There is an ingenious solution to the deepening crisis in which Rishi Sunak finds himself. The Prime Minister could pass an Act of Parliament declaring that the Conservative party under his leadership is united and popular with a grateful nation.
Since neither is true, this Sunak security bill should contain clauses limiting the publication of opinion polls to surveys that show enthusiasm for the Tories.
Such a plan has two flaws: it wouldn’t work and it would look ridiculous. But that shouldn’t stop Sunak. The same shortcomings applied to the tinpot plan to declare Rwanda a “safe country” for the purpose of deporting asylum seekers, while the Supreme Court has ruled – in fact and not on opinion – that this is not the case.
The sinister absurdity of an attempt to create an alternative reality through legislation is lost in the breathy theatrical atmosphere of a parliamentary setting: the briefings and counter-briefings; whispering whips and emergency conclaves of MPs in self-aggrandizing ‘star chambers’.
The passage of the Rwanda Bill to its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening spared Sunak a spectacular humiliation. (No government has lost a vote at that stage since 1986.) But the pain is only postponed. At the time of writing, around 24 Tory MPs are believed to have abstained. A completely devastating uprising was postponed pending concessions on a scale that Downing Street is unlikely to grant. A fiction about leadership is kept alive by the prime minister pretending he can appease his critics, who in turn pretend to be plagiarists.
The whole spectacle is grimly reminiscent of Theresa May’s doomed attempts to push her Brexit deal through the House of Commons. The underlying questions about what a sensible policy might look like were also submerged in a froth of fantasy politics. The formulation of the argument was distorted as Tory hardliners applied impossible tests of ideological purity and demanded concessions incompatible with the duty to govern responsibly.
In these strange internal Tory civil wars, the process of reporting events becomes a kind of complicity in the bewilderment of public debate. To explain what is happening, it is necessary to treat ridiculous proposals as if they were serious, and to spread the opinions of stirring contenders as if they were eminent lawyers.
A reliable indicator that the Tories have succumbed to the old ailment is the return to the news channels of Mark François. The chairman of the Tory backbench European Research Group (ERG) has delivered his inexpert judgment on the Rwanda Bill with unhealthy prominence like a giant bead of sweat on Westminster’s fevered brow.
The height of the Brexit delirium was the belief that the best alternative to May’s imperfect deal was to leave the EU without a deal at all. Now the ERG, in the same hallucinatory vein, wants Sunak to exempt Britain from international treaty obligations that could give asylum seekers every possible reason to resist flying to Rwanda.
Downing Street has already agreed to the closure of almost every legal avenue. That’s not enough for a faction that sees intolerable loopholes emerging from the tiniest of threads that could ever connect Britain to the European Convention on Human Rights.
To understand this pathology, it helps to distinguish between the policy question that has caused the current inflammation – how to stop the trade in boats that illegally transport migrants across the Channel – and the underlying neurotic obsession with impeccable national sovereignty.
These two issues are closely linked, because the idea of dinghies loaded with uninvited foreigners coming ashore in Kent feels to many people like a systematic border violation. The power to take those people directly to another country, where they will be gladly received (in exchange for a hefty fee), feels like something a sovereign nation should be able to do.
But if the only question was how to stop the boats, the Rwanda plan could be factored into a rational cost-benefit equation. Does it work? Is it worth it? The answer would be no. It fails every practical test, even before ethical and legal judgments are involved.
There are not enough places in Kigali for people already in Britain waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. There is no evidence that the threat of deportation is stopping more people from crossing. The tens of millions of pounds it all costs could be better spent on measures closer to home and with a greater chance of results: cooperation with other European countries; eliminating the existing backlog of cases; have a functional asylum process, including safe and legal routes, so that refugees are not forced to take to the water.
Sunak is familiar with that analysis. Rwanda was never his idea. When he is questioned about this, he draws attention in a funny way to other parts of migration policy. Last month’s Supreme Court ruling was the moment for the Prime Minister to call off a moribund plan, salvage some credibility as a pragmatist and transition to an evidence-based approach. It would have been messy. There would have been a fierce outcry among the Tory backbenchers, perhaps even a resignation of the ministers. But that was coming and at least the battle would have been fought on terms chosen in Downing Street.
Sunak’s easy blunder was that he thought there was a third way between adhering to the rule of law and reducing to zero the chance of an asylum seeker appealing against forced deportation to Rwanda.
The two positions are irreconcilable. Stifling every conceivable appeal to justice would extinguish a pilot light of democracy. And any compromise involving even an imagined submission of the government to judicial authority would be rejected by Tory hardliners. It would insult their fundamentalist vision of national sovereignty: politicians acting according to what they regard as the will of the people, not only free from meddling continental judges, but above the reproach of domestic courts populated by left-wing lawyers of dubious patriotism.
The militant Tory tendency is no more open to diluting that ideological elixir on asylum claims than it was willing to blur the EU’s sharp dividing line with a ‘soft’ Brexit.
Sunak is a fool if he thinks he can change that attitude through persuasion or tactical concessions as much as May could. The category error is the belief that leader and party are on the same side and disagree only about the means to achieve a common goal.
Such coordination does not exist. Sunak is expanding the rule of law as far as he thinks he can, while staying just within the bounds of international respectability for a country that has independent courts and respects treaties. To achieve this, he needs the support of MPs who see this line as the line where real conservatism begins, and who despise the hesitation to cross it.
Related: It’s Rishi Sunak’s twilight zone: a reenactment of the Brexit battle that never ends | Marina Hyde
The Prime Minister thinks he is keeping his party on the road by steering to the right. His supporters will continue to pull harder and harder towards the ditch, from where they will blame the crash on a weak leader who followed incorrect liberal instructions.
The course has been set. Only the timing and extent of the wreck are unknown. Sunak chose this fate by trying to erase inconvenient facts from existence. That was the moment he passed the point of no return on the road of ideological delusion littered with the abandoned hopes of past conservative leaders who once thought they could navigate back to common sense.