Patrick O’Flynn

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens, the author Fay Weldon once declared.  This observation about life’s tendency to deliver sudden squalls between periods of apparent calm could certainly be applied to the leadership of the Conservative party.  It is only a year ago that Kemi Badenoch rather brilliantly used the leadership contest that followed the downfall of Boris Johnson to force her way into the top rank of Conservative politicians after having been overlooked during various Johnsonite Cabinet reshuffles. Now her merits are widely acknowledged and she is firm favourite at the bookies to become the next leader of the party.

We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday. And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to our authorised Ukrainian refugee scheme in which women have outnumbered men by a ratio of two to one.  The British state first acknowledged this illicit traffic to be a crisis on 29 December, 2018, when the then home secretary Sajid Javid cut short a family holiday to deal with the arrival of around 200 people by small boat that month.

It hardly takes a genius to work out that whoever is in charge of the government’s media grid over the summer parliamentary recess has designated this as 'illegals week'. Not only has Home Office floated the eye-catching idea of building a holding centre on Ascension Island, but the Bibby Stockholm has finally seen its first residents march up the gang plank. Yet another new crackdown on employers hiring illegal immigrant staff has been heralded by the Prime Minister, while Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has suggested that migrants who turn their noses up at being housed on barges should 'f*** off back to France'. And it’s only Wednesday. After half a year of failing to stop the boats, Sunak’s administration is determined at least to be seen to 'strain every sinew'.

There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme Court confirms the Appeal Court’s controversial view that the long-delayed Rwanda policy is unlawful. Way back in 2005, the Conservatives made a commitment in their manifesto that ‘asylum seekers’ applications will be processed outside Britain’. In the run up to that year’s election, Mark Reckless, then a researcher at Conservative Central Office, conducted a scoping exercise to identify a site for overseas processing. Ascension Island came out top of his list.

It will not come as much of a shock to learn that people who voted Conservative in 2019 generally think their chosen party is fairly useless these days. A new poll this week from YouGov has broken this down issue by issue – the results make chastening reading for any Tory MP who thinks the party has done a decent job in government over the past four years. The Tories have lost the approval of an outright majority of their 2019 voters on nearly every big political issue. Only 46 per cent of them now say the Conservatives are the best party on law and order, 44 per cent for the economy, 41 per cent for taxation, 37 per cent for handling asylum and immigration and 28 per cent for the NHS.

How big is a 20 point opinion poll lead and what word should we use to describe it – insurmountable, commanding, or maybe flaky? Right now, 20 points is the average advantage Keir Starmer and Labour hold over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives: 46 plays 26. In Tony Blair’s case, such a lead proved more than sufficient to propel him to his first epic win over the Conservatives. For 20 points was roughly the size of the polling advantage he took into the 1997 election campaign (although he had enjoyed some much bigger leads prior to that). On election day itself, Labour only beat the Tories on vote share by 13 points, which was still sufficient to secure a landslide majority.

After claiming that Labour is on the same side as criminal people-trafficking gangs, Rishi Sunak clearly owes a rival party leader an apology. The person he should be saying sorry to is not Keir Starmer but Boris Johnson. When Johnson struck a low blow against Starmer for having failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile while DPP, Sunak swiftly joined the pious outrage club against the then prime minister. 'I wouldn’t have said it,' he claimed, at what was a moment of particularly intense political peril and personal crisis for Johnson. Never mind that Johnson had thrown his below-the-belt punch immediately after Starmer had mounted an extraordinarily unpleasant attack on him that alleged he ruined the lives of everyone he came into contact with.

The Tory green brigade now tends to be heavily concentrated in the House of Lords, where Zac Goldsmith recently joined John Gummer, now known as Lord Deben. This pair were jointly responsible for the Conservative party 'Quality of Life' report of summer 2007, which argued: 'Beyond a certain point – a point which the UK reached some time ago – ever-increasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden.' Had the hard-bitten Andy Coulson not arrived to reframe the Tory message, the party could well have gone into a general election in the autumn of that year with its central charge against Gordon Brown being that he had made the British people too well-off.

'One out of three ain’t bad' isn't a saying you hear often. Yet avoiding a clean sweep of by-election defeats overnight will surely have Rishi Sunak breathing a sigh of relief. Holding on in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip not only means the Tories have exceeded the rock-bottom expectations of the pundit class, but there is an unmistakeable further intuition hanging in the air: had Johnson not lost his courage and instead decided he would trust his electors and stand in a by-election under the recall process, then he surely could this morning be the man who had pulled off an unlikely triumph. And imagine how he would have milked that.

