Sunak’s bungled Rwanda scheme won’t save him

Like a cowboy builder sucking his teeth about unanticipated complications on the job, Rishi Sunak has just pushed back another deadline. The Prime Minister was meant to get flights off to Rwanda this spring but has now given himself until July. And this isn’t even the main job. The actual grand design he is supposed to be working towards is to ‘stop the boats’.

If sending irregular migrants off to Rwanda helps secure that then so much the better, but it would be remiss not to point out that illegal arrivals via cross-Channel dinghies have increased this year, more than wiping out the limited and wind-assisted progress made in 2023.

The decidedly punchy performance Sunak put in at a press conference this morning was surely designed to get him through the local elections on Thursday next week. ‘If Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the Bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago,’ he claimed.