The government at one point considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers – like the Rwanda scheme – according to documents seen by Sky News.

This could have seen people sent from the UK to a country the government advises against all travel to.

The two countries already have a returns agreement – but only for people that are from Iraq.

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According to leaked correspondence between high-ranking officials, the Iraqi returns commitments were made with a “request for discretion” and no publicity.

The country was willing to move forward but did not want a formal or public agreement.

The current travel advice to Iraq on the Foreign Office website simply advises against “all travel to parts of Iraq”. However, according to the document, negotiations were fairly advanced and described in one table as “good recent progress with Iraq”.

Other government aims included enhancing cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in order to enhance returns arrangements for migrants and potential asylum seekers.

Returns agreements are also in the works for Eritrea and Ethiopia, according to documents about work undertaken by the Home Office and Foreign Office that relates to countries with the highest number of nationals arriving to the UK by small boats.

In a tranche of internal government documents seen by Sky News, even from the earliest stage of the Rwanda policy, Downing Street advisers knew there were serious problems with their proposals.

There are even private admissions that many people arriving here on small boats did so without the assistance of criminal gangs – despite their communications strategy.

Comparisons were also made to Australia’s response – to what Downing Street officials understood to be a comparable “smaller problem” than in the UK and admitted it had cost billions of Australian dollars in order for their returns processes to be fully operational.

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In one document submitted to the Home Office, some of the highest-ranking officials at the time wrote that their guidance was to be “prepared to pay over the odds” to get the policy up and running. And that the initial offer from Rwanda was a “modest sum”.

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Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has priced the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda at £1.8m per person for the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali.

It also disclosed that since April 2022 the Home Office has paid £220m into Rwanda’s economic transformation and integration fund, which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, and will continue to make payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs for individuals relocated to Rwanda.

It will also pay further amounts of £50m over the next year and an additional £50m the following year.

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A government source said: “The Home Office is spending millions every day accommodating migrants in hotels – that’s not right or fair. We’re taking action to put an end to this costly and dangerous cycle. Doing nothing is not a free option – we must act if we want to stop the boats and save lives.

“The UK is continuing to work with a range of international partners to tackle global illegal migration challenges. Our Rwanda partnership is a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration, and we will get flights off the ground to Rwanda in the next nine to eleven weeks.”

It was a wafer-thin victory, but a huge win.

The symbolism of Labour taking the West Midlands mayor, a jewel in the Tory crown, could be felt in the room as Labour activists gathered in Birmingham to celebrate the win with their new mayor Richard Parker and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

There are moments on election journeys when the momentum shifts – and this win felt like one of them.

“We humbly asked [the voters] to put their trust and confidence in a changed Labour Party and they did. And that is a significant piece of political history that we’ve made here today,” said Sir Keir at his victory rally.

“So the message out of these elections, the last now the last stop before we go into that general election, is that the country wants change.

“I hope the prime minister is listening and gives the opportunity to the country to vote as a whole in a general election as soon as possible.”

This win gave them the boost that was missing when they won the Blackpool South by-election on a massive 26-point swing, but then failed to pick up the hundreds of council seats they were chasing.

This win, on just 1,508 votes or 0.25 per cent of the vote, was a body blow for a Conservative party that believed they could just about cling on. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is now the last Tory standing.

For Labour, then a moment to bookmark.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Hartlepool by-election win in 2021 was a low point for Sir Keir – he told me this week that he considered resigning over the loss because he thought it showed he was the barrier to Labour’s recovery – this too will feel devastating not just for Andy Street but for the PM too.

Labour has beaten him in a street fight. He’s bloodied with Sir Keir now emboldened.

“This was the one result we really needed,” said one senior Labour figure. “It’s been our top focus for the past week and symbolically a very important win.”

And Labour needed the boost, because, as Professor Michael Thrasher pointed out in his Sky News’ national vote share projection calculated from the local election results, Sir Keir was not picking up the sort of vote share that Tony Blair was winning in the run-up to the 1997 Labour landslide.

His latest calculation of a 35% vote share for Labour and 26% for the Tories, put Sir Keir winning a general election but short of a majority.

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What the West Midlands mayoral win did for Sir Keir was to give him a clear narrative that he is coming for the Tories and will do what he needs to take them down.

It raises inevitable questions about what is next for Rishi Sunak. The prime minister had nowhere to go today, not one win to celebrate. The worst performance in council elections in 40 years, was already pretty much as bad as it gets before the loss of Andy Street. The former Conservative mayor was magnanimous towards the prime minister, saying the loss was his alone.

But colleagues will not be so generous. One former cabinet minister said this loss was “devastating”. “We’re done and there’s no appetite to move against him,” said the senior MP. Many Tories tell me they are now resigned to defeat and believe Mr Sunak and his team needed to own it, rather than the rest of the party.

The coming days might be bumpy, the mood will be stony. But Tories tell me not much will actually change for them.

For Sir Keir, he now needs to sell not the changed Labour Party, but his vision for changing the country. The West Mids mayor’s win was dazzling, but it could have so easily gone the other way. And as Mr Sunak fights to survive, Labour still has to fight hard to win.