‘Red Rishi’ no more: is Sunak shifting rightwards?

Rishi Sunak goes into the weekend one ally down after Dominic Raab’s resignation but having avoided a rebellion from the right-wing of his party on the small boats crisis and having potentially shaken off the “red Rishi” tag for good.

Fresh from the departure of his deputy prime minister, Sunak has “delighted the Tory right by bowing to their demands for amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill”, said Sky News’s chief political correspondent Jon Craig.

According to a new government amendment, British judges will be banned from blocking deportation flights unless the risk to migrants hits a new threshold of “real, imminent and foreseeable risk of serious and irreversible harm”.

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It has also been widely reported that Home Secretary Suella Braverman will get new powers to ignore similar injunctions by judges at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, stopping deportation flights to Rwanda.

Sunak’s decision to take on the “lefty lawyers”, as he has dubbed those opposed to the bill, “is a sign of his continuing vulnerability to rebellions from the party’s rightwing”, said the Financial Times (FT).

What did the papers say?

In the leadership contest against Liz Truss last summer, “red Rishi” was “painted as the high tax, pro-EU candidate of the Tory left”, said Politico. “Rishi blasted on ‘socialist’ taxes” was the front page of one edition of the Daily Mail.

But in the past five months of his premiership, “that portrayal of Sunak has started to become laughable”, wrote The Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot. “He is perhaps the most socially conservative prime minister of his generation.”

Those close to him told Elgot that Sunak’s “views on social issues such as gender, drugs, crime and migration are deeply conservative”.

This is demonstrable in Sunak now making it “virtually impossible for refugees to seek asylum in the UK apart from through an extremely narrow set of country-specific routes”, Elgot added. Despite suggestions that the PM has been using Braverman as a shield, this “is not just the personal drive of Braverman but of Sunak himself”, she wrote.

That there still remains a “suspicion from his own side that he is some kind of liberal wet”, said the FT’s Stephen Bush, is because the PM “has carried off a clever piece of political triangulation”, Jay Elwes wrote in The New European. On the one hand Sunak’s government “will appear sensible on the economy and repair relations with the EU”, but on the other hand “it will go for all-out culture war on the issue of immigration”, said Elwes.

This delicate balancing act of the Sunak government could benefit him at the next election, given “the fact that this same perception” of Sunak as less socially conservative “obtains among liberals” making him “a great asset to the Tory party”, said the FT’s Bush.

What next?

The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, who sits as a cross-bench peer, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that ignoring interim ECHR judgments would be “an immensely serious step”, setting “an extraordinarily bad example”.

“This is a step a government should never take because it is symbolic of a breach of the rule of law,” he added.

But it is a decision that has more than just a passing glance at the next election, said Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator. Sunak will have “received advice telling him that failing to stop the boats as a result of being blocked by opposition MPs, the House of Lords and ‘lefty lawyers’ may leave him with a fighting chance of retaining support among migration-sceptic voters”.

Tom Harris in The Telegraph agreed, describing the move as a “masterstroke” by Sunak given it is the “general public’s view that the regular TV footage of migrants arriving on the Kent shore represents a collective two-fingered salute to Britain’s right to control its own borders”.

Commentators believe a desire to keep in lockstep with public opinion on these issues is driving Sunak’s premiership. “It is fashionable to think of today’s post-Brexit Conservative Party as being some kind of seismic shift away from its traditions… from Thatcher,” said Unherd’s political editor Tom McTague. “The truth, though, is that the Tory coalition of 2019 marked something of a return” to a “coalition of the wealthy elite and the provincial petty bourgeoisie”, something “the Tories have always needed to win”.

In 1974 Margaret Thatcher “argued that the party had failed the people by losing focus on the day-to-day reality for ordinary people” and the “same is true today”, said McTague.