Patrick O’Flynn

There is a modern country music standard called 'When You Say Nothing At All'. The song, taken to the top of the UK pop charts by the Irish singer Ronan Keating a quarter of a century ago, is a treatise on the power of non-verbal communication. The central 'hook' line involves someone telling their lover: 'You say it best when you say nothing at all.' That sentiment came to mind in an altogether less romantic context on Thursday, as I was listening to radio news reports of Keir Starmer’s opening salvos in this crucial year in politics while on a long drive.

Let the trumpeters trumpet and church bells across this land peal away in celebration: the Home Office has an administrative achievement to its name. According to ministers, a 'legacy' backlog of almost 92,000 asylum claims made before the end of June 2022 has been cleared, just as Rishi Sunak pledged that it would be. It is hardly the equivalent of the Union flag flying again over South Georgia early in the Falklands War. But nonetheless let us just rejoice for a moment at that news given how seldom it is that the Home Office hits any target whatsoever. Yet after our rejoicing is done we must, alas, kick our brains into gear and unpack what this really means.

How is the idea that Nigel Farage might join the 'broad church' Conservative party going then? Given that he floated the notion mainly to troll the party’s high-ups and then they breathed life into it mainly to try and keep right-leaning voters on board, it’s going about as well as one might expect. Which is to say terribly. On Thursday, Farage replied as follows to a tweet by James Cleverly that had sought to claim credit for the lack of small boat Channel crossings over Christmas: 'You may be called Cleverly but you are clearly a moron. I am close to Dover now, the wind has been gusting 50 mph…That is why there are no migrant crossings. You charlatans and liars all deserve to lose your seats at the election.

That best-selling 1970s toy Action Man proved the power of evolution. First, the painted hair on the initial models was superseded by 'realistic' flock hair and then came an 'eagle eyes enhancement' that allowed the eyeballs to be moved back and forth via a lever at the back of the head.   One is put in mind of this by the current photograph of Keir Starmer in combat fatigues standing in front of some especially fierce-looking British soldiers. Fixing the camera with a steely gaze and benefiting from his square jaw and Martin Sheen-style Hollywood hair, the Labour leader comes across as a later series commanding officer Action Man. I dare say his shadowy team of advisers has by now even equipped him with fully gripping hands.

Do not let the relatively comfortable margin of victory for the Rwanda Bill’s second reading fool you: we have now moved squarely into the 'third Brexit' stage of British politics. The first British exit from looming European control over key policy levers came when eurosceptics beat off a plot to take the country into the single currency. The second Brexit, obviously, was actual Brexit, when we voted to 'take back control' of our laws and especially our borders by leaving the EU and ending free movement obligations.  During each of these two mighty and protracted struggles, both of which almost tore the Tory party apart, those resisting the movement of sovereignty away from the nation state and into supra-national European institutions were depicted as jingoistic headbangers.

When he found out that a career-minded MP called Rishi Sunak had come out in favour of leaving the EU, David Cameron turned to George Osborne and declared: ‘We’ve lost the future of the party.’ Almost eight years later, Sunak should be turning to his own wing man – Oliver Dowden perhaps or even Cameron himself – and saying the same thing about the resignation of Robert Jenrick as immigration minister. Because Jenrick quitting over the Rwanda Bill not being strong enough is an equally telling moment. The 41-year-old Jenrick comes from the same well-mannered, centre-right Tory tradition as Sunak. He is in politics for the long haul and undoubtedly sees a return to full Cabinet rank as part of his personal career plan.

Whither Newsnight? Or do I mean wither, Newsnight – shortly to be reduced to a 30-minute debate show shorn of more than half its staff. As a teenage news and politics junkie, I grew up on this programme, watching it from its 1979 inception and through its 1980s heyday when that broadcasting giant Sir John Tusa was the main anchorman. Just three years after Tusa departed in 1986, Jeremy Paxman became a presenter and Newsnight’s indispensability was thus preserved. So it is hard not to be saddened by the latest swingeing cuts imposed on the programme by BBC high-ups. And yet, that is a feat I have found myself achieving; not the merest flicker of regret at their decision to transfer it to broadcasting’s end-of-life ward.

