Things seem to go from bad to worse for the Tories. They are now a stonking 27 per cent behind Labour in the latest YouGov/Times opinion poll with Reform UK on 12 per cent. They are assailed from the Right and Left, and one has to feel for Sunak. The tightrope he walks seems pretty precarious.
Who would have Sunak’s job?
But Sunak, his advisors and his backbenchers just make things worse. The focus on the Rwanda deportation scheme for illegal migrants, for example, is a disaster. Squeezing the Bill through the House of Commons last week finally by a majority of 44 just confirms Sunak’s weakness. It was excruciating to witness the aggressive interventions from some 60 Tory MPs saying the Bill wasn’t strong enough before finally pushing it through. Nobody, least of all the public, think the scheme is going to work despite spending £240 million to date. When the President of Rwanda, seeing his country constantly getting trashed in the media, has had enough you know the game is up. The Bill will go to the House of Lords, get amended, come back to the House of Commons, get passed, and then will be challenged in the courts. It is highly unlikely a single person will be deported to Rwanda this side of the election.
And the bizarre thing is that the government has had some success with illegal migrant channel boat crossings. They are down by a third in the past year but all the noise over Rwanda has hidden this.
Keir Starmer just has to sit back and watch the Tories implode, now helped by another intervention from ex-cabinet minister Sir Simon Clarke. Writing in The Telegraph he describes Sunak as “leading the Conservatives into an election where we will be massacred” and urges him to step down. Oh dear indeed.
The only hope for the Tories is that Reform UK’s polling at 12 per cent, which would cost them dozens of seats, is exaggerated. There is some evidence for this but even that won’t save them.
Footnote on Trump
For some time, Trump has been the clear favourite to win the Republican nomination. Whilst the size of his victories in Ohio and New Hampshire is depressing, there is a long way to go before November. Whether Nikki Haley stays in the race or not through to Super Tuesday in March (she will probably get a thrashing in her home state of South Carolina) will provide some insight into Trump’s perceived viability throughout the year. The two issues will be whether Trump is still the candidate by November and whether Biden can still beat him. We are no closer to knowing the answer to these two questions despite the primary events of the last couple of weeks.
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