Rishi Sunak knows the Tory rebels are right about small boats

When the Rwanda migrant removals programme was torpedoed by a European judge at a hastily-convened hearing one evening last summer, the notion that Britain had ‘taken back control’ of its borders crawled away to die.

The anonymous judge at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights issued a controversial ‘Rule 39’ instant order. This blocked the removal of the few failed asylum seekers who had not already been sprung from the proposed inaugural flight via appeals made to British courts in the preceding days.

One Tory MP on the cultural right of the party sought out the then-PM Boris Johnson. They pleaded with him to ignore the ruling, which strayed far beyond the ECHR’s original powers, and just get a plane with some illegal immigrants on it in the air and heading for Rwanda. To fail to do that would destroy faith in the Tories among millions of voters, he warned.