Right-wing rebel Tories won't let Sunak off that easily

By Martin Ivens

A group of right-wing dissident Tory factions, dubbed “The Five Families” — a tribute to the mafia clans popularized in The Godfather — threaten to destroy a UK prime minister who is proving too pragmatic for their taste. Rishi Sunak supported Brexit but is a conviction internationalist. The families are not happy. And those who know mafia lore know how that tends to end.

Hand-wringing about the maverick excesses of right-wing euroskeptics is not new. It is, however, intriguing that Conservative leaders should find this kind of internal sectarianism harder to quash than Labour, which has had its own long-standing schisms between right and left (and further left) in its ranks. Simply put, right-wingers pose a greater threat to the Conservative leadership than the Left now does to Labour — and there could be worse to come.

When polled, the dwindling Tory membership base would like to see the former chief of a populist right-wing party, Nigel Farage, join the Conservative ranks, perhaps working in cahoots with the “lost” Tory leader, Boris Johnson. The Parliamentary Right has a new casus belli: The government’s plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda to get their claims processed is “too soft.” On Tuesday night, their rebellion fizzled out as the government passed its bill in the House of Commons by 313-269. Dissident Tory MPs abstained en bloc, but they have reserved the right to revisit the issue.

The resemblance between the Godfather’s youthful anti-hero, Michael Corleone, and the UK’s prime minister has, like most neat movie metaphors, a flaw. The college-educated don was a far more cunning politician than the tyro technocrat who currently occupies No. 10. The opinion polls suggest that floating voters want Sunak to focus on the economy (it shrank 0.3 per cent in October) and the ailing National Health Service (8 million patients sit on waiting lists). Instead, the PM got pulled into an unnecessary fight about the legal details of an impractical immigration policy broadly accepted by his party. Migrant numbers agitate those who voted Conservative in 2019, but the opposition Labour party is never going to offer a more hardline alternative.

So far, there have been more flights to Rwanda by British Home Secretaries (three) than ones featuring luckless asylum seekers from the UK, but the Five Families aren’t yet finished with the Rwanda scheme, which could cost £400 million ($500 million). They will try to toughen up Sunak’s bill in the New Year, unless the liberal-dominated House of Lords wrecks it first. That said, Sunak has had a good week. The PM lobbied wavering backbench MPs to secure his Commons majority, and he was cool under fire when interrogated as a witness in the official inquiry into Covid on Monday.

But the political climate keeps changing fast. Only three years ago, the Labour party was still crippled by a left-wing faction that put ideological purity before power. Now, it’s the turn of the Tory Right, bolstered by the addition of a group of hard-nosed MPs elected by former Labour voters in the post-industrial North and Midlands. The Five Families are buoyed by success: They brought down one of Sunak’s short-lived predecessors, Theresa May, and triumphed by “getting Brexit done.” The Left, however, is demoralized by the calamitous electoral disaster of 2019, which reduced Labour’s vote to levels last seen in 1935.

The old Left speaks in abstract, almost theological, terms about its beliefs — socialists are wedded to “taking the commanding heights of industry” and “controlling the means of production.” A modernizing Labour leader can outflank his radicals by simply declaring that he will pursue these traditional values in a modern setting. The slogan “Save the NHS” can be retained, for instance, even while private money is invited to deliver social democratic objectives.

Tory ideologues nowadays resemble the lawyers they often disdain in one important regard. They take a legalistic approach and are therefore less tractable. Their bugbears are legal frameworks that constrain UK sovereignty like the European Court of Human Rights or political institutions like the European Union. The Right came to blows with successive Tory leaders over the post-Brexit status of Northern Ireland, because as a legal entity, the province had indeed changed. Room for compromise vanishes fast in arguments about the watertight terms of contracts.

The Right beats the modern Left, too, for consistent bloody-mindedness. An anti-European, nationalist group has been a thorn in the side of the Tory leadership for more than 30 years. Its MPs take inspiration from Margaret Thatcher’s uncompromising style, forgetting that the Iron Lady would bend when circumstances dictated. Like the Left, the Right distrusts its leaders’ appeal to short-term electoral gain. The latter, however, coordinates its factions in Parliament rather more skillfully by threatening to vote with the opposition on key votes. To the consternation of so-called One Nation Tories, the Right has been the tail that wags the dog for more than a decade.

Despite their rabble-rousing rhetoric about class struggles, the Left are sentimentalists — the adoration of former leader Jeremy Corbyn among his supporters far exceeds anything he achieved by squandering an election and giving Boris Johnson a solid majority. The Tory Right, however, is flinty-hearted. They don’t mind how many Conservative leaders they burn through — another one will come along eventually. Rather like the Marxists of yore, it’s the ultimate goal that matters to them.

The Right have been rebels with a cause ever since the 1990s. The passage through Parliament of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which paved the way for the euro, gave them ideological coherence and an eternal enemy in Brussels. Moving in lockstep with Farage’s insurgent nationalist party, the Right dragged then-Prime Minister David Cameron to the precipice of a European referendum and saw him plunge over the brink. Theresa May conceded to a hard Brexit outside the European single market and customs union, but the Right swiftly withdrew support when she appeared to compromise over the status of Northern Ireland. Boris Johnson — ironically, a natural liberal on issues like immigration and the environment — exuded the single-minded ruthlessness the Right admires. Johnson purged pro-European MPs, sneered at legal restraints imposed by foreigners and won elections. The Five Families would like their boy back.

Even the Right knows that toppling their current leader months before a general election would be electoral suicide. Still, they are tempted to put principles first. In the Godfather, young Michael Corleone learned to keep his friends close and his enemies even closer. Rishi Sunak knows the score.