Can Rishi defuse the timebomb ticking under his party? Theresa knows…

A rebellious parliamentary party, never-ending psychodramas and the threat of no-confidence votes… the former prime minister, who tried getting the Conservatives to back her Brexit deal, will feel her successor’s pain over his Rwanda migration plan, says Sean O’Grady. But will it end with another Downing Street resignation?

Prime minister Rishi Sunak and his predecessor, Theresa May (WPA Rota)

Anyone remember Theresa May? Tory prime minister destroyed by factionalism? Sound familiar?

Rational, policy orientated, methodical, hard-working and thus not unlike our present incumbent, she too had the wrong skill-set, shall we say, for the party crises of her time. She simply could not comprehend just how nihilistic and disloyal her own MPs could be. Rishi Sunak, who was a newly elected MP at the time, can’t have imagined that he would be going through much the same psychodrama as May endured for too long. He too finds himself trying to lead an unleadable party. It never ends well.

You may vaguely recall the nervy knife-edge votes of the unhappy May premiership. The backstops. The backstop to the backstops. The unbreakable deadlines that came and went. Technical solutions for the Irish border that never were. Michel Barnier. The rebels bullying her for concessions only to come back for more. When she placated the Leavers, the Remainers opposed to her. When she tilted back towards the Remainers, the Leavers deserted her.

Today, it’s eerily similar. Sunak finds that the centrist One Nation Group will vote with Sunak… but won’t if Sunak amends the Bill to suit the rightist European Research Group (ERG) and the rest of the Right. If he gets his Rwanda bill through, the reckoning is merely put off to another day.

May, too, had to politely tolerate the supreme pomposity of the hard Right. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s patronising her. David Davis showing his insouciance in the face of cold, hard detail. The attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, asking the Tory rebels in his fruity basso profundo four years ago: “What are you playing at? What are you doing? You are not children in the playground. You are legislators, and this is your job.”

Cox, by the way, is nowadays backing Sunak – consistent, if nothing else. He wisely points out that the ERG policy of ruling out all judicial intervention on deportations would cause the Rwanda treaty to be rescinded – by Rwanda. Just as May had to keep an eye on Brussels, so too must Sunak retain Kigali on side. Sovereignty always has its limits.

There’s another recurring feature to afflict both May and Sunak: the permanent treachery of Boris Johnson, a foreign secretary so untrusted he was kept well away from Brexit policy.

The Tory addiction to intrigue is as powerful as ever, and can only dismay the public. In the late 2010s, we witnessed the rise to prominence of people who styled themselves, absurdly, as “Spartans”, when the only thing they’d ever fought for is a decent table at a fancy restaurant: Bill Cash, parliamentary curiosity suddenly boring the a***s off an entire nation; Mark Francois – part Del Boy, part Penfold off Danger Mouse, and leader of the European Research Group, a body that never knowingly conducted any kind of research – strutting around self-importantly with the fate of the government in his chubby little fingers.

With his “Star Chamber” of cranks purporting to sit in judgment on the fate of the premier, Francois was perhaps the most pompous, but only one of poor Theresa’s many tormentors. The only difference now is the plethora of unmanageable rightist Tory factions – Common Sense Group, Northern Research Group, New Conservatives, Conservative Democratic Organisation… – to put Sunak through a repeated cycle of Hell.

The fact is that Sunak’s Rwanda Bill is the equivalent of the May Brexit plan – the best that can be realistically managed, but satisfying none of the party puritans. As with May, he may well win some votes, such as the imminent vote on the Rwanda Bill’s Second Reading, on the promise it is “amendable”, and some mythical compromise can be discovered in a few weeks. But all he is doing, as his predecessor did with her many postponements, is to kick the can down the road.

Sooner or later, there will come a point, as with Brexit in 2017-19, when logic can no longer be defied and the crisis will reach a crescendo. Last time round, it was resolved – superficially – by Johnson’s famous doctrine of cakeism. At this distance, the UK might have been better off if May had got her much-maligned deal through. We’d still be in the single market and there’d be no border on the Irish Sea. Imagine!

Anyway, poor old May went through the agonies, just as Sunak is going to. No matter what May tried to do with Brexit, it was either too soft for the Right; or too hard for the Tory Left. Or, in a series of cruel and humiliating parliamentary divisions, her various variations on the dream of a compromise Brexit deal were sometimes rejected by both wings of her own party, plus every opposition party in the House of Commons and Larry the Downing Street cat.

To this day, May holds the unwelcome distinction of having suffered the heaviest parliamentary defeat in modern British democratic history for a vote on government business – when, in January 2019, MPs rejected her Brexit deal by 432 to 202, a resounding majority of 230. She immediately called a vote of confidence in her government, but her party wasn’t through with her yet. She won the vote, and the misery continued. She lost 33 divisions on her Brexit withdrawal agreement. Eventually, even her stamina ran out.

May had no majority, thanks to her snap election in 2017, and her minority administration theoretically had a couple of years to run. Sunak has a nominal majority of almost 60, but an election must realistically be held next year. For May, it was Boris Johnson’s plotting that ended her premiership, and he won his “get Brexit done” election – though, as we see now, he did so on an illogical false prospectus.

Sunak will eventually simply run out of time and be turfed out by the electorate. He should never have made his pledge to stop the boats, nor to revive the Rwanda plan. Unlike May with the EU Withdrawal Agreement, Sunak did not have to have the Rwanda plan define his premiership.

But, fair enough: it’s not entirely his fault that his party has to behave like children in the playground.