Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly gambled on migration – and lost

In an interesting case of attempted nominative determinism, the home secretary, James Cleverly, chose to publish selected asylum figures before the official, complete and detailed release of the figures for 2023.

It must indeed have seemed a clever tactic. On his media round of the studios, Mr Cleverly was able to quote some partial, cherry-picked numbers to prove, supposedly, that the “legacy” backlog of asylum claims had been “abolished”, just as the prime minister had promised in December 2022.

“Every single” legacy application – no less – made before asylum laws were changed in 2022 had been processed, he stated. Of course, not long after the home secretary had completed his set of appearances and returned to the relative safety of his office, the full statistical picture emerged, and it is not fully consonant with his Cleverly-presented version. Indeed, it is rather disturbing.

For one thing, even on the face of it, the legacy backlog, as defined respectively by Mr Cleverly and Rishi Sunak, has been drastically reduced, but not actually reduced to zero as the prime minister said it would be. It also seems that part of the clearance was due to applications being “withdrawn” because of the failure of asylum seekers to remain in contact with the authorities.

Therefore, many thousands have come off the waiting lists but without ever having had their cases settled, let alone being given leave to remain or deported. They are still in the UK, with no clear status, and, no doubt, have melded into the informal economy, with all that entails for their accommodation and working conditions.

A further proportion of asylum seekers in the backlog have been merely reclassified as “complex” cases; they are still waiting for a decision years after their arrival. In essence: the tray marked “pending” was overflowing, so they got another one and labelled it “too difficult”.

Moreover, while the old backlog may have been partially dealt with, a new backlog has simply replaced it, with the overall numbers hardly changed since the prime minister made his bold claims. All this has been noticed by the media and by their political opponents.

So now Mr Sunak and Mr Cleverly find themselves in the worst of all worlds: not only has their policy failed and the promise to “abolish” the backlog been effectively broken, but they have been caught in an amateurish attempt to cook the books.

So much for “integrity, professionalism and accountability”. It is hardly surprising, given their accident-prone record, that they are in this quandary, but puzzling nonetheless.

There is a pattern emerging in Mr Sunak’s approach to migration – an intractable challenge at the best of times. First, he makes a bold, unequivocal, absolutist pledge that allows for no wriggle room – to “abolish” the asylum backlog, to implement the Rwanda plan “whatever it takes”, and to “stop the boats”.

When, as is inevitable, the real world conspires to defy the prime minister’s wishes, he doubles down on the original pledge while pretending that his migration policy is clear and effective, when it transparently is not.

The result is that he looks obsessive and more than a little desperate, and devotes hugely disproportionate amounts of energy trying to make it work, talking tough, passing yet more laws, and manipulating the data. All he succeeds in doing is tormenting himself, and the public are not taken in by his spin or his attempts at legerdemain.

The fact is that on immigration the prime minister has constructed a torture chamber of his own design. His extravagant promises cannot be fulfilled and he has run out of time to make much more progress on them, but he is trapped by his own over-ambitious words and cannot escape from them.

He plainly hates the idea of admitting defeat, understandably, but because he has so loudly proclaimed that he should be judged against the impossible objectives he set himself he cannot now quietly drop them. It is painful to watch.

In the case of Mr Cleverly – appointed to replace Suella Braverman, whose insubordination became intolerable – Mr Sunak has found himself with a loyal but highly gaffe-prone colleague, whose unguarded and dishonourable remarks continue to dog him.

The only good thing, from Mr Cleverly’s point of view, about being asked by the media so much about his recent foul-mouthed and offensive remarks about Stockton and his crass joke about date rape is that much less time is spent having to defend the government’s record on immigration.

Just to top his performance, with a typical lack of self-consciousness, Mr Cleverly criticised his own civil servants for a lack of “accountability” for past failings, while he himself has been in hiding for the festive break.

To borrow an older political slogan, the Conservatives’ approach to migration, regular and irregular, isn’t working, in either policy or political terms. The levels of regular migration set by them under their own much-vaunted Australian-style points system are now too high for their tastes, though still inadequate to fill the labour shortages and to get the economy growing (another key Sunak pledge in jeopardy).

In electoral terms, hardline rhetoric on “invasion” migration of all kinds alienates many of the Tories’ more moderate traditional supporters; but the failure to “stop the boats” leaves their more nativist voters feeling betrayed and frustrated. It is little wonder Mr Sunak is so behind in the polls, and makes himself so vulnerable to attack from the liberal centre and from the hard right.

In many ways, winning a fifth term after 14 years in power was always going to be a challenge, albeit one that seemed quite conceivable in the warm glow of the unique circumstances of the 2019 general election. Mr Sunak remains troubled by the difficult legacy left him by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Yet he has made mistakes of his own, especially on immigration.

Mr Sunak’s fundamental error was to stake his already slim chance of winning the next election on factors mostly out of his control – the flow of refugees from Africa and the Middle East; decisions by the courts; even the prevailing weather in the Mediterranean and the English Channel.

It was a rash sort of gamble to commit so much political capital to stopping the boats and getting general migration down – and he has lost.