Ivory Tower: exclusive access to the Conservative WhatsApp group on immigration
KeeganSoS: I’ll tell you honestly, I’d love it… I’d love it if we beat them.
CleverlyHomeOff: The polls say it’s unlikely that we’ll win against Labour.
KeeganSoS: Labour? I’m talking about the Migration Advisory Committee.
CleverlyHomeOff: I am considering the government’s response.
JenrickGoHomeNow: I’ll tell you the response I’d give them.
CleverlyHomeOff: This is a party WhatsApp group to discuss all shades of opinion on immigration, so your contribution is most welcome.
JenrickGoHomeNow: I’d give you the same response.
O’Brien4Rwanda: We should send them all back home.
CleverlyHomeOff: The members of the committee? I think they are at home.
O’Brien4Rwanda: No, the students.
KeeganSoS: I think some of them live at home as well—they are called commuters, or something.
ForeignLordDave: Can you commute to Oxford?
ShappsMoD: There’s trains now and all sorts, I believe.
ForeignLordDave: Didn’t know it was an option in my day, could have played a lot more tennis at home instead of swotting for exams.
KeeganSoS: They mostly commute to the lower-tariff universities.
ForeignLordDave: Like Cambridge?
JenrickGoHomeNow: Can’t commute from Rwanda.
CleverlyHomeOff: Acutely observed, but I don’t think anyone is suggesting international students should be sent to Rwanda.
Suella4Leader2026: Aren’t they? Can I be the first to start?
JenrickGoHomeNow: There are ready-made halls of residence there for them to move into. I saw them in a newspaper.
KeeganSoS: I think that was a detention centre.
O’Brien4Rwanda: It’s got to be a deterrent rather than a holiday.
KeeganSoS: Have you ever visited a halls of residence in the UK? It’s not all pool rooms and fine dining.
ForeignLordDave: I remember having to go to a laundrette with Toby Young and Boris Johnson—that was very much a deterrent.
CleverlyHomeOff: Don’t you mean detergent?
ForeignLordDave: Could never get the grass stains out my tennis whites.
JenrickGoHomeNow: It’s a whitewash!
ForeignLordDave: I think it was a boil wash.
JenrickGoHomeNow: No, the MAC.
ForeignLordDave: Wrote my memoirs on a Mac—wouldn’t swap it for a PC.
Suella4Leader2026: Typical PC bias from the Foreign Office.
ForeignLordDave: Hold on, just because I introduced equal marriage, that doesn’t make me woke.
McVeyOrTheHighway: Doesn’t it?
ForeignLordDave: Attending a gay or lesbian wedding doesn’t make you part of the wokerati. Last one I went to, we were all given rainbow lanyards.
KeeganSoS: Sure that wasn’t a visit to the DfE?
McVeyOrTheHighway: I’m banning rainbows from government buildings.
Suella4Leader2026: That’s just common sense.
ChancellorHunt: Does that include the Treasury?
McVeyOrTheHighway: Especially the Treasury.
ChancellorHunt: But I’d heard there was a crock of gold at the end of each rainbow. Anything is worth a try.
ForeignLordDave: Equal marriage is literally the only thing the Conservatives have done in the last 14 years that anyone likes.
O’Brien4Rwanda: Precisely, it’s attracting too many students from overseas.
ForeignLordDave: To get married?
KeeganSoS: Well, they are not allowed to bring their spouses and children anymore.
CleverlyHomeOff: So, let me get this clear, we are banning rainbow lanyards because too many students are coming to the UK for same-sex weddings?
McVeyOrTheHighway: That’s common sense.
CleverlyHomeOff: That’s bigamy.
McVeyOrTheHighway: Well, it’s big of me too.
O’Brien4Rwanda: I think I read about that in the MAC report.
CleverlyHomeOff: Did you really?
O’Brien4Rwanda: Wait a minute, I’ll post the quote.
Suella4Leader2026: Yes, and then they claim it’s their human right and we can’t get them on a plane to Rwanda.
CleverlyHomeOff: Once again, no one is taking about sending students to Rwanda.
ForeignLordDave: Not even for a gap year?
KeeganSoS: I think you can go on the Turing Scheme.
ForeignLordDave: To do what?
KeeganSoS: To help with refugees, I think.
JenrickGoHomeNow: But we haven’t sent any yet.
KeeganSoS: No, the ones we are taking from there.
JenrickGoHomeNow: It’s a safe country.
Suella4Leader2026: Unlike England, that’s full of no-go areas.
CleverlyHomeOff: Why do all the international students want to come here then?
McVeyOrTheHighway: Rainbow lanyards?
