Win or lose, supreme court decision on Rwanda policy will be pivotal for Tories.

While only the five justices of the supreme court hearing the case will know its outcome for sure before their decision is made public at 10am on Wednesday, there is speculation that the relatively rapid process – a ruling was seen as more likely in December – could signal rejection of the government’s arguments, endorsing the appeal court’s decision in June. And, paradoxical as it might sound, a loss is seen by some inside No 10 as not just likely but in some ways welcome.
If the highest court in the land gives the green light to the deportation scheme, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will have to enact a policy that many critics viewed as largely performative and unlikely to achieve its stated aim: to significantly reduce the number of people arriving unofficially in the UK on small boats.

Nearly 46,000 people made the Channel trip last year and, while numbers are down so far in 2023, they remain way above beyond the number that could be flown to Rwanda, even though the scheme is theoretically uncapped. While the aim is to remove enough people to disincentivise the trip, even this is questionable.
Another risk for Sunak and Suella Braverman, his – for now at least – home secretary, is that while the policy is popular with some voters in theory, images of tearful deportees, plus potential future stories of mistreatment in Rwanda or people embarking on the same journey to the UK again, might dent this.
It would be very politically damaging for the government to see one of its flagship policies obviously fail, something that could make hard right-leaning voters incline to the even more drastic migration ideas of Reform UK, while Conservatives on the other flank of the party might become tempted by the Liberal Democrats.

All this is not necessarily to say that ministers want to lose; the consequences of the policy being struck down could be even more destabilising for the Tories than a victory.