The Rwanda plan remains doomed to fail

Editorial: The central tenet of Rishi Sunak’s blueprint for stopping illegal immigrants from crossing the Channel passed its third reading in the Commons – but at a terrible political cost to the prime minister. It will be for historians to establish why he wrecked his reputation trying to make it a success

(Dave Brown)

Most premiers find their time in office defined by a few broad, historical brush strokes. For Chamberlain, appeasement; for Churchill, it was obviously the finest hour; for Eden, Suez; for Callaghan, the winter of discontent; for Blair, it was Iraq; for Johnson, Partygate and Brexit; with Truss, it was the disastrous mini-Budget.

For Rishi Sunak, it will assuredly not be the Windsor Framework, nor the halving of inflation. Rather, his epitaph seems destined to be “Rwanda”, a fairly obscure African country at the centre of a convoluted saga of a relatively small number of refugees who never quite made it to Kigali. In a word, failure.

It is bizarre, but highly appropriate, because, for whatever reason, Mr Sunak has made the Rwanda plan his own personal cause, to the virtual exclusion of all else. Historians may be able to make better sense of it than those living through it now. It is politics viewed from the wrong end of the telescope.