Nothing reminds me more of how Rishi Sunak lost to Liz Truss than Sunak’s utter failure on dealing with the Channel crossings. This is a battle Sunak is losing quite badly and publicly. Sunak’s stop the boats pledge, like the Maginot Line, was designed to reassure a country about it’s safety and security, but had a huge flaw.

Not only is it the failure to stop the crossings, it is the resultant calamities such as the Legionella outbreak on the Bibby Stockholm that is damaging the government, just look at Suella Braverman’s ratings, even amongst Tory voters. If Sunak wanted an easy win he should fire Braverman and replace her with someone who has a bit more obvious humanity about them. Braverman is the sort of person who would unplug an asylum seeker’s life support machine just so she could charge her mobile phone.

Every time Lee Anderson talks about telling asylum seekers to fuck off back to France because they do not wish to be housed on the barges he reminds the country of Sunak’s failures, this is a problem that Sunak isn’t dealing with as we can see with the above polling.

If I were Sunak I would try and reframe the argument, what better endorsement of Brexit than thousands of people fleeing the EU to come to the UK, it could help him improve the bad polling around Brexit as well.

TSE