This week’s Look, Stranger! has two offerings. The first, from me, is a reflection on the character of Rishi Sunak after some time in office. Who is he, really? The second is “a venomous screed” from Hari Collins on the truly dreadful Rwanda Bill. It seemed an obvious move for Sunak to drop this nonsense when Suella Braverman resigned. Instead, he has pressed on.
Politics as Character
In Party Political Speech from 1958, Peter Sellers mimics the vapid vocabulary of the politician who has space to fill but nothing to say. As the police begin their investigation into the Prime Minister, every Tory MP will be, right now, “more than sensible of the exact definition of the precise issues which are at this very moment concerning us all”. Since he became Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has been asked the question Peter Sellers poses of who he really is and what he has to say.
Boris Johnson’s time in office proceeded through embarrassment to shame. Every further day he spent in office added to the reputation of his party for shameless self-regard. The implicit promise of Sunak was that better officials, advisers and ministers would arrive into government. A sense of order and propriety would be restored. He would do all that, as an urgent matter of contrast with his predecessor but he would also do that because he is a decent man. He has had long enough now and we have to say that it hasn’t happened.
There did always seem to be a slight air of the Peter Sellers character about Rishi Sunak. To the majority of the public, Sunak was the man who preserved their job with the furlough scheme. He was the rescue man who handed out money, the biggest spender in the history of HM Treasury. Yet his tells ending of the aid spending commitment, his private opposition to spending on levelling up projects and the social care plan and his slightly desperate attempt to brand a rise in National Insurance as the Prime Minister’s tax were all attempts by Mr Sunak to flaunt his market credentials to his party.
Yet perhaps the answer lies at neither of these two poles. Politics is as much about character as it is about belief so the pertinent question might be not “what does Mr Sunak believe?” but “what kind of person is he?” And the answer to that might be that he is the sort of person who changes his beliefs to fit the situation he finds himself in. The scanty evidence seems to support this interpretation. Everywhere he has been, Mr Sunak has been a man whose chief trait was a willingness to conform to whatever orthodoxy prevailed at the time. He is one of life’s Head Boys, at the very high end of technically impressive without ever being truly outstanding because standing out is not in his nature. He says whatever the others say, only better. Wherever he goes Mr Sunak is the man with the most polished boilerplate in town.
Through Winchester and Oxford, he went on to intone received market wisdoms at Goldman Sachs. Then off to learn the catechism of the modern religion in Silicon Valley, with an MBA at Stanford. Returning to find that the orthodoxy of Tory politics was changing, he became a dutiful advocate of Brexit. Then, this self-proclaimed fiscal conservative became the symbol and organiser of state largesse as Chancellor. Salman Rushdie once called this process “chutnification” by which he meant that some substances take on the shape of the receptacle that holds them.
This protean quality might be ascribed to inexperience. We all take a while to find ourselves and Mr Sunak is a politician of the accelerated age. Margaret Thatcher was an MP for 20 years before she became Prime Minister. John Major’s apprenticeship in Parliament was 11 years, Tony Blair’s was 14 and Gordon Brown’s 17. David Cameron was 9 years an MP and Theresa May served for two decades before she got to Downing Street. Boris Johnson himself had been an MP for 11 years, in two spells. Mr Sunak is barely into his sixth year.
Politics always lays bare who you are. At the end of his speech, the Peter Sellers character says “now, finally my friends, in conclusion, let me say just this”. There follows a long silence. Sellers himself was so addicted to putting on faces that he forgot who he actually was. Being elusive helps you on the way up but it is devastating at the summit.
A Venomous Screed
Guest post by Hari Collins
On the BBC today yesterday were two contrasting political spectacles. The first was at the Covid inquiry, where Boris Johnson was soberly answering Hugh Keith’s questions. It looked like political downfall, a reckoning for lying, for destroying the credibility of our public institutions. The second was Rishi Sunak talking about fairness, stopping the queue-jumpers, standing up for ordinary decent people concerned about their public services, and the political and legal commentary on it.
