Rishi Sunak's Rwanda Bill was finally ratified last week (Image: GETTY)
Rishi Sunak has been warned he must gear up for a fight with “lefty lawyers” over his Rwanda legislation.
But Mark Littlewood, chairman of Conservative Party faction Popular Conservatism, also believes the Prime Minister can turn the fight to his advantage - by framing it as a face-off with the blob.
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And the former director of the Institute of Financial Affairs believes success represents Mr Sunak’s best chance of pulling off an unlikely victory in the general election most people expect he will call in the autumn.
The PM has pledged to put the first failed asylum seekers on flights to Rwanda within 10 to 12 weeks after his legislation was finally ratified by Parliament, clearing the way for it to get Royal Assent and become law.
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Many - including Mr Littlewood himself - are sceptical about whether the former Chancellor will succeed in doing so.
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Boris Johnson won in 2019 using the slogan Get Brexit Done (Image: GETTY)
However, Mr Littlewood nevertheless said Mr Sunak could turn the opposition to his advantage.
He told Express.co.uk: “If flights don't take off because it is seen that Sunak and his Government has been incompetent and hasn’t procured sufficient number of aeroplanes or whatever, then it will rebound on him.
“But if they don't take off because he's litigated by a whole bunch of human rights lawyers in the Supreme Court and in Strasburg, then he needs to make a fight of it.
“And in to that extent, you've got a whole range of things that I think will be mini-versions of the Brexit battle.
“Gina Miller continued to stymie Boris Johnson but it actually added to Boris Johnson's popularity. He was saying, ‘Look, I'm trying to get this stuff done but I'm being hamstrung by the courts and all of these litigants, and called the election on the Get Brexit Done slogan.
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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (Image: Getty)
“So if the flights don't go in the air, but the reasons that they are not in the air are widely seen and understood to be our overly cautious and overly powerful human rights culture, then I think Sunak’s got not just an excuse, but a platform to campaign on.
“He can say ‘I’ve done this, what more do you want from the Prime Minister, I've passed this into law, I've navigated it through Parliament, I faced down the House of Lords, I've got my party more or less on the side, and I'm now being blocked by effectively lefty lawyers’, this is unacceptable.
“That would be a similar canalogouslarion cry. So the one that Boris made in December 2019.”
The situation was not directly analogous, with the polls much worse for the Tories now, but Mr Sunak might still be able to “pivot” to such a position, Mr Littlewood suggested.
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He added: “He could almost say it was a constitutional crisis in that, who is actually going to determine our immigration policy?
“Is it going to be lawyers and the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court or is it going to be the democratically elected government?
“Now I'm not saying that's a surefire way of guaranteeing victory but I think it certainly makes a fight of it and more of a fight of it than is presently being reflected in the opinion polls that we're witnessing at the moment.”
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If he was perceived to have won such a fight, it would “massively improve” his hopes of pulling off an unlikely victory, Mr Littlewood stressed.
Mr Sunak has given no firm indication as to when he plans to go to the country other than to say it will be in the second half of the year.
The autumn is regarded as the most probably date, although former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage believes a summer election is on the cards.
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