Scotland is a warning to him… self-ID is not going to happen under a Labour government.' So it was only a matter of time before Starmer’s support for gender self-ID went the way of many of his other principled stances such as support for free movement, nationalising utilities, banning private sector involvement in the NHS.

Frank Sinatra once sang about the seductive properties of bright and shiny ephemera. 'Her heart will sing, singa-linga, wearing baubles, bangles and beads,' crooned Ol’ Blue Eyes. There is a temptation for anyone cynical about politics – that’s nearly all of us by now – to view the Government’s announcement of planned new asylum-seeker accommodation as a similarly knowing exercise in buttering us up with something eye-catching but insubstantial. Barges, barracks and airfields make up Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick’s latest attempt to get the electorate in the mood to couple-up with the Conservatives at the next election.