Rishi Sunak will start the year as he means to go on: spending more time in key marginal seats, telling ‘ordinary’ voters how he is helping them by cutting tax, taming inflation and curbing welfare. The accuracy of his claims is open to question (both tax and welfare numbers are still rising) but the idea is that selected audiences, rather than combative journalists, will ask the questions. Major had his soapbox; Sunak has his livestream.

Things could become even worse for the Tories if Farage swaps GB News for the stump

While the interrogators might have changed, questions remain about Sunak’s message for voters. One minister admits to being ‘baffled’ by the recent flurry of ‘confusing’ resets which seemed to lack any common thread. Sometimes No. 10 emphasises change; at other times continuity is stressed instead. Will the next election centre on a fifth Conservative term or a ‘new age of Sunak’? Does the Prime Minister represent a refresh, or more of the same? At times, it seems even he is not sure.

Last October, for example, he told his party conference that he would end a run of ‘30 years’ of failed politics. Six weeks later he exhumed David Cameron and made him Foreign Secretary. Sunak promised ‘honesty, not obfuscation’ in a speech on net zero, yet talk of telling ‘hard truths’ is difficult to sustain when he claims to have ‘cleared’ an asylum backlog that stands at almost 99,000 claimants. Aides complain of not knowing whether they will be fighting a 2015 or a 2019-style campaign. ‘Are we the Establishment or an insurgency?’ asks one.

No issue better demonstrates this than the Rwanda Bill, which is expected to return to the Commons in a fortnight’s time. The concern on the left of the party is that it will breach international law and renege on the UK’s global commitments. For those on the right (and for Robert Jenrick, who resigned as immigration minister in protest at the legislation’s leniency), it isn’t robust enough and risks failure – like the two bills which preceded it. Party whips managed to keep the warring tribes together before Christmas, but battle will resume shortly when the bill returns to parliament. Jenrick’s successor, Michael Tomlinson, has been tasked with brokering a deal that avoids a case of the January blue-on-blues.

Two key areas will be the focus of right-wing MPs such as the New Conservatives: the right of individual migrants to appeal their deportation and the power for ministers to ignore injunctions issued by Strasbourg judges under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The latter power is dependent on ministerial discretion, with right-wingers fearful that any such use in practice would be blocked by Victoria Prentis, the Attorney-General and a member of the One Nation group of Tory MPs (seen by some as the Conservative left). They want the Rwanda Bill to be rewritten to allow ministers to ignore any ECHR injunctions, rather than just specific ones.

The backdrop to the Tories’ in-fighting over the bill is Labour’s 18-point poll lead, one of the biggest gaps that any modern opposition has ever opened over a government at this point in the election cycle. By some calculations, if today’s polls reflected tomorrow’s election result, just 150 of the 350 sitting Tory MPs would survive. Any Conservative with a majority of less than 10,000 is extremely vulnerable – and just over half of the 25-strong New Conservatives group are defending such seats. They’re fighting not just for their party, but what they regard as their own political survival.

No. 10 says it’s risky to ‘toughen up’ the Rwanda Bill because Rwanda itself has said it won’t accept any migrant sent under a scheme that breaks from international law. So why fight for it? The answer, for many, is that the need to tell their Red Wall voters that they tried. ‘Why should they go quietly into the night, to face electoral suicide?’ asks one in their camp. Should the Rwanda plan end up central to the Tory election campaign, it is probable that – just like in 1997 with membership of the euro – some candidates will break from the official line and urge Britain’s withdrawal from the ECHR. The hope would be to turn the issue into Brexit Mark II.

Until recently, No. 10 was able to say: who else are right-wing voters going to turn out for? It seems that, years after Nigel Farage’s retirement from frontline politics, there is a new answer: the Reform party, led by Richard Tice. For every 2019 Tory voter choosing Labour at the next election, there is another ‘who now says they will vote for Reform’, according to the psephologist Sir John Curtice. Polls put Reform on about 9 per cent of the vote, just shy of the Liberal Democrats (11 per cent) and ahead of the Greens (6 per cent). If realised, that could cost the Tories 35 seats.

Name recognition is the party’s biggest problem, so Reform is reprising the time-honoured tricks of the Ukip playbook: wealthy donors, talk of defections and boosterish press conferences in the familiar haunt of Westminster’s Hilton Hotel. Tice has pledged to have no mercy for the Tories, no standing down candidates to aid their chances (as the Brexit party did for Boris Johnson in 2019). With Britain out of the European Union and Jeremy Corbyn evicted from the stage, no such entreaties to ‘unite the right’ are forthcoming this time around.

Things could become even worse for the Tories if Farage swaps his GB News microphone for the stump. One ally suggests that he has ‘one last great campaign left in him’ and that, if he were to return to politics as Reform party leader, ‘it would be out of a sense of duty’. Within the Conservative fold, there are questions as to how much Ben Houchen and Andy Street will distance themselves from the party leadership as they seek to retain their respective mayoralties of Tees Valley and the West Midlands in May. Things may very well start to fall apart.

‘The path to victory is steep and narrow,’ warned Tory HQ in its New Year’s Day message to supporters. How steep? Bookmakers now have the odds of a Conservative majority at 12 to 1. At this stage, it’s a bet that not many Tories would be inclined to take.