While Sunak survived his grilling at the Covid Inquiry today – offering a fairly convincing defence of his Eat Out to Help Out scheme – tomorrow could transpire to be a much more fateful day for him. 

As MPs prepare to vote on Sunak’s revamped Rwanda bill tomorrow during its second reading, rival Tory factions have been gathering today to scrutinise its content. 

At lunchtime, the European Research Group published its legal advice about the government’s plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda and, as anticipated, the verdict was damming. 

Mark Francois, chairman of the group, did not explicitly state how the group would vote but his comments provide a strong indication. The legislation has “so many holes in it” that the consensus on his wing of the party is that the government should “pull the bill”, said Francois. 

The European Research Group (ERG) – which is concerned that the legislation does not remove the UK altogether from the reach of the European Court of Human Rights or rule out all legal challenges to deportations – concluded that the safety of the Rwanda bill provided only a “partial or incomplete solution” and required “very significant amendments”.

We can expect a very different – but possibly equally damning – verdict on the bill when a rival gathering of a similar number of One Nation centrist Tories gather this evening. 

According to the The Times’ Matt Dathan, several One Nation MPs have have already told whips they will be voting with Labour in a bid to kill the bill. 

The worry for Sunak is that, in attempting to find a middle ground, he has alienated Tories on both sides of the debate. More centrist MPs are understood to be concerned that Sunak’s new bill has given ministers the power to overrule the courts by allowing Parliament to declare Rwanda to be “conclusively” safe – while simultaneously banning British judges from intervening to say otherwise. 

This afternoon, the Home Office published its summary of the government’s legal position in response to the ERG gathering. It warned that completely barring legal challenges to the Rwanda scheme would breach international law and be “alien to the UK’s constitutional tradition of liberty and justice”.

It added that migrants would only be able to make legal challenges in “extremely limited” circumstances – if they could provide compelling and credible evidence that their specific circumstances put them at immediate risk of serious and irreversible harm if they were to be removed.

Indeed, a leaked Home Office assessment of the bill estimates that only 0.05 percent of asylum seekers would be able to successfully challenge a deportation order. 

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