Yesterday, 1,295 people arrived in the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats. That is the highest daily total since current records began being kept in 2018. More than 6,000 people entered the country this way in the first three weeks of August and more than 22,500 in the first eight months of the year. That is almost double the numbers seen at this point last year. From a video of the latest arrivals, there seem to be quite a number of young, fit, unaccompanied men.

As an immigration liberal – someone who believes in safe, sustainable, legal immigration – it continues to baffle me that my fellow liberals are so relaxed about this. Supportive, even. These numbers are bad for us. There can be no liberal immigration system if there isn’t a system at all. We can’t make the case for the economic, cultural and demographic benefits of immigration if your ability to live in the UK is not conditioned on whether you would bring these benefits but on whether you can make it across the Channel in a dinghy.

We will also struggle to maintain support for welcoming refugees, as I believe we should, if we keep up the pretence that able-bodied young men require sanctuary from France, that notorious human rights violator. Border protection is one of the primary duties of government and in aligning liberalism with a free-for-all, we are in effect telling people they must choose between border security and a flexible immigration and compassionate asylum policy. Which do you suppose they’ll opt for?

But this isn’t about liberals. It’s about, in secular terms, right-of-centre people. Fraser Nelson is a right-of-centre person, more or less, albeit more suited to the liberal or Christian Democratic right on the Continent. His views would fit in well in Sweden’s Centerpartsiet, Belgium’s Open Vld, or Luxembourg’s Demokratesch Partei – anywhere but the editor’s chair at The Spectator. Fraser is an immigration progressive, meaning he shares liberalism’s optimism about immigration but not its insistence on rules and process. Indeed, he seems to regard the failure of the state to ‘legalise’ those who have come here illegally as some sort of social injustice, as well as impractical. The editorial page of the magazine reflects these views and it is a testament to The Spectator’s near-masochistic commitment to freedom of speech that the last time the magazine published a leader urging amnesty for illegal migrants, Coffee House ran a response from me headlined: ‘Why The Spectator is wrong to call for amnesty for illegal migrants’.

I recount all this to make a point about the immigration debate in Britain. Fraser’s views, which are principled, sincere and wrong, are shared by other influential centre-right intellectuals, writers, thank-tankers, MPs and ministers but are utterly anathema to a broad mass of centre-right voters. If these voters look further right they will find plenty of rhetoric but nothing in the way of practical policy.

Indeed, it wasn’t under Fraser’s editorship that The Spectator editorialised:

If you are bright enough to sidestep the Home Office’s finest for a set period, you probably have what it takes to make a worthwhile contribution to British life.

That particular paean to illegal immigration was published by a previous editor, a Tory progressive who convinced a gullible Tory right to make him its standard bearer, carrying that conceit all the way to Downing Street. In exchange, these voters got the Northern Ireland Protocol and unprecedented numbers of people being smuggled into the country via Calais. Boris Johnson used to merrily lash Tony Blair over Europe and migration but, as I’ve noted before, it’s on his watch that there’s a border in the Irish Sea and none in the English Channel.

Why does it matter that the centre-right’s intellectual leaders espouse a policy on illegal immigration barely distinguishable from the left’s? Why does it matter that the first candidate of the right to win a competitive Tory leadership election in almost two decades has presided over year-on-year surges in illegal immigration? Because Brexit is seeing significant increases in non-EU legal migrants at the same time as economic instability around the world is driving elevated levels of migration, including illicit migration, to the developed West. These patterns would be likely to heighten anxieties at the best of times but in the context of a cost-of-living crisis, predicted energy shortages and a possible recession, there are all the makings of a toxic culture war over population growth and perceived scarcity of resources.

It’s obvious why liberals should want to avoid this but even the most cynical Tory strategist, eyeing up a new wedge issue, might want to think again. The Conservatives have been in government for 12 years now, seven of them with no Liberal Democrats to hold them back, and appear incapable of addressing illegal immigration. When the Rwanda policy was announced, I reckoned it was ‘hard to see how it could have anything more than a marginal, symbolic impact on the illegal boat crossings problem’, and since then there have been 431 small boats and 17,299 illegal migrants detected crossing the Channel. It’s hard to spin that as a deterrent effect.

If the Tory party cannot come to a reasonable compromise with its voters – e.g. stopping the boats but making it easier to come here legally – you have to wonder how much longer those voters will hang around. If a bleeding-heart liberal like me is troubled by the failure to get to grips with illegal migration, imagine how the average Tory must feel. The last time centre-right voters felt this poorly served by the main centre-right party, it was over the Tories’ failure to reflect their discontentment about Brussels and the additional migration brought by EU expansion. Then along came Ukip and the rest, including the UK’s membership of the EU, is history. The circumstances feel ripe for another Ukip, one focused on restricting migration but also pushing back against other bugbears of conservative-minded blue-collar voters, such as net zero, the ‘woke’ movement and violent crime.

The likely election of Liz Truss, a metropolitan Thatcherite at odds with much of the populist-nationalist agenda, might merely confirm the Tory party in the eyes of these voters as part of the progressive consensus on immigration and much else besides. There is a fundamental disconnect between the elite right at the top of the Conservative party and the popular right that makes up a significant part of its electoral coalition. If the Tories can continue to ride both horses, fair play to them, but I suspect they can’t and I would pinpoint the next election as a potential turning point.

If they somehow win, it means another four or five years in office, presiding over outcomes their voters despise, rubbing their noses in the total futility of voting Tory. If they lose, it will either hasten a conversation about the party’s purpose and philosophy, or the absence of such a conversation will underscore how alienated the Tories have become from natural Tory voters. Britain’s border security is no longer fit for purpose but it’s not the only thing.