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Rishi Sunak\u2019s \u201cpanicking\u201d Conservative Party needs Nigel Farage – but he does not need them, former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe has said.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister bought himself a reprieve when MPs backed his Rwanda Bill in the Commons earlier this week. However, Ms Widdecombe believes Reform UK, of which she is now a member, nevertheless represents an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to her former party at the next general election.<\/p>\n
Tuesday was a day of high drama in Westminster, with Mr Sunak pulling out all the stops to ensure the legislation passed its second reading, which it did by 313 votes to 269 – a majority of 44. He responded by tweeting: \u201cThe British people should decide who gets to come to this country \u2013 not criminal gangs or foreign courts. That\u2019s what this Bill delivers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, significant hurdles remain, given Mr Sunak needs to keep different factions on both the right and left of his party happy. Those in the European Research Group, for example, chaired by Mark Francois, abstained from the vote, believing the Bill must include a commitment to ignore the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to work effectively. However, so-called One Nation Tories have made it clear such a move would put their future support in jeopardy.<\/p>\n
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Don’t miss… <\/strong> Rishi Sunak breaks silence after winning Rwanda bill vote as rebels back down[LATEST] <\/strong><\/p>\n Ms Widdecombe, the former Conservative MP for Maidstone and more recently a Brexit Party MEP, said: \u201cIt was a victory in the sense that for once Rishi Sunak managed to persuade his party to act as one.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had rebels, but he managed to persuade the party to put its differences aside and unite in a vote. Now frankly, that’s a major achievement given the state it’s in at the moment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve still got all the rest of the bill to go through, we\u2019ve got the amendments to get through and all the rest of it and there are going to be massive divisions and they may lose some, I don’t know.<\/p>\n \u201cBut he’s got through the main Bill and frankly, that is an achievement thought it would just pass but it happened by a much bigger majority than I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n However, what was not clear was what Mr Sunak had needed to tell MPs to get enough of them to back the Bill, Ms Widdecombe stressed, suggesting that many of them were likely to have been motivated by \u201cpanic\u201d.<\/p>\n She explained: \u201cI think this is purely about survival. There would have been a confidence vote if they\u2019d lost, it would have been more chaos, it would have worsened the polls.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an election next year. I mean, you know, for once you managed to persuade them to focus on that.\u201d<\/p>\n Tory MPs are also likely to be mindful of the impact of Mr Farage, especially in the light of a poll published by JL Partners this week indicating that he was more popular among 2019 Conservative voters than Mr Sunak. Such is the 59-year-old\u2019s influence, that it has even been claimed he might make an unlikely return to the party he has not been a member of since 1992 – but Ms Widdecombe was sceptical.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cI don’t think he wants to. Of course, he’s more popular with Tory voters. They only voted for Boris Johnson a few years ago, with the slogan Get Brexit Done. So of course Farage is more popular with Tory voters, but that doesn’t mean that he wants to rejoin the Tory Party, it just means the Tory Party wishes they had him.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/139\/590x\/secondary\/Rishi-Sunak-5114319.jpg?r=1702650669025\")
<\/p>\nFarage says he left I’m a Celeb ‘fitter and stronger’ than ever<\/h3>\n
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