Starmer knows Labour has the upper hand on asylum

It is a measure of how much trouble Rishi Sunak is in that Keir Starmer felt he could devote all six of his questions yesterday to the subject of asylum and immigration.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Some opinion polls suggest that voters prefer Labour to the Conservatives not just on immigration, but on Brexit and low taxes.

The world has turned upside down, and if the government fails to make significant progress in stopping the boats by the time of the election, the Conservative Party is going to be turned upside down at the ballot box.

Sunak's defence is so bold that it suggests he either has a secret plan up his sleeve, or he is desperate. He said that Labour is on the side of the people-smugglers. He is, as he said on Tuesday, "up for a fight" over this issue - despite, as everyone else said on Tuesday, having no useable weapons with which to fight.

Still, he came to the Commons armed with some old quotations from Starmer, which showed the Labour leader to have been in favour of the free movement of people and against deportation flights. Starmer was briefly on the defensive, deciding during one of speaker Lindsay Hoyle's many pointless interruptions that he had better actually deny one of the more outrageous libels thrown in his direction by the prime minister.