Watch: Lights go off in the Lords in Rwanda showdown 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is one step closer to stopping the boats — or so he hopes. After months of back and forth on the Prime Minister’s immigration deterrent, Sunak’s Rwanda legislation has finally passed through parliament. The ping-pong palaver just made it into the early hours of the morning after the House of Lords relented at nine minutes past midnight that it was time to ‘acknowledge the primacy’ of the Commons. Lord Anderson of Ipswich won the accolade of last peer standing, resignedly throwing in the towel at seven minutes to midnight — in good news for Tory MPs who were already rather merry at a drinks reception laid on by Sunak for the occasion.

But the final few hours of wrangling over the bill did not go quite as smoothly as the peers might have hoped. As the Lords talked into the night, their discussions were rather unexpectedly interrupted — by a blackout.