Rishi Sunak has risked provoking the ire of Conservative MPs who want a swift end to people crossing the Channel illegally, by refusing to guarantee that his pledge to “stop the boats” will be fulfilled by the next general election.
A hot topic, given that the number of landings is expected to increase as summer approaches, the prime minister tempered expectations by stressing it would not be easy to deliver on his promise.
He used a wide-ranging interview with the website ConservativeHome that Downing Street hopes will fire up Tory activists in the run-up to next month’s local elections to stress his achievements since taking the job in No 10 in October.
But having become prime minister with no leadership contest, Sunak found himself defending himself against suggestions that he was struggling to match Boris Johnson’s mandate and dodged a question about whether he could reappoint Johnson to the cabinet.
Although Sunak stressed his delivery skills and suggested that a more united Conservative party was making life easier, he was pressed to give a timeframe for fulfilling one of the five pledges he laid out at the start of 2023 – stopping the boats.
Asked if that would happen by the next general election, which must be held by January 2025 at the latest but which Tory strategists suspect is likely to take place next autumn, Sunak declined to give a firm commitment.
“I’ve always said that this is not something that is easy – it is a complicated problem, where there’s no single, simple solution that will fix it. And I’ve also said that it won’t happen overnight,” he told ConservativeHome’s editor, Paul Goodman.
While Sunak said it was “hugely important” to him personally and to the public, he said No 10 was braced for legal challenges to a draft piece of legislation designed to make it easier to remove any migrants who arrive in the UK by small boat.
Stressing that he thought the illegal migration bill was compliant with international law, the prime minister said there “may well be” another adverse legal judgment from judges presiding over the European convention on human rights.
“We’re taking an approach that is novel that is untested, that’s ambitious. I don’t make any apologies for that,” he said.
The bill could face similar hurdles over the plan to remove migrants to Rwanda, Sunak said. He added that the government was already “robustly challenging” cases in the courts, and there had recently been a judgment made “very strongly in the government’s favour”.
Sunak faced other questions about his record and how he had come to power. Despite Johnson’s allies having claimed Sunak was behind a “coup” to topple his former boss, Sunak stressed that as chancellor there had been “a fundamental difference about economic policy” between them. “What happened thereafter was not my doing,” he said.
Sunak refused to say whether he would offer Johnson a cabinet job, saying the government already had a “great team”. But he added: “It’s great that we’ve got former prime ministers who want to contribute still to public life and feel that they can do that. That’s a good thing, and we should welcome them.”
Fielding pre-submitted questions from viewers, Sunak said the Conservatives’ target of recruiting 20,000 more police officers should be hit “any day now”.
He doubled down on plans to change the Equality Act by toughening up protections for people on the basis of their biological sex, instead of gender. Asked if 100% of women did not have a penis, Sunak agreed.
Despite concerns about the collapse in intergenerational equity of capital, Sunak defended dropping the national target of building 300,000 new homes every year.
Having spoken to members and councillors during the summer leadership race, Sunak said, “what they didn’t want was a nationally imposed, top-down set of targets imposed telling them what to do”.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up and housing secretary, said it was “shameful” that Sunak had been “too weak to stand up to Tory members” and claimed the decision had “pushed housebuilding off a cliff” and exacerbated the housing crisis.
