Chris Mason: Delay to Rwanda bill gives Rishi Sunak time to plan

The government's plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda are delayed in the House of Lords.

If there is a splash of familiarity to that sentence, it is because it is very familiar. They had done it before and they have done it again.

No sooner has the House of Commons nixed their previous proposed changes, peers have now glued some more to the bill.

This is what is called ping-pong in the parliamentary process: a proposed new law bounces back and forth between the two chambers until they agree and the thing actually becomes law.

So what happens next?

The government has decided not to bosh on with this immediately and instead return to it after the Easter recess.

The plan, I am told, will be back in the House of Commons on Monday 15 April. With expected ping-pong between the Commons and Lords that week.

Senior government figures hope that it will finally become law in four weeks - on Thursday 18 April.

In other words, they hope and indeed detect that the appetite of the Lords to keep slowing things down is likely to wane.

If this happens, it will be almost two years to the day since the then prime minister Boris Johnson first announced the idea of sending some asylum seekers to Rwanda.