Rwanda bill latest: Tory factions meeting as Sunak faces crunch vote - BBC News
Conservative Party critics of the updated plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda are debating whether to support the PM.
Would Sunak really do that to his flagship immigration policy?

“It would be humiliating for the government,” one former minister who will be supporting Sunak tomorrow told me.

And, again, it’s hard to see what would change. Constrain the right to appeal further and the One Nation group would begin to get even twitchier. Plus Sunak himself has warned moves in that direction would mean the Rwandan government pulling the plug anyway.

So suppose Sunak presses ahead. Then the crucial question is not just how many Tory rebels there are, but also in what way they rebel.

To vote against the bill at second reading would be a vote against the principles of the bill rather than just its details. Many Tory MPs will therefore be extremely reluctant to do so.

The rebels may prefer instead to abstain. One MP on the right said: “I’ll vote against if enough colleagues are going to do that to defeat the government. But if just a few want to vote against then I’ll abstain.”

Clearly if the rebels went through with voting against the government in large enough numbers this would be near-apocalyptic for Sunak in political terms.

That prospect, if the whips tell him it is imminent, may be enough for him to withdraw the bill after all.

Going ahead with the vote and being defeated would potentially presage a leadership election, perhaps even a general election.

But, crucially, the dizzying possibility of these consequences may well be enough to give many of the potential rebels pause for thought.

So there are still plenty of permutations to how tomorrow may play out. We might get more clarity from the ERG MPs on how they plan to vote this evening.

Other chats are less formal: at lunchtime in the House of Commons Sir Bill Cash, the veteran eurosceptic, was publicly briefing colleagues including Jonathan Gullis, Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates next to the parliamentary canteen.

But whatever happens, yet another day of public dissent in Parliament displays Sunak’s fragile authority over his party.