Truss and Sunak are out of step with the public on immigration

Politics has been beyond surreal for quite some time now, but rarely has it felt more dystopian. Has there ever been a spectacle quite so grotesque as two people, fighting to be the next prime minister, seeking to outbid one another by announcing ever more extreme policies that a clear majority of the country find repulsive?

The current terrain in the ongoing battle is a contest to see who can be the most cruel to asylum seekers. Or rather, not actually be the most cruel, but simply say the most cruel things. Liz Truss boasts that she will deport “more” asylum seekers to Rwanda. This is despite the policy not merely having failed for every other country that’s tried it, but having been found to be illegal in almost every case – not to mention that the Rwandan government itself, having taken the £120m payment up front, has announced that the maximum number of people it can take is 200.

Rishi Sunak has pledged to do “whatever it takes” to get the Rwanda policy “off the ground”. He won’t, and he can’t. He just knows that he has to say that he will, to appease the 160,000 Tory members who will decide the outcome of the contest.

The British public are now well used to the madness of having their next prime minister, and their next government, chosen by what amounts to little more than a clique of 160,000 rich old men and women. It is not a constitutional aberration that it should ever happen this way, but it is meant to be the exception, not the rule, and this is the third time it has happened in the past six years.

It is appropriate to ask, at this point, whether things might be more than a little bit broken. Boris Johnson, in the end, was disposed of because his MPs could see that the country didn’t trust him any more. He had simply told too many lies. But Tory MPs are not stupid. They could also see that the polls had moved decisively against them, and that if they didn’t take action they would not win the next election, and would certainly not hold on to the crucial traditional Labour seats they won in 2019.

But polling covers many things. For a lot of people, the Johnson government became untenable precisely because of the appalling Rwanda policy, which – don’t forget – was rushed out 24 hours after the prime minister received his fixed penalty notice. And yet here we are, with one fatally unpopular leader kicked out, and still the contest to replace him requires appealing to a tiny electorate whose lives and views bear almost no resemblance to those of the public at large.

To win a Tory leadership contest, you must make yourself hateful to the wider public. You must make yourself unpopular. To win, you have to lose.

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To the same end, each candidate is doing their level best to brand themselves the new Margaret Thatcher. Mr Sunak went to her old hometown of Grantham to give a speech. This, naturally, is what the members want to hear. But it is a lot easier for the members to ignore a reality that Mr Johnson clearly understood – that the party governs with the borrowed backing of the towns Thatcher broke. Clearly, they were ready for a change.

A new Tory leader – with one contender for the role having quite literally dressed up as Thatcher (see Ms Truss’s costume in the first TV debate) – may be more than those towns are prepared to lend.

Naturally, you can pivot away from all this madness once in office. You can carry on doing what the last lot did, and blame the failure of your deportation plan on “lefty lawyers” and the like, which was always the plan in the first place. But this transparent chicanery has been tried once already, and it has – equally transparently – failed.

Politics has never been a more unpredictable business. Maybe they can pull it off. But there is clearly a path of less resistance, which involves the voters, only two years from now, calling time on this dystopian horror show. If either candidate can prevent that, then they will need to possess political skills far deeper than either has displayed thus far.