As they headed into the autumn, Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives needed a gamechanger. Their gradual recovery in the polls from the dog days of Liz Truss had stalled not very far from base camp and began sliding into reverse. Destroying what was left of the party’s reputation on the most important issue to its 2019 voter coalition was not the gamechanger many people had in mind. But that is what has occurred following the sacking of Suella Braverman and subsequent developments on both legal and illegal immigration.

The rise of Ukip and the highway to Brexit was greatly smoothed by the widespread perception that British governments had lost control of immigration. For many years, we purists in matters of nation-state independence struggled to articulate a stand-alone ‘sovereigntist’ argument that would catch fire with the wider public. But then Tony Blair threw open the UK labour market to millions of workers from the A8 EU accession countries, without even taking advantage of the transitional controls offered to existing member states by Brussels. As enormous numbers of Poles, Slovakians and others came to Britain to compete for working class jobs, suddenly we were in business.

Of all the essential tasks facing Rishi Sunak when he became Prime Minister, bringing down the level of legal immigration should have been by far the most straightforward. This is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders All he had to do was tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson. He could then have tried to sell the idea to Tory-leaning voters that a downward direction of travel had been set in motion, with further down payments on the way (as Jeremy Hunt attempted to do with taxation yesterday).

Can the people around Rishi Sunak really be dim enough not to have anticipated that his reshuffle would go down like a lead balloon among social conservatives? It seems unlikely to me that Sunak’s Downing Street could be peopled by such clowns. Sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron into a great office of state was an unmistakeable sign of Sunak’s true political complexion, amounting to two fingers up to the party’s winning 2019 coalition of voters. So as we move, Sherlock Holmes-like, through the range of explanations, that leaves us having to consider the rather conspiratorial possibility that the Sunakites want to lose.

There is no point in critics of our activist judiciary kicking off about today’s Supreme Court’s decision that the government’s Rwanda policy is unlawful. This isn’t a case of ‘lefty lawyers’ thwarting honest politicians, but of incompetent politicians seeking to wish away the United Kingdom’s international treaty obligations without having the bottle to withdraw from them. This PM promised to do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop the boats and yet has failed to do so More precisely, it wholly vindicates Suella Braverman’s accusation of Rishi Sunak engaging in ‘magical thinking’ when rejecting her advice to push through more radical legal changes.

So farewell then to the great realignment: Suella Braverman out of a great office of state and David Cameron back into one. As electoral signals go, this one hardly needs much decoding. The alliance of social conservatives that fell into the Tory lap without them really understanding why has been spurned. The boarding school boys are back in charge and the possibilities of the Conservative party embracing much conservatism is at an end. Everything that has happened since 2016 has in effect been wiped in the Westminster equivalent of a Bobby Ewing shower scene. It just needs Cameron to stare at us quizzically as if puzzled at our collective double-take for us to understand that it was all just a dream.

Can Rishi Sunak still catch a break or has the plughole spiral of British politics now dragged him firmly into its unsparing ambit? It is just possible that he will come up for a lungful of air on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court delivers its long-awaited verdict on whether the Rwanda scheme is legal. More likely, the justices will rule the plan incompatible with their ever-more elastic interpretations of European Convention rights, sending him whirling further downwards. Suella Braverman probably won’t be Home Secretary by then. Or, if she is, she will probably walk should Sunak fail immediately to come round to her view that we must now leave the Convention and its supervisory court in Strasbourg.

If prizes were dished out for saying what the unwashed and un-woke are thinking then Suella Braverman would be garlanded in medals and have a mantelpiece groaning with trophies. The Home Secretary scored bullseye of the year when she said that multiculturalism had failed. A couple of weeks later groups of people waving Palestinian flags and dressed in the garb of the Middle East could be seen dancing in the streets of London as news broke of the 7 October pogrom by Hamas: No further questions, your honour. Since then, she has made utterances that have shot to the top of the news agenda several times more.