Ben Riley-Smith

POLITICAL EDITOR

AConservative Party whose two flanks are bitterly opposed and threatening rebellion. A Tory prime minister trying to thread the needle with a critical piece of legislation.

Star chambers summoned to pass judgment. Mutterings of the leadership consequences of failure. And all the while, a Nigel Faragelinked party is hoovering up Conservative votes.

No wonder Rishi Sunak’s woes trying to keep the Tories united over immigration this week sent shivers up the spines of those by Theresa May’s side as she tried to pass a Brexit deal.

Lord Barwell said: “It feels very late 2018, early 2019.” As Mrs May’s chief of staff he was in the trenches for those parliamentary battles over what terms the UK should leave the European Union.

“It feels like the party is back in that ungovernable space, that unleadable space. You’ve got these two wings of the party and it’s very difficult to see where the landing zone is.”

Mrs May’s fate is known - she failed to pass a Brexit agreement and paid with the end of her premiership. That of Mr Sunak’s is less clear, as scores of his MPs think over options this week. Reignited Tory divisions

The Brexit comparison may not be a perfect match. There has been no referendum backing the Rwanda deportation scheme, the issue that has reignited Tory feuding this week.

The debate has not been entrenched in Tory politics for decades as the schism of the Europe question had been. Fewer MPs have built their political careers around the issue.

And yet the question of how hard this Tory Government should go to drive down the numbers of both legal and illegal migration is emerging as a defining question for the party.

It has put Tory divisions back at the top of the news bulletins and elevated mutterings about whether Mr Sunak really is the best person to lead the party into the next general election.

Downing Street’s “immigration week” was designed to get Mr Sunak on the front foot with a hat-trick of announcements on successive days, each drawn up at speed in recent weeks. Monday brought a package of measures to drive down net migration which went further than had been expected, a move to address annual net migration recently peaking at 745,000.

The plan, including raising the work visa salary threshold and limiting how many relatives a foreign social care worker can bring, was estimated to reduce yearly immigration by around 300,000. Next came a new treaty with Rwanda, with James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, flying out to Kigali for a deal that made clear no asylumseeker sent there by the UK would then be sent home to their country of origin.

But it was what came on

Wednesday, the second part of the Government’s push to address the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Rwanda scheme was unlawful, that triggered the worst Tory splits.

So-called “emergency” legislation was unveiled, a Bill just 12 pages long, which was designed to protect the

As the PM struggles to maintain a united front, is the party returning to its ‘ungovernable’ space?