Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith have resigned as deputy chairs of the Conservative party after defying Rishi Sunak by backing rightwing challenges to harden up his Rwanda deportation bill.
The two senior “red wall” MPs led a rebellion of 60 Tories to vote for a series of rightwing amendments, inflicting a damaging blow to the prime minister’s authority in the biggest revolt of his leadership.
After the vote, Anderson told GB News: “I don’t think I could carry on in my role when I fundamentally disagree with the bill. I can’t be in a position to vote for something I don’t believe in.”
It heralds another Commons battle on Wednesday when MPs vote on the key third reading of the Rwanda bill, with about a dozen Tories already having publicly said they will vote against the legislation. Just 29 rebels are needed for it to fall.
However, there was little sign of panic over the scale of the rebellion. Government insiders suggested that the rightwing bloc did not yet have the numbers – or the inclination – to inflict a potentially fatal blow on Sunak.
The first rebellion came as 60 Conservative MPs voted in favour of changes to the bill, clause 10, put forward by the veteran Tory Bill Cash to ensure UK and international law could not be used to prevent or delay a person being removed to Rwanda.
The second came as 58 Conservative rightwingers backed an amendment, clause 19, from Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, aimed at severely limiting individual asylum seekers’ ability to appeal against being put on a flight to Rwanda.
The rebels included the former home secretary Suella Braverman, Jenrick and the former prime minister Liz Truss, along with dozens of other rightwingers. However, both amendments were defeated after they were opposed by the Labour party.
Kemi Badenoch’s parliamentary private secretary, Jane Stevenson, also resigned after voting against the party whip. There were reports that the business secretary had urged the prime minister to toughen up the legislation by stopping people from lodging individual appeals against their deportation.
The resignations came after the most senior judge in England and Wales spoke out about plans to recruit and train 150 judges to help implement Sunak’s Rwanda plan.
The lady chief justice, Sue Carr, said decisions on how judges were deployed should be “exclusively a matter for the judiciary”, adding that plans outlined by the government drew “matters of judicial responsibility into the political arena”.
Alex Chalk, the lord chancellor and justice secretary, had earlier announced plans to expand court capacity and recruit new judges to fast-track asylum appeals in an attempt to win over rightwing Tory MPs deciding whether to rebel over the bill.
It is understood civil servants may be ordered to obey ministers if they decide to block a European court of human rights order to stop Rwanda deportation flights.
In a move that will enrage unions, government sources said officials had drawn up guidance to ensure Whitehall staff followed ministerial guidance if emergency orders known as rule 39 procedures were used to try to halt flights to Kigali.
An intervention by a Strasbourg judge under the rule 39 procedure in June 2022 stopped a deportation flight taking off for Rwanda
In a joint resignation letter, published shortly after the votes, Anderson and Clarke-Smith said they had consistently argued for the government’s Rwanda legislation to be watertight. “It is therefore important in terms of credibility that we are consistent with this.”
They suggested the Rwanda legislation in its current form would not work, with critics arguing that individual challenges would leave it snarled up in the courts.
“We have already had two pieces of legislation thwarted by a system that does not work in favour of the British people,” they wrote.
“It is for this reason that we have supported the amendments to the Rwanda bill. This is not because we are against the legislation, but because like everybody else we want it to work.”
However, in a sign that their criticisms lie with the legislation rather than with Sunak, the pair were muted in their criticism of the prime minister, commending his work on “illegal migration”. “The last thing either of us wants to do is to distract from this,” they said.
Anderson, a former Labour councillor who earned a reputation as an aggressive Tory attack dog and culture warrior, and who is paid £100,000 a year as a presenter on GB News, had warned government whips that he would vote for the rebel amendments.
It is unclear how many Tory rebels will vote against the bill at the third reading even if it remains unamended, given the high stakes for Sunak. When asked about the scale of the potential rebellion, the rightwinger Mark Francois said “the numbers speak for themselves”.
“I hope very much that the government will listen … and take stock and that perhaps there will be some possibility of tightening the bill tomorrow,” he told Sky News.
Earlier, Boris Johnson backed calls by Conservative rebels to harden the Rwanda deportation bill in a direct intervention on the side of those defying his successor.
On X, the former prime minister reposted an article by a former cabinet minister, Simon Clarke, who had described the bill as a “flawed measure” and warned he would not support it unless it was amended.
Johnson, still an influential figure on the right of the party, particularly in red wall seats that the Tories won for the first time in 2019, said: “This bill must be as legally robust as possible – and the right course is to adopt the amendments.”
Addressing the Commons during the debate, Clarke told MPs: “There is a crisis of faith in our politics and that really boils down to – as it has done for a number of years, spanning the Brexit debate and indeed the causes of it – do we as MPs mean what we say?
“Is our word worth anything? Are we capable as a country of asserting our national sovereignty? Are we as a country capable of policing our borders?
“Now I welcome the fact that the government has decided that we now need to derogate from parts of the Human Rights Act 1998 and that is welcome, it is brave, it is commendable. But we now need to follow that logic to its conclusion.”
Labour said the Tory resignations showed that even senior members of the party believed the Tories had failed. Pat McFadden, the party’s national campaign co-ordinator, said: “Rishi Sunak is too weak to lead his party and too weak to lead the country.
“These resignations show that even senior Tories think that the Conservatives have failed and is yet more evidence of the total Tory chaos over their failing Rwanda gimmick – yet they are still making the taxpayer pay the extortionate price.”
The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael, said: “Sunak’s Rwanda scheme just won’t work – and even the deputy chairs of his own party know it. He has yet again been embarrassed by his own MPs. If the prime minister can’t even settle squabbles in his own party, how can he be expected to run the country?”
• Guardian Newsroom: Is the Conservative party finished?
On Monday 29 January, 8pm-9.15pm GMT, join Gaby Hinsliff, Kiran Stacey and Salma Shah for a livestreamed discussion on the Conservative party in crisis. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
