'These Tory turkeys are about to vote for a Christmas bloodbath'
There is no more certain harbinger of immediate doom than a politician giving a tetchy press conference.
It's like watching a turkey ruffling its feathers, pumping up its wattle, and fixing its mad, beady eyes on another turkey, all affronted dignity and threats of psychopathic violence. On Christmas Eve. Mate, whatever you think THIS is, THIS is not your biggest problem.
So when Rishi Sunak saw his Immigration Minister flounce out of the door that his Home Secretary had only just been ejected through, told his backbenchers they had a year left to pull it together and then called an emergency meeting with hacks to tell them he knew what he was doing, it was clearly the day to set the oven-timer for a slow festive roast.
You've not got a year, chum. Your political life expectancy can now be numbered in days, and not many of them.
"Honestly, I've just about had it up to here" (PA)Politicians fight like a bag of snakes on monkey spice at the best of times. But throw in a weak leader and certain electoral defeat, and they become rabid - gouging, chewing, disembowelling each other in a media melee which titivates the journalists and turns off voters.
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Rishi Rich was supposed to calm those waters. A spreadsheet fiend with enough money to shelter him from the corrupt friendships that permanently-broke Boris Johnson kept making, a money man who'd never scare the bankers like wild-eyed Liz Truss.
Yet the Tory MPs who voted him in, and have the collective self-awareness of an ocean liner packed with TikTok influencers, never realised that he couldn't fix their great, unfixable problem: an unhealthy obsession with immigration.
That's why they've spunked a third of a billion pounds on a plan that won't work, for a thing that voters don't want, delivered in a way no Tory likes, for an aslyum processing centre that doesn't exist, in a country that isn't safe.
... and a partridge in a pear tree (PA)Surveys show that 60% of Brits don't think immigration is a problem. Only 10% think it's the most important issue we have. And while immigration has hit record levels, general concern about it has evaporated over the past decade. On each of those points, the Conservative Party is in official opposition to The Great British Public.
And why? Because Brexit. Because in 2016 it not only mattered more to voters, it mattered enough for some of the worst maniacs we'd ever produced to win a vote, and then win a landslide. Immigration immigration immigration, thought the Tories, while the public thought: "There's a lot more migrants around. Aren't they nice?"
The Tories spent years arguing about border controls, while voters saw the benefits of immigration. According to data collected by the FT, in 2012 immigration was considered to have a net negative impact on the NHS of -15%. Today, after the pandemic and weekly applause on the doorstep for key workers, public opinion puts the effect of immigration on the NHS at 40 points higher, at a very positive +25%.
Perhaps public views changed because Brexit was handled badly, or because they read fewer newspapers now. Maybe Covid made us nicer, or maybe the very fact that immigration has risen a lot meant we were forced to get used to it. For whatever reason, the British are now ranked among the least-bothered-about-migration countries in the world, while our government is determined to stake its continued existence on it.
Please make your own joke about James Cleverley putting his finger in a dyke (Getty Images)That alone is not enough to bring down a Prime Minister, although it will certainly lose a general election. No, what's sending Sunak to the chopping block is that the emergency legislation he's come up with to fly 7% of immigrants, who are mostly-genuine aslyum seekers, to Rwanda in a deal that's cost £290m before it's even begun, doesn't please anyone. And there's a lot of them.
So there are 20 backbenchers in the ERG, the Brexit equivalent of hardline imams in Tehran. There's another 20 or so in the Common Sense Group, who are by comparison ISIS: the most foam-flecked headbangers the party has, who consider the ERG a bunch of pansy-ass liberals. Then there are 110 in the One Nation caucus, who are more like a happy-clappy Church of England vicar who just wants everyone to be friends.
And these loons - along with another 200 or so, half of them in government - have been told to vote next Tuesday on a bill that 40 of them think isn't tough enough, 100 of them think is too tough, and no-one thinks is good enough to work in any event. All to tackle 7% of immigration, when the government itself let in the other 93% and the voters don't much mind.
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Sunak has a working majority of 56, and the festive goodwill of no-one.
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