If Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, Domitian and Commodus were the best in Rome, it can be said that Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak – the last five prime ministers – are the ace poker of the British Conservative Party. But just as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is long overdue, that of the UK's alpha group could be brewing right now, in real time. Brexit, illegal parties in Downing Street, austerity, the cost of living crisis and immigration threaten to be their battle of Adrianople. It is not that the invasion and sacking of the capital by the barbarians is imminent, but rather the arrival of Labor to power.
Rishi Sunak has stumbled upon what is known in philosophy as a tragic dilemma, in which all the solutions are bad. He inherited the strange idea of sending illegal immigrants to Rwanda to have their asylum applications processed there from his predecessors, but xenophobic pressures and the advance of the extreme right have turned it into an inalienable Tory dogma, the number one commandment and the raison d'être of conservatives in the politics of the culture wars.
The problem is that the Supreme Court has unanimously declared Rwanda's plan illegal, estimating that it is not a country with sufficient guarantees and that immigrants could be sent to their places of origin, or to others, where they would be in danger of death, persecution or tortures. For the Tory far right, the solution consists of nothing less than abandoning the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention, a position defended by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman (dismissed) and Secretary of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick. (resigned).
On the other hand, the moderate sector of the Conservative Party, just over a hundred deputies and several ministers such as Foreign Minister David Cameron, have warned that such a radical position would turn Great Britain into a pariah in international relations, at the level of Russia. and Belarus, would jeopardize the Brexit agreements and the Northern Ireland protocol and would earn the wrath of President Joe Biden.
In the midst of this tragic dilemma, with threats of resignations from both sides, Sunak has chosen to play Pontius Pilate, presenting a bill that proclaims Rwanda as a “safe country” for the purposes of political asylum and requires the judges to accept that statement without question. The imposition of executive and legislative power over the judicial power.
Attacked on all fronts in a labyrinth from which he does not know how to get out, Sunak finds himself in the weakest position since he came to power just over a year ago, to the point that there is speculation about the possibility of an attempted defenestration. . Yesterday he was forced to call a press conference to try to regain control, after Jenrick resigned and Braverman declared to the BBC that the new plan is a hot topic that will lead nowhere, other than to make things dizzy and lose the time.
Maybe Sunak would have been willing for London to stop being a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, maybe not. But, irony of ironies, it has been Rwanda itself – a country with few guarantees according to the Supreme Court – that has stood firm and said that if the United Kingdom abandoned international law in this way, it would renounce welcoming British immigrants, because everything has a limit.
Power wears down and the conservatives have lost their nerve. The party by definition of the country's great institutions (the judges, Scotland Yard, the BBC, the universities...) has turned in desperation against them, eager to cling to the helm by all means, diluting rights and exploiting the insecurities of millions of voters in the face of growing inequality, immigration, climate change, the economy and the weakening of the nation state. Caligula tried to appoint his horse as a senator. At the moment, its decline has not reached that point...
