In voting through the government’s Rwanda Bill, Conservative MPs have made a declaration: they want to reduce illegal immigration but they don’t want to take any of the hard choices required to do so. The final version of the Bill is the worst of both worlds, tailored to the sensitivities of the Tory left and yet still wide open to legal challenge. The chances that anything more than a token number of illegal immigrants are transferred to Rwanda between now and the election, whenever that is, are extremely slim.

Those who faithfully parrot the Number 10 line will regard the Bill’s passage as a political victory for Rishi Sunak. He has seen off the dastardly right-wing rebels and stuck a thumb in the eye of the open-borders left, all in one fell swoop. This could not be further from the truth. To the payroll vote, the election-year loyalists and those who are terminally Westminster-brained, the Prime Minister has shown the country that the Tories are united and serious about fighting illegal immigration. A great wave of clear blue water now separates the Conservatives and Labour.

The bill will be a constant, cankerous reminder that the Conservatives have failed yet again on immigration

What this doesn’t account for is that bills are legislation and legislation is routinely challenged in court and this legislation will be challenged far more than most. Its key provisions will be attacked and so too will the application of those provisions. When this happens, those same Sunak parrots will squawk about liberal judges and human rights and the blasted ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights). Do not fall for their cynical amateur dramatics.

It has been evident from the beginning that the Bill, while seeking to address the issues that saw the Rwanda scheme struck down by the courts, would not go far enough to put that scheme beyond a fresh barrage of legal challenges. It is not as though Number 10 was unaware the Bill was not robust enough. The Bill is not robust enough by design. Making it robust enough would have forced the government to do without the votes of Conservative MPs who regard failing to meet the UK’s ‘international obligations’, or rather their interpretation of those obligations, as intolerable, more so than the mass-scale abuse of the asylum process. Without those votes, Sunak would have lost.

Some will argue that, in an election year, a bad Bill is better for the Tories than no Bill, but that’s a particularly dim analysis. A bad Bill will be much worse for the government. Not only will this legislation fail to remedy the illegal immigration problem, it will be a matter of record that the vast majority of Tory MPs voted for it. They chose to lumber themselves with a Bill that cannot do what they have promised it will do. For the rest of this year, it will be a constant, cankerous reminder that the Conservatives have failed yet again on immigration.

Voters who believe Britain should control its borders do not care whether the Prime Minister scored a victory over his backbench rebels. They do not care whether or not the Conservative party looks united ahead of the election. They want their borders back under control and they will soon see that the Rwanda Bill will not do so. As I’ve pointed out before, every election the Conservatives have won in the last 40 years they have done so on a manifesto promising to control or reduce immigration. Yet after almost 14 years of Tory government, not only legal but illegal immigration is at a record high.

There is one of two conclusions to be drawn from this. Either the Conservative party believes in controlling immigration but is chronically incapable of doing so, or the Conservative party does not believe in controlling immigration but is saying otherwise to win votes. Whether it is the former or the latter, it is no longer possible to deny the plain truth: the Conservative party in its current incarnation will not control immigration.