When the Lib Dem peer Brian Paddick complained on social media last month that the House of Lords was keeping punishing hours, it is fair to say the plight of peers was not greeted with universal sympathy. Lord Paddick, the Lib Dem spokesman on home affairs in the upper house, had the battle around the Illegal Migration Bill in mind when he complained: 'Last night I got home from @UKHouseofLords four hours earlier than the night before…10.30 p.m. instead of 2.30 a.m…I’m 65, many colleagues are older. This is unsustainable. So tired.

The announcement by Ben Wallace that he will stand down as Defence Secretary at the next Cabinet reshuffle and then give up being an MP at the general election hardly counts as a sensational turn of events. There are at least a dozen happenings at the top end of the Tory party from the past few months that put it in the shade where personnel matters are concerned. One thinks, for example, of the ongoing technicolour splurge of the quitting of Nadine Dorries, the ushering of Dominic Raab towards the exit door and of course the abandoning ship of the great blond bombshell himself before he could be made to walk the plank.

When Rishi Sunak made ‘stop the boats’ one of his key pledges at the start of the year he mentioned the importance of being seen to ‘strain every sinew’ in pursuit of that goal. This led some of us to suppose he had a fall-back position should he prove unable to stop all illegal immigration via dinghies across the Channel: that if he was seen to try everything but ended up being blocked by the liberal establishment then he might still be given credit by voters who would rally to his side in any general election fought on the issue. The first string to his bow has already snapped. He has not stopped the boats. He cannot even now claim that he has substantially reduced them.

When confronted with a list of problems and setbacks afflicting the Government, a minister recently told me: 'The darkest hour is just before the dawn.' I doubt she really believed it, which is just as well because, in a scientific sense at least, it turns out not to be true. But Tory ministers – aware of the party's looming fate at the next election – are seeking such crumbs of comfort. In recent weeks, there has been a tsunami of announcements from backbenchers and former ministers that they won’t be standing again. Unhelpful by-elections look set to confirm what many suspect: the Tories are heading for defeat, come the next election.

The very modest poll 'bounce' that Rishi Sunak delivered for the Tories after the farcical Liz Truss premiership has proved to be of the dead cat variety. The most recent YouGov poll showed the Conservatives at just 22 per cent – about half the vote share they achieved in the 2019 general election. This, you might think, explains Labour’s buoyant 47 per cent rating in the same poll. Well, not really. Because digging deeper into the figures reveals that only 15 per cent of 2019 Tory voters have switched to Keir Starmer’s party. That’s about one in seven. Even the little-known Reform party led by Richard Tice is doing better than that, chalking up the support of 16 per cent of Boris Johnson’s collapsed coalition of Tory voters from four years ago.

If Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges already looked in terrible shape at the start of the week – which they did – then today’s events have placed one of them on its deathbed. The promise to 'stop the boats' was administered its last rites in the Court of Appeal this morning when Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett announced: 'The High Court’s decision that Rwanda is a safe third country is reversed. Unless and until the deficiencies in its asylum processes are corrected, removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda will be unlawful.' So the only country thus far identified as a destination for those many illegal arrivals to the UK who cannot be returned to their country of origin is now off-limits. The much-heralded deterrent effect of certain removal to central Africa is no more.

These are heady times for Britain’s smaller political parties. Seldom has there been as much interest from voters in breaking away from the stale embrace of the entity known to many as the 'LibLabCon'. On the left, the Greens keep growing – though their addiction to identity politics in general and the militant trans movement in particular puts a ceiling on their potential progress. In the muscular centre, there is a revival of the SDP making steady progress. The party, which these day is stoutly pro-Brexit and leans to the left on economics and the right on culture, won a second seat on Leeds City Council from Labour in May. It now has around 2,000 members, of which I am one.

Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold a pass giving him access to the Parliamentary Estate as a former MP. So it is odd then that almost nobody has commented on Keir Starmer’s exposure for the commission of a new political fraud – even though it came in the high-profile setting of PMQs.

The Commons privileges committee report into the conduct of Boris Johnson is completely damning. All the kerfuffle about whether the committee was justified in devising a new intermediate category of mendacity defined as 'recklessly misleading parliament' turns out to be irrelevant. The entire seven-strong committee, including the four Tory members on it, have found that Johnson deliberately misled parliament on multiple fronts. Johnson’s dissembling and purveying of falsehoods while prime minister is judged so serious that, had the blond bombshell hung around to take his punishment, the committee’s recommendation would have been a suspension from the Commons 'long enough to engage the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act'.

Such is Boris Johnson’s magnetic draw that his resignation gambit is still being discussed largely in terms of what it means for Boris Johnson: will he be back in the Commons next year? Could he lead his party again? But it is time to ponder what it means for Rishi Sunak, who after all is the Prime Minister and therefore in conventional terms currently a far more important figure than Johnson. It does not take a genius to work out that Johnson resurfacing with a malevolent eye and then blowing his lid like Moby Dick attacking the Pequod is very bad news for the captain of the ship of state.