O’Brien4Rwanda: Here it is, page 34 of the MAC report: “Evidence of the graduate route visa being used for people to overstay by entering into legal marriages.” Told you.
KeeganSoS: Page 34? The full quotation actually says, “There is no evidence of the graduate route visa being used for people to overstay by entering into legal marriages.”
O’Brien4Rwanda: That’s the sort of selective reading you’d expect from the woke education blob.
KeeganSoS: It isn’t woke to read the whole sentence.
McVeyOrTheHighway: Isn’t it?
JenrickGoHomeNow: British education shouldn’t be about reading.
KeeganSoS: Shouldn’t it?
ForeignLordDave: Mine wasn’t. Too busy playing tennis.
JenrickGoHomeNow: It should be about our island history and the British values we have spread around the world.
ForeignLordDave: Like equal marriage.
DonelanSci: You would never have caught Alan Turing wearing a rainbow lanyard.
CleverlyHomeOff: Are you sure?
DonelanSci: They say he was the father of computing, but I don’t know much about his wife.
CleverlyHomeOff: Have you not watched the film with Benedict Cumberbatch?
KeeganSoS: I’d marry him.
McVeyOrTheHighway: Woke virtue-signalling creep.
KeeganSoS: I only meant he was as good looking as Sherlock Holmes.
McVeyOrTheHighway: I meant he’s a woke virtue-signalling creep.
ChancellorHunt: Surely he’s the sort of British hero he should be teaching in schools.
CleverlyHomeOff: He isn’t a real person.
ChancellorHunt: Benedict Cumberbatch? Is he one of those AIs?
CleverlyHomeOff: Look, we have to stop obsessing about this?
KeeganSoS: I’m not obsessed, I just think he’s good looking.
CleverlyHomeOff: No, I’m talking about international students. We need a unified response to the overwhelming evidence and very clear steer from the MAC report.
JenrickGoHomeNow: I agree, send them all home.
O’Brien4Rwanda: Stop the students.
Suella4Leader2026: Especially the ones in tents.
DonelanSci: My mother says that when I was a student I was always in tents.
KeeganSoS: She said you were always intense, dear.
McVeyOrTheHighway: The common sense position would be that British students should be the priority for British universities.
Suella4Leader2026: Yes, too many British students are getting a raw deal.
ChancellorHunt: I know, funding for courses hasn’t risen for years and some universities are really struggling.
Suella4Leader2026: There should be no taxpayer bailout. Let them diversify their business model.
ChancellorHunt: Like take more students from abroad?
McVeyOrTheHighway: No, definitely not that.
DonelanSci: I can’t believe it. I’ve been reading about Turing and I’m absolutely shocked at what I’ve discovered.
CleverlyHomeOff: Now the penny drops.
DonelanSci: Apparently, the Turing Scheme funds people to go abroad, turning them into overseas students. No wonder there are so many trying to get back in.
O’Brien4Rwanda: The graduate route is a way into employment. A university education shouldn’t be about getting a job at the end of it. British universities should deal purely with education.
KeeganSoS: Wait a minute, I’m really confused now.
JenrickGoHomeNow: They should just be concentrating on British students.
KeeganSoS: Who we tell, it’s all about the job you get after your course.
CleverlyHomeOff: So, for students on the same course, we tell the foreign ones that they shouldn’t bother about a job, and the British ones that they should be anxious about it to the point of immobility?
McVeyOrTheHighway: Sounds like common sense.
CleverlyHomeOff: This is batsh*t.
RishiPM: Hi team, been following your contributions closely. I think I’ve come up with a solution.
KeeganSoS: Call an election?
RishiPM: Taking the best elements from all your ideas, we are going to stop international students going to British universities. Instead, we’ll send them to Rwanda to be taught offshore in franchised degrees.
KeeganSoS: But the Rwanda scheme costs £1.8 million per head. A degree in England cost £9,250 per year.
RishiPM: Exactly, even if we pay for the flights, we’ll be quids in.
KeeganSoS: And what about our universities that will empty out?
RishiPM: They can house everyone arriving on small boats that the courts won’t let us deport. There should be plenty of room in the halls of residence.
CleverlyHomeOff: But it’s much more expensive to house asylum seekers than students.
RishiPM: Exactly, solving the university funding crisis at a stroke.
KeeganSoS: By sending all the students to Rwanda and using our universities as immigration detention centres?
McVeyOrTheHighway: Sounds like common sense.
JenrickGoHomeNow: Works for me.
KeeganSoS: Whatever happened to universities should just be about education?
O’Brien4Rwanda: At the end of the day, they are businesses.
RishiPM: There you go @CleverlyHomeOff, a coherent policy that we can all agree on and that will be popular with everyone.
CleverlyHomeOff: Please, just call an election.
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