You can’t help but wonder how it must feel to be the Prime Minister facing the awful reality of Monday morning. For Rishi Sunak, staring down the barrel of another long seven days in Westminster, it must get increasingly hard to steel yourself.
This week he faces the prospect of finally passing his Rwanda bill after it was rejected by the Lords repeatedly. There is a majority for it in the House of Commons so it is likely that later today the plan will finally become law.
Getting it through the Commons will be a big moment for the Prime Minister. It is a policy he heavily scrutinised as Chancellor but then hitched his hopes to once through the doors of Number 10. But it marks the beginning not the end of a difficult journey.
The courts may have a say and planes and a departure point for them are still yet to be publicly announced. There are fears inside the Home Office that migrants could simply walk out of their bail accommodation because the ability to keep track of them will be outstripped by the demand.
But it isn’t the practical considerations which are the most difficult to navigate. Rwanda has become something far bigger for the Tories and there is a risk that it can never live up to expectations.
It is the election-winning charm, the soother of the right-wing, the thorn in Labour’s side, and the solution to much frustration in the towns and cities around the UK whose residents see hotels and other accommodation being used to house young men who are equally fed up at their own inability to work or move on.
It is the get out of jail free card for a Prime Minister on the ropes and it is also a promise that he made and repeated to the country, on which he asked them to decide his fate in the next general election.
The Rwanda policy is many other things to different people, but for the Conservatives it has become something unattainable – the answer to all the most difficult questions rolled into one. And as with all impossible situations, however hard you try to distill them into a perfect answer, it never quite fits.
That Rishi Sunak appears to have been able to see these flaws for himself as Chancellor, when he is reported to have told Boris Johnson to scale the scheme back for cost reasons, and because the policy was unlikely to act as a deterrent, makes his conversion to it in office all the more difficult.
But Rwanda has also become a dangerous catch-all solution for a future election win, like the improving economic situation. The notion that voters will see the Government sending flights from the UK and suddenly decide to vote Tory instead of Labour is more than wishful thinking.
In allowing the policy to become the answer to its electoral woes, the party has done itself a disservice. Instead of working out what voters care most about (immigration hasn’t topped this list in YouGov’s tracker poll since 2015), energy is poured into a scheme which is unlikely ever to provide the boost the Government wants.
It isn’t a policy that people can feel in their everyday lives – important if you want to take credit for it come election day. Yes, many voters do care deeply about immigration. But they care about the impact of it on their lives: how their communities have changed, fears – rational or not – about getting a GP appointment, a home or a job. Questions of fairness which run far deeper than who arrives in the country via a boat on the south coast.
If people give credit for the scheme existing at all, they are also concerned about the cost, the relatively small numbers who will leave for Rwanda and whether it will prevent the pull factor the UK is for many – exactly the same things Chancellor Sunak flagged to Boris Johnson as concerns when the policy was first developed.
They are unlikely to believe this very difficult and multi-layered issue will be solved by the Rwanda scheme alone. And what’s politically tragic for the Prime Minister is that’s how he reportedly felt too, putting him right in line with the way voters feel now, if only he had followed that instinct.
Kate McCann is the political editor at Times Radio
