The Channel migrant crisis will make or break Liz Truss

Liz Truss has been clear about her key selling point throughout her leadership campaign. At its launch she boasted: ‘I can lead, I can make tough decisions and get things done.’

And her whole campaign has amounted to variations upon that theme – ‘I do what I say I will do’, ‘I’m somebody who gets things done’ – in TV debates, hustings with members and personal appearances.

So Liz Truss – not the slickest communicator but gets things done: that’s the offer which Conservative members are buying into in droves. Of course, Boris Johnson was once the ‘getting things done’ go-to guy. Or at least the ‘Get Brexit Done’ candidate.

And that was the problem. Once Brexit got done and the obsessively focused Dominic Cummings left his side, Johnson proved fairly useless at the implementation side of things. He never lost his columnist’s facility for story-telling, but the dog-ate-my-homework excuses saw a chill descend towards him from many of his natural supporters.

On no issue was this ultimately fatal loss of faith felt so keenly as on the shocking surrender of control over the United Kingdom’s borders.

Just a month into his premiership, Johnson spoke out about a then trickle of inflatable dinghies illegally unloading human cargo on the Kent coast after crossing the English Channel from France. ‘We will send you back,’ declared the new prime minister directly to camera in August 2019.

In 2019 there were in total 1,843 illegal arrivals via this new method, almost all of whom went on to lodge asylum claims. The next year there were 8,466 such arrivals and almost nobody got sent back anywhere. Far from the Johnson administration implementing an effective deterrent regime as promised, successful arrivals began to put out TikTok videos about how easy this border-busting was proving to be, much to the impotent fury of Home Secretary Priti Patel.

In 2021 there were 28,526 arrivals by dinghy recorded. At the tail end of last week the number so far for 2022 surged past 20,000, almost twice the number who had arrived by the same point last year. It can now confidently be asserted that the government will do even worse this year than last, probably considerably so.

Everything Ms Patel has promised or tried on Mr Johnson’s behalf has failed; paying France to stop the dinghies setting out has produced scant results, France has also refused to take back people picked up mid-Channel, there have been no ‘pushbacks’ at sea, the Ministry of Defence being placed in charge of operations has only resulted in an improved water taxi service to whisk migrants to Dover and that experiment will shortly come to an end. Some 30,000 hotel rooms at a cost of £5 million a day have been requisitioned to accommodate the arrivals, the vast majority of whom are young men.

And the Rwanda removals agreement, that great hope of springtime, has come to nought as well, tied up in knots by human rights lawyers. With immigration in general surging contrary to 2019 Conservative manifesto promises and the government leaning on local authorities to divert scarce social housing away from British families and towards the huge numbers of Afghans and Ukrainians it has invited to come, nobody should believe liberal commentators who claim that the public are relaxed about all this.

In fact there is a feeling that the basic social contract between the government and the citizenry is breaking down given the ease with which foreign nationals can circumvent UK borders. Among 2016 Leave voters and 2019 Conservative voters, immigration and asylum is rated as the second most important issue, behind the economic crisis.

The Tory leadership candidates understand that among party members its salience is just as high, which is why both Truss and Rishi Sunak have pledged to drive through the Rwanda policy. Truss has promised to seek similar agreements with other countries too.

So if Ms Truss’s emerging political brand is to hold together rather than fall apart she will swiftly need to demonstrate progress on this front rather than just raging impotently, Johnson-style.

She says she does not rule out the UK withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, but first wishes to try a less drastic remedy – passing a British Bill of Rights to bolster the jurisdiction of UK courts. Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, was clear in her own leadership campaign that this alone is unlikely to prove effective and so did advocate withdrawal from the ECHR.

Putting Braverman in charge of the government’s response on this issue – either as Home Secretary or Justice Secretary – would send a useful signal to the Conservative-leaning voters for whom it is a major priority.

But Ms Truss will also need to prepare for the Bill of Rights approach to fail, not least because our own judiciary is quite capable of expanding de facto rights to asylum seekers and thwarting removals – but also because it won’t stop the ECHR interfering.

She must do enough between now and the next election to reassure Tory-leaning voters that she will do whatever it takes to stop the abuse of the asylum system. That may mean setting up a vast new asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island, whether or not the Americans – who share our military bases there – object. It may mean routine detention of every asylum-seeker while claims are processed.

It will certainly mean preparing a radical set of policies for the next manifesto, including walking away from the ECHR and disavowing a swathe of other unsustainable international agreements.

Such an approach will cause an uproar among the liberal establishment and left-of-centre opposition parties. That could prove politically useful should Ms Truss hold her nerve, forcing an issue Labour is deeply uncomfortable talking about to the top of the broadcast media agenda. But her prime challenge will be to convince people that, unlike the teller of tall stories who preceded her, she really means it.