Rishi Sunak is facing calls to sack Suella Braverman in his upcoming reshuffle following a disastrous small boats week.
The prime minister has been forced to concede that he probably won’t manage to stop small boats by the next election, despite that being one of his top five pledges to the electorate.
He said the number of illegal migrants making the dangerous journey this year is “down for the first time in some years”, but that he would not be being “straight” with the public if he claimed the crisis can be solved overnight.
The government’s plans to send asylum seekers to ‘safe third countries’ such as Rwanda and house them on migrant barges have also been significantly derailed, leading to a significant drop in confidence among the public in the Tories’ ability to tackle immigration challenges.
Opinium’s latest polling suggests Labour now holds an eight-point lead over the Conservatives on the issue, with with 29 per cent now saying they’d trust a Starmer Labour government on immigration vs 21 per cent for a Sunak Conservative government.
According to i reports, Conservative MPs believe the home secretary may be in the firing line when the prime minister changes his Cabinet team in a shuffle expected to take place at the start of September.
“The chatter is Suella will go”, one MP told the newspaper. “She hasn’t fully delivered, we’ve got the Illegal Migration Act through now, and need gentler hands.”
Another added: “Braverman has got to go, she is shit. All of this right-wing nonsense is just playing into Labour’s hands.”
Another Tory insider claimed ministers were “trying to blame each other post the barge fiasco”, adding: “A couple of MPs who are normally supportive of Suella have said if she can’t deliver then she should go.
“But No 10 are basically worried she’ll machine gun them for the next six months in the run up to the election, which she will. She would lead the charge on quitting the ECHR [the European Convention on Human Rights], which would be a nightmare”.
A former Cabinet minister said of Sunak: “Whether he feels politically strong enough to get rid of the likes of Braverman, I don’t know – but that is what I would do. This is his opportunity to get the Cabinet he actually wants.”
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