PMQs live: Rishi Sunak faces MPs after Rwanda bill passed by Commons | Politics

Rishi Sunak is about to take PMQs. It will be the last of 2023.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Mark Drakeford has announced he is stepping down as the Welsh first minister with immediate effect and a leadership contest will take place, Steven Morris reports.

Whether or not the Rwanda bill is compliant with international law remains a matter of dispute. Some distinguished lawyers says it isn’t, and that was the conclusion of a briefing from the joint committee on human rights yesterday. Officially, the government claims the bill is complaint. But the bill contains a section 19(1)(b) statement on the face of it from James Cleverly, the home secretary, saying he cannot be sure it is compatible with the European convention on human rights, and his language has been slightly evasive. In the Commons yesterday he spoke about the bill being “within the framework of international law” – which may not be quite the same thing.

In his interview on the Today programme interview this morning, Cleverly signalled that, while not wanting to leave the European court of human rights (ECtHR), the government does want to change the way it operates.

Referring to the court and other international institutions, he said:

What we have seen is an unprecedented and new challenge. The scale of organised criminal people smuggling is unprecedented. It is something that has washed across north America, across Europe. We have got to take action.

I [gave] a speech when I was foreign secretary at the Chatham House thinktank about my view that these postwar institutions, incredibly important, they need to survive, but they also need to reform in order to survive. The circumstances that we are seeing, digitally enabled organised criminal gangs smuggling on an industrial scale, is new. We have to respond to that novelty. And some of those postwar institutions – incredibly important, I desperately want them to survive – have got to recognise the tectonic plates are shifting, and we have to respond to that.

Asked why he did not support Tory rightwingers who just want the UK to leave the ECtHR, Cleverly suggested it was better to get the court to change. He said:

Sometimes countries are in dispute [with the ECtHR]. That is not unusual at all. In fact, that is the norm, rather than the exception. So it may well be that we find ourselves in dispute with international institutions. That happens a lot.

Cleverly said the UK had already got the court to reform in some respects its use of emergency injunctions. The first flight to Rwanda was blocked by an injunction from the Strasbourg court, but, partly in response to lobbying from the UK, the court announced last month some changes to the way these will operate. Cleverly said:

We made the case that the way they had been used was not appropriate in our view and the ECtHR have made changes because of our intervention. So you can both be in dispute with an international court, and you can also change an international court. We might need to do both.

This is also an argument that David Cameron, the new foreign secretary, made in the House of Lords last week, citing his experience of dealing with the court over voting rights for prisoners.

Rishi Sunak’s favourability ratings have hit a new low, according to new polling by YouGov.

Rishi Sunak’s net favourability rating slips to a new low of -49 (fieldwork 11-12 Dec)

Favourable: 21% (-5 from 28-29 Nov)

Unfavourable: 70% (+5)

After a year as PM, Rishi Sunak’s net popularity has now fallen to the same level as his party (both -49)

By contrast, Keir Starmer currently stands at -22 and Labour at -14

Favourability of senior British politicians (11-12 Dec)

Keir Starmer: -22

James Cleverly: -29

Suella Braverman: -46

Jeremy Hunt: -47

Rishi Sunak: -49

*Politicians with >50% “don’t know” scores*

Rachel Reeves: -10

Wes Streeting: -11

Victoria Atkins: -15

Sadiq Khan has warned that ministers’ plans to cut legal migration will lead to a “full blown recruitment crisis” in London, with vacancies in hospitality alone still higher than they were pre-pandemic. Daniel Boffey has the story.

When Rishi Sunak announced that he would respond to the supreme court judgment saying the Rwanda deportation policy was unlawful with a new bill, he described it as emergency legislation, implying it would be rushed through parliament.

But that is not happening. Although the bill has had a second reading, its remaining Commons stages are not due to be debated until January. And, in an interview this morning, James Cleverly, the home secretary, said it would take “some time” for the bill to become law. He told Sky News:

We’ve got to get this bill through the House of Commons and the House of Lords. That will take some time … We’re going to move quickly but we’re going to make sure we get this right.

Good morning. James Cleverly, the home secretary, has been doing a victory lap media round this morning after the government’s bigger-than-expected win in the Rwanda bill vote last night. Tory rebels abstained, rather than voted against, and there were “only” 29 of them – which is barely enough to put the government’s majority at risk, and quite small in the scale of Tory rebellions over recent years.

But the jeopardy for Rishi Sunak is far from over. The rebels were only abstaining because they believe that they can get significant concessions to the bill when it is debated again over two days in January, and the gap between what the rightwingers are demanding (set out in the European Research Group’s legal “star chamber analysis) and the minimal tinkering Sunak seems to be offering is considerable. After the votes on amendments, there will be a final third reading vote on the bill as a whole and at that point some rightwingers say they will try to vote it down if they still don’t like it. Some Tory centrists have also said they will no longer vote for the bill if it’s been subject to an ERG rewrite.

That is why most of the front pages today claim the parliamentary threat to Sunak remains very real. When the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express all end up using more or less exactly the same headline, there’s a good chance it’s right.

And here are some other headlines on the same theme.

But in his interviews this morning Cleverly played down suggestions that the bill might be killed off in the new year. On Sky News Kay Burley asked him to respond to this comment from one unnamed Tory rebel quoted in reports this morning.

This bill has been allowed to live another day. But without amendments it will be killed next month. It is now up to the government to decide what it wants to do.

Cleverly did not accept the bill was at risk. Referring to Mark Francois, the chair of the European Research Groups, one of the rightwing Tory factions pushing for a tougher bill, he said:

I will talk to Mark and I’ll talk to others, of course, to understand their thinking on this and try to harvest their ideas to make things better.

But I can’t see if someone’s got a concern that the bill might not be as strong as they would like, killing the bill doesn’t strike me as the best way of doing that, because if the bill isn’t on the statute books it can’t possibly succeed.

He also rejected claims some of his Conservative colleagues don’t want the bill to work. He said:

No, this is absolutely wrong. The Conservative party is united on the desire to get this right and to stop the boats. The Labour party’s position is to try and wreck it.

I will post more from his interviews soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Michelle Donelan, the science secretary, gives evidence to the Commons science committee about AI governance and other matters.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

2.30pm: Michael Tomlinson, the minister for illegal migration, and Tom Pursglove, the minister for legal migration, give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee.

4pm: Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, gives evidence to the Commons health committee.

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