Senior Tories have warned Rishi Sunak he must hold a general election before small boat Channel crossings reach their annual peak in the summer.
The Prime Minister is under mounting pressure from his backbenchers to drastically beef up the Rwanda policy to ensure the Government can make good on its promise to voters that it will stop the migrant crossings.
Mr Sunak is expected to publish the renewed Rwanda treaty after Wednesday’s Autumn Statement, which will set out how the Government intends to address the concerns raised about the country by the Supreme Court when it declared the plan was unlawful.
The issue of small boat crossings has become one of the Conservatives’ key electoral concerns, and has prompted senior Tories to urge the Prime Minister not to wait until next autumn to go to the polls. Mr Sunak is widely expected to wait until October or November next year before holding an election as he seeks to wait to reap any rewards from an improving economy.
One minister told i: “I am not in favour of anything [an election] before May 2024. But before the summer season of boat crossings, yes.”
Another senior Tory backbencher linked the issue of migrant Channel crossings to the party’s lacklustre polling and suggested the Government will need to show it has a grip on matters before the summer or face a heavy defeat at the election.
“We have the better part of six months,” the MP said. “If those polls don’t narrow, there is going to be wholesale slaughter.”
It comes after former Cabinet minister Simon Clarke last week called for a snap election if the planned emergency legislation to bolster the Rwanda policy is snarled up in the House of Lords, which many within Westminster widely expect.
Mr Sunak refused to say whether he would hold an early election if the Lords blocks the emergency laws to save the Rwanda deportation deal.
But immigration minister Robert Jenrick admitted last week that he could not “see a path to victory at the next general election unless we resolve this issue”.
There are serious doubts that the Prime Minister will be able to push through the policy despite insisting he will do “whatever it takes” to begin flying asylum seekers to East Africa.
Former home secretary Suella Braverman has demanded Mr Sunak give the Government the power to ignore all legal challenges to the Rwanda plans, including disapplying human rights conventions.
Former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption said that unless the Prime Minister chooses to pull out of international human rights treaties, the “current Rwanda’s scheme is probably dead”.
“There are other possibilities. They’re not terribly attractive, but they do exist,” Lord Sumption told Sky News.
“They could take the extreme line suggested by Suella Braverman and either withdraw from the relevant treaty obligations of the UK, or ignore them. But the government has made it clear in statements from No 10 on Friday that they don’t intend to do that.”
And he added: “That basically means that although the Government may well ignore interim orders from Strasbourg, they presumably intend to comply with final orders from Strasbourg.
“So essentially that means that the Government is risking an adverse judgment by a tribunal which will not pay the slightest attention to statutory declarations about safety.
“It’ll investigate safety for itself and presumably arrive at a conclusion that is similar to that of the Supreme Court.”