Except that Rishi is the proto-fascist, not Boris. I use the term to shock; we need shocking. There have been constitutional outrages in recent British history which were, in some ways, worse than the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill the Government just published, which attacked even older liberties and were more likely to go into effect: New Labour’s brief policy of indefinite detention under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, for instance. But this draft bill is still the most flagrant violation of the domestic rule of law by any government for, say, fifty years.
First, because it is in open defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights, without even the pretext of a ‘public emergency’ allowing ‘derogation’. To disapply the Human Rights Act in a single case simply because you do not like it is extraordinary - as is disputing the European Court’s power to issue ‘Section 39’ temporary injunctions, which are surely a necessary part of any court’s inherent powers. The idea of a court which can only act after the wrongs it concerns itself with have been performed is ridiculous.
Second, and worse, is to have overturned by legislation a judgement of fact that the highest court in the country made less than a month ago. A crucial point in everything concerning this whole saga is that the Supreme Court only invoked the ECHR on a matter of procedure - that is, its duty to assess, independently of the government assessment, whether Rwanda was in fact a safe country. The question of safety itself, the need for someone to determine it, was decided by the Refugee Convention; to overrule this (even on the basis that it should not have the power to make such an assessment) is to say that its assessment could simply be declared wrong, as if Parliament could decide that black was white and up was down.
Third, and worst of all, the Bill disapplies the Refugee Conventions, makes them inapplicable in domestic litigation around whether Rwanda is in general a safe country. This is quite unforgivable. The ‘international legal order’ is a cracked and rickety thing set up by superpowers for superpowers and whose power is, of course, utterly insignificant where it matters; nevertheless, of its many well-intentioned and dead provisions the principles of the Refugee Conventions are perhaps less nominally dead than others. They are also the most fundamental international instruments of all, much more so than the UN Charter, because they try to guarantee that no one should be a person without rights, a non-person, what Hannah Arendt called one made into the ‘scum of the earth’. They are the most minimal commitment, and also the most necessary, to the idea that no one should be that after so many were, in concentration camps and killing fields.
The great disappointment of the litigation around the previous Rwanda scheme was that no court acknowledged what ought to be the fundamental reason for its illegality - that the Refugee Convention does not permit the offloading of asylum seekers at all. I think it is clear, if implicit, that it does not, since nothing in the convention makes sense if it does, and its basic principle is that asylum seekers must have their claims investigated wherever they are and however they got there. This principle is as good as sacred, and ought to be defended at all costs; you need such a principle to prevent endless shunting, endless rounds of it’s someone else’s problem, which as Arendt said was why refugees between the wars so rarely received help (this is also why irregularly arriving asylum-seekers are not ‘queue-jumpers’; they are the queue). The courts did not see this, but now the government has disapplied the Refugee Conventions explicitly anyway.
You would know little of this from the coverage on the BBC, or the newspapers, and even less of its real significance. This policy has been subsumed into regular politics – what will Braverman do, what will Starmer do, what will the electorate do – so that its true implications are covered up. As I write, the only story about the Rwanda plan on the BBC News homepage has the headline ‘Get behind my Rwanda plan, Sunak tells Tories’; as if the only thing one could possibly be concerned about is that the plan does not go far enough. That some members of the Tory party are worried about this is terrifying; it is more terrifying that the BBC does not realise how bizarre and dangerous this is. The Guardian is similar; it simply reports that Sunak thinks the bill will avoid legal challenge.
It is not just a matter of repealing the Rwanda policy, or any other policy; it’s a question of how you do it, whether Starmer sternly admonishes us that the Conservative immigration policy is unworkable or if he joyfully proclaims that he has undone the authoritarian corruption of our political institutions. To fight against proto-fascism requires and justifies a very different cast of mind than just beating the Tories one more time (though of course, as in America, it also licences a lot of self-importance). Starmer won’t do anything like this – having strangled his party, he has no Progressive Congressional Caucus to drag him towards it – but he should, and when he does not, anyone who cares about British democracy should scream at him that he must.
You can find a longer version of this essay on Hari’s substack, Automatic Writing
Automatic Writing | Hari Collins | Substack