If Conservative MPs don’t want one, they should vote for the Bill, hoping that it can be strengthened in Committee and Report.
We have become a party for whom the grotesque is the primary mode of communication. Just to reiterate, I’m not talking about policy or principle here, but a predilection for the odd and off-putting in presentation.
It’s tough at the top: there are white hairs on the PM’s temples which were not there when he took over in October last year.
Unable to conceive that it may have made mistakes, officialdom seeks to set Johnson up as its scapegoat.
Thousands of grief-stricken relatives reckon he is guilty as hell, and want him sent to the scaffold.
His Bill may be held up in the Lords as he continues to insists that his Government will stop the boats. The only means of squaring the two would be an election with illegal migration centre-stage.
The former Prime Minister, chastened at the start, began to explain to the lawyers how politics actually works.
“I no longer had the luxury of waiting, it was over”, says Johnson.
The former Prime Minister says that “we were all collectively underestimating how fast [Covid] had already spread in the UK” at the start of the pandemic.
The difficulty is that if Party unity is made the great imperative above everything else then the Government loses any sense of direction. The status quo is continued by default.
In his youth he was mocked for being weird, but in middle age he upholds conventional wisdom.
Doing the minimum possible on legal migration would have the unwelcome effect for the Prime Minister of prolonging and intensifying debate about it.
The Prime Minister will want to avoid the trap that Gordon Brown created for himself in the autumn of 2007.