The endgame looms for Sunak and the Tories. ‘Rwanda’ will be the epitaph on their political grave

Photograph: Reuters

The ship goes down and the panic starts. As the Tory party lurches towards the electoral rocks, the bridge is losing control and the crew are taking to the boats. Or at least some of them are, joined this week by a disaffected backbencher, Simon Clarke, and a reported band of a dozen rebels. Clarke’s thesis is that “an electoral massacre” can only be avoided if the ship mutinies and acquires its fifth captain in five years. His colleagues are mostly refugees from the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss eras, the source of so much of the Tories’ present troubles.

The new rebels are a measure of the herculean task that confronted Rishi Sunak on taking the Tory leadership just 15 months ago. A government long in office at this stage in a parliament has almost nothing going for it. Polls have sometimes been wrong – they forecast a Labour win in 1992 – but this seems unlikely now. They merely argue over the size of defeat. The Tories’ task is to keep their nerve, maintain loyalty to their leader and measure up to the challenge history has given them.

The trouble is that as the election approaches, Tory MPs worry less about their party winning and more about losing their seats and their jobs. A recent YouGov poll suggested as many as half may do so. For MPs such as Clarke who have never known opposition, this is enough to induce a loss of political nerve – and put pressure on their leader either to go or to offer a barrage of electoral bribes.

This runs directly counter to what was a sensible strategy for Sunak on taking power in 2022. Facing almost certain failure, his mission was to steady the ship. He needed to clear up the budgetary aftermath of the pandemic and the chaotic legacy of Johnson and Truss. He had to make a Tory vote in 2024 seem like one for stability and common sense. The first budget from his downbeat chancellor Jeremy Hunt conformed to this. Together, they seemed the ideal team for the job.

Since last summer, however, things have fallen apart. Sunak’s weeks have been filled with photo opportunities setting up decisions, or more often leaks of decisions, that have grasped at electoral straws. He and Hunt have signalled tax cuts, energy price caps, more childcare, higher pensions, more NHS recruits and rescued council budgets. Almost all are near meaningless for a regime with less than a year to run and absolutely no spare money. Worse has been the one issue that has replaced Europe as the perennial obsession of rebellious Tories: immigration.

All prime ministers have tended to depart office with a fatal phrase stamped as a memorial on their graves. For Margaret Thatcher it was the poll tax, for Tony Blair Iraq, for David Cameron it was Brexit and for Johnson it was Partygate. Sunak’s memorial is destined to be Rwanda. The policy was the talismanic favourite of his rightwing home secretary, Suella Braverman, on whom he was rumoured to have depended in his leadership bid. The iron law of cabinets is that home secretaries chosen for any reason other than merit are accidents waiting to happen. Braverman’s Rwanda was the prime minister’s great mistake.

Every occupant of Downing Street has needed an in-house adviser, a source of caution, a second thought in time of stress. Sunak has conspicuously lacked one. We know he had regarded Rwanda as a nonsense, as he, in effect, admitted when he was at the Treasury in 2022. Deporting a few hundred asylum seekers to central Africa would be absurdly expensive, statistically trivial and ethically dubious. Its declared purpose was buried in the reckless authoritarian concept of deterrence. Never can deterrence have been less plausible than in the case of those risking their lives on the nightmare trek across half the world.

Rwanda’s history as a deportation centre is more than chequered. It has become nothing but a totemic sop to rightwing opinion. Whatever the legality of any British deportation, it seems unlikely that a single plane will depart by election time, let alone a single migrant be shown as deterred. The reality is that illegal migration into Britain from continental Europe has one solution, and that lies in Europe. All else is pretence.

Sunak must now stagger on through the rest of 2024. He faces the terminal period of office that risks being defined by a policy that panders not to public opinion – which is equivocal on Rwanda – but to his right wing. If he has any concern for his reputation he will shelve Rwanda, cast aside his fixation on tax cuts and do everything to rescue public services, whose state is the most glaring failure of modern British government. His Commons jibes at Keir Starmer are like those of a man howling in the dark. He would do better to seek the Labour leader’s support in reforms that Starmer will next year have to implement.

What should matter now is the dignity with which Sunak completes what was always a difficult task. He should want it to be said of him that, in whatever shambles he left the Tory party, at least he did the right thing for the country.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist