Rishi Sunak is fighting to save his flagship Rwanda bill ahead of a crunch vote this evening that could be fatal to his authority.
The embattled prime minister will host an emergency breakfast in Downing Street this morning with would-be rebels who have warned that “major surgery” is still required to fix the legislation.
The Safety of Rwanda Bill aims to revive the stalled £290m scheme to deport asylum seekers who arrive by small boat to the east African nation, after the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful.
MPs on the right of the party have said the bill does not go far enough to avoid being blocked again by the courts.
But in a sign of the challenge facing the prime minister, moderates from the opposite wing said the government must “stick to its guns”, warning that any further changes to appease the right-wingers would breach international law and prove “unacceptable”.
As tensions between the two sides flared on Monday night, senior Tories made a rallying cry for unity.
Former defence secretary Ben Wallace urged his colleagues not to “wreck” the government over the Rwanda plan, describing immigration as a “Rubik’s cube of a problem”.
“Both Labour and the Conservatives have gone from pillar to post on the issue and never has any good come of it,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
“Before anyone in my party thinks the solution to this Rubik’s cube is to wreck the government, perhaps we should calmly state that we are heading in the right direction and making progress.”
He said that while the Rwanda bill is “not a silver bullet”, the vote in the Commons tomorrow should be seen as a further step in “building deterrence” and “will make it more likely that some illegal immigrants are sent to Africa”.
Former attorney general Sir Geoffrey Cox also urged his party colleagues to back the Rwanda bill, telling BBC Newsnight: “I am surprised my colleagues feel it is so porous to legal challenge, because it seems to me it has been drafted very tightly.
“I think it is about as far you could go without risking the complete blockage and collapse of the bill.”
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Mr Sunak has tried to find a middle ground in response to the Supreme Court ruling. His bill declares Rwanda as safe and allows ministers to disapply the UK’s Human Rights Act – but does not go as far as overriding the European Convention on Human Rights.
Tomorrow’s vote on the legislation will be the most serious test of the prime minister’s leadership since he took office in October last year. No government has suffered a defeat at a second reading since 1986.
The backing of the One Nation caucus was a boost to the prime minister – who spent most of Monday in front of the COVID-19 inquiry – and his hopes for getting the bill through the key parliamentary stage.
But it came with a warning too, as chairman Damian Green said MPs would oppose any amendments that would risk the UK breaching the rule of law and its international obligations.
This is at odds with the position of many groups on the right of the party who also met to discuss the legislation yesterday.
The New Conservatives said that around 40 MPs – including former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and former home secretary Suella Braverman alongside senior MPs Sir Simon Clarke and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg – gathered to discuss the bill.
A spokesman warned: “Every member of that discussion said the bill needs major surgery or replacement and they will be making that plain in the morning to the PM at breakfast and over the next 24 hours.”
Meanwhile Brexiteer European Research Group (ERG) said the legislation had “so many holes in it” that the consensus from this wing of the party was to “pull the bill” and put forward a “revised version that works better”.
Despite criticising the bill, the groups on the right have yet to say how they will vote.
Various ministers were deployed on Monday to brief MPs and win over wavering party colleagues, with Attorney General Victoria Prentis addressing the One Nation faction while Home Secretary James Cleverly spoke to MPs in a separate gathering in a Commons committee room.
It takes 29 MPs to vote against, or 57 MPs to abstain, for the legislation to be rejected – with no clarity on whether Mr Sunak could survive such a defeat in practice.
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A number of Tory MPs revealed to Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates that Number 10 is threatening to call an early election if they vote against the legislation – though some were sceptical Downing Street would follow through.
In a rare move intended to win over critics, the government produced a summary of its own legal position in support of the new bill on Monday.
It said completely blocking any court challenges would be “a breach of international law and alien to the UK’s constitutional tradition of liberty and justice, where even in wartime the UK has maintained access to the courts in order that individuals can uphold their rights and freedoms”.
The document also said the government of Rwanda had been clear it would withdraw from the scheme if the UK breached its international obligations.