Rishi Sunak's Rwanda Bill: Tories' descent into chaos over immigration shows why they're unfit to run the country – Euan McColm

Despite heading for a heavy election defeat, Conservative MPs think they have the space to indulge their disagreements

In the end, the result of the vote was neither here nor there. The damage had already been done. Conservative infighting over the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda may have come to a head this week, but the policy has been hurting the party for a long time.

Under pressure from voters in the south of England – and from the right of the Tory party – to take more decisive action to stop illegal immigration, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in April of last year a plan that would see some asylum seekers who’d crossed the English Channel given a one-way ticket to Rwanda. This, said Johnson, would act as a great deterrent to the gangs illegally smuggling people into the country on small boats.

Some, myself included, were inclined to believe this policy – shocking or bold, depending on your stomach for cruelty – was designed not so much to tackle illegal immigration but to distract attention from Johnson’s ongoing woes over “Partygate”, and to feed into a culture war that sees the right try to demonise the vulnerable.

Conservative party members leave Downing Street following a breakfast for right-wing MPs yesterday as Rishi Sunak sought to shore up support ahead of the Rwanda Bill vote (Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images)

But, whatever the motivation behind the agreement with Rwanda, the flaws in the policy were clear from the start. Was Rwanda, with its own human rights controversies, a safe place to send asylum seekers? Could the UK enact this policy while sticking to the rule of international law? More than a year and a half since the announcement of the plan, no asylum seekers have been sent to Rwanda and the issue continues to tear the Tory Party apart.

We’ve come to a bizarre pass. The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled the plan unlawful on the grounds that genuine asylum seekers risk, after being sent to Rwanda, being returned to the home countries they fled in fear for their lives and so Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wishes MPs to vote in support of the position that the African nation is safe.

Forget the evidence from international aid agencies and United Nations observers that Rwanda is problematic, all of this can be swept aside with a vote in the House of Commons which will enshrine, in UK law, Rwanda’s status as a safe place. Naturally, the Rwanda plan – inhumane though it may appear to even the casual observer – is not tough enough for the cranks of the Tory right, who demand the Prime Minister goes further and harder. The Tory MPs on the European Research Group in the Commons don’t offer specific solutions to the problems they identify with the policy. Instead, of course, they prefer to concentrate on undermining the Prime Minister.

I’m perfectly able to live with Rishi Sunak’s discomfort. The Tory party’s self-destructive instincts are a matter for its members. But it does seem extraordinary that, with poll after poll showing the Conservatives are on course for a heavy defeat at the next general election, its MPs think they have the space to indulge their disagreements.

Voters do not warm to divided parties for the very good reason that they cannot be depended upon to provide stable government. At a time when the Tories should be trying to pull together, they’re falling apart. They thoroughly deserve the defeat heading their way.