Inside Politics

Good morning. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both endured difficult moments as leaders of their respective parties yesterday. Neither leader’s position is under threat: but the true cost of yesterday to both men may take some time to be felt. Some more thoughts on that below.

The UK government’s Rwanda policy has been declared unlawful again, this time by the Supreme Court. Again the central problem is the question of whether Kigali’s asylum system is fit for purpose or if it puts the people sent to have their asylum claims processed there at risk of being returned to countries where their lives and freedom are in jeopardy. (More on this in our handy explainer on the case here, David Allen Green’s piece on the judgment here, while you can read the court’s thinking for yourself here.)

The Supreme Court’s verdict has little if anything to do with the European Court of Human Rights or the convention more broadly but, inevitably, it has triggered internal Conservative wrangling over the court and the convention. Rishi Sunak does not personally want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (the big hint there is if he did, he would have said so as that is the path of least resistance in the Tory party). He has said that he will not allow a “foreign court” to block the UK on the flights, though as it stands, a British court is preventing implementation of the UK scheme to remove asylum seekers to Kigali.

Sunak’s government will seek to place the UK-Rwanda agreement on a firmer statutory footing in order to get the all-clear from the UK courts, though both the process of legislating and testing that in the courts mean there is little prospect of a flight to Rwanda this side of the election.

The Conservative government’s problem here is that a simple, non-binding memorandum of understanding does not place any legal obligation on Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his officials to pay due regard to the rights and dignities of the people sent to the African nation for processing. Given the nature of the Rwandan government, it would be something of a struggle to convince a court with any sort of human rights framework embedded into law that the Kagame regime is a fit and proper guarantor of those rights. But the problem here is, unquestionably, not about a “foreign court”.

Sunak’s words are adding to the gradual drift in the Conservative party towards the idea that it is better simply not to have any sort of human rights framework in order to be able to reduce the number of small boat crossings. That is part of the broader trend in his premiership, which Robert Shrimsley observes well in his column in today’s paper. Sunak is handing his internal enemies a big and powerful post-election argument that the reason why the Tories were defeated was not because of Liz Truss, or Partygate, the crises in the public realm or the economic shocks the country and the world has experienced, but because Sunak was too left-wing.

In terms of the risk to Keir Starmer’s leadership, the most dangerous moment has now passed. Yesterday 10 frontbenchers quit and 46 Labour MPs rebelled against the party line to back the SNP’s motion calling for an immediate release of Hamas’s hostages and a ceasefire on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war. But no one has called for Starmer to go and it is hard to see when a parliamentary flashpoint will come next that threatens Labour’s position on the issue.

As Felicia Schwartz and Neri Zilber report from Washington and Tel Aviv respectively, Joe Biden is coming under pressure to call for a ceasefire, while both in public and in private, Israeli officials are putting the amount of remaining time before they face significant diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire to a matter of weeks.

We won’t know for some time whether the political costs of holding the line on Starmer’s position (whose own motion called for an immediate release of Hamas’s hostages and longer and larger humanitarian pauses in the Israel-Hamas war, not a million miles from the SNP’s own motion) were worthwhile.

It has surely reduced Labour’s hopes of taking back Brighton Pavilion from the Greens — where Caroline Lucas’s retirement has given it what may be a once-in-a-lifetime shot at the seat — and increased the Green party’s hopes of taking another Labour constituency in Bristol. For Jeremy Corbyn, a close associate of George Galloway and former chair of Stop the War, it will have raised his chances of being elected as an independent MP, though the conditions for that are not as favourable in his Islington constituency as they are elsewhere in London.

You may think: come on, none of that matters — if a handful of seats that would otherwise have Labour MPs then go to MPs on the party’s left, what does it matter? Well, given that the next Labour government is going to have to pass any number of quite controversial fiscal events, anything that makes Labour MPs jittery about challenges to their left is going to make Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ lives a lot harder.

It may be that in a few weeks’ time, Biden changes policy, Keir Starmer rows in behind him and this is all ancient history by the time of the next election. But it may be that it is the beginning of a running sore throughout the next Labour government.

I had an enjoyably difficult time trying to pick a favourite cosy winter restaurant (outside London) for this coming weekend’s FT Magazine. A well-prepared meal — particularly a good lunch when the weather is bad outside and you feel yourself getting pleasantly fatter and drunker as the day wears on — is one of those small beautiful events that make life worth living, and it is almost as good to remember a good meal as it is to experience one.

I considered the Gurnard’s Head (a delightful restaurant and hotel not far from Zennor) or the Magpie Café in Whitby (a brilliant seafood restaurant in Whitby). But I had to be honest: while I have had a lovely time in both places in unseasonably cold summers, I couldn’t truthfully say I had visited in the winter. I have visited another Whitby haunt (The White Horse and Griffin) in winter but it has changed chefs since my last visit so I felt I couldn’t in good conscience recommend that either.

One potential contender was the Bell Inn in Horndon on the Hill (a lovely pub and hotel in Essex where we spent our most recent anniversary) but given the nearest train station is still within a TfL zone this felt like cheating. In the end I picked a wonderful place I have visited any number of times that is at the heart of a number of very pleasant circular walks: the Raven Hotel in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Check it out plus 18 other picks from FT writers here.