Time will tell whether the woman who helped Rishi Sunak gain the ultimate prize of running the country is the Achilles heel that could also undermine him. Suella Braverman’s swift return to the Home Office has unsurprisingly dominated the Ri-shuffle headlines this week. A new PM talks of integrity, then swiftly recalls the Cabinet minister who had been removed days earlier for breaking the ministerial code.
A less contentious minister would have garnered fewer headlines. But Braverman, the 42-year-old MP for Fareham, is a divisive figure, loved by the Right but viewed with suspicion by centrist voters who felt deeply uncomfortable at footage of her gleefully talking up her “dream” and “obsession” of sending migrants to Rwanda during the Conservative Party conference.
It smacked of prioritising ideological obsession over compassion and pragmatism, especially as the Rwanda plan was already a failed strategy.
Braverman is seen as a hardliner who wants to keep net immigration to tens of thousands, even as we struggle with huge gaps in our workforce, including within the NHS. Her comments were not helpful to her cause as it let critics paint the Tories as cruel towards the vulnerable. But illegal immigration is an issue that can’t be ignored. It will equally haunt Labour on the doorstep.
The boat crossings cost us nearly a million pounds per day, endanger innocent lives, line the pockets of violent traffickers and benefit those who are young and male. Dan O’Mahoney, clandestine Channel threat commander for Border Force, told a Commons committee this week that many, once here, are adept at gaming the system. Their actions foster resentment against those who are fleeing persecution.
I feel compassion about any human who risks their life in a dinghy to pursue their ambition of a better life. But we cannot be woolly around the reality — it is not mostly women and the young in those boats. The industry of small boats, O’Mahoney claimed, is associated with criminal gangs, prostitution, female and child trafficking, and drug warfare. Some 12,000 Albanian migrants have arrived alone this year, he added, up from 50 in 2020, after Albanian criminal gangs gained footholds in northern France, facilitating the crossings.
Once in the system, processing visas is complex (and designed to be so). And our system is jammed. There are 120,000 stuck in a backlog. Only 1,000 applicants have been granted asylum this year. If Sunak wants to prioritise his Brexit voters’ concerns, his ten-point plan from July will need to go further. He wants to also set targets of how many boats leave France. It was 50 per cent, now it’s 46 per cent. But it will need to be drastically cut to stop thousands reaching here. They need to recruit staff to process people faster to reach their new target of six months or that near £7 million daily hotel bill for asylum seekers (including Afghans who fled the Taliban) will keep ballooning. Build larger processing centres, as conditions are reportedly abysmal at Manston Airport, and ensure the Border Force has the resources it needs.
But the pressure for more cash, when crumbling hospitals are being ignored, and we desperately need more police on the streets, is only going to get tougher as our new PM desperately searches for his cuts. And it will be desperate, make no mistake on that.
Meanwhile, many other refugees, including 10,000 here on a settlement agreement from Afghanistan, languish in nowhere land, prevented from building meaningful lives.
But there are no fast fixes in sight to deter the crossings. They leap into dinghies because there is no way to get here legally, so they take their chances. We don’t process applications abroad. Sunak is badly in need of a Home Secretary who doesn’t merely talk up “dreams” of Rwanda flights taking off but delivers a strategy that is workable. And that’s not easy. Currently it is still a shadow of a plan, with only vague internal talk of a rehash of Australia’s offshore visa processing.
That same Home Secretary needs the skills to convince us, when they have developed a cohesive approach, that it is compassionate, as well as necessary. Brexit for many was about taking back control of our borders.
It won’t only be the economy the PM will be judged on. Suella’s “dream” will soon be her and Sunak’s nightmare when bodies wash up on the beach again.
Why do you keep doing this to yourself, Prince Harry?
Spare. The sparse title of Prince Harry’s autobiography is loaded with meaning. And I dread its arrival, not merely because I suspect there will be very little in it that I will find in any way riveting — seriously, I’d rather discuss the movement of snails on my doorstep — but because already the loud yelps of disgusted outrage have begun. And that’s before we’ve read the contents or pilfered from its many pages the odd line or paragraph that can be spun into a devastating betrayal of his family, heritage and grandmother.
Social media and newspapers are awash with commentary — here I am doing it myself! — and we’ve only had the book cover and a few quotes.
I dread the month of January, and from the 10th, to make it much worse, I am going to be drowned in the drama of the royal family and its supposedly heartbroken occupants, the sniping from anonymous courtiers with their hotlines to royal reporters, joined by Harry’s old friends, resentful and upset because they miss their pal as he’s swanning around California trying to find himself. We are told by the publishers, Penguin Randall House, his memoir is “his story at last. With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.”
My recurring question to Harry is, why do you keep inviting this endless traumatic cycle into your life? Actually, don’t answer that.
Harry: my only advice, if you want to heal — stop sharing every detail of your pain, for money. It is wholly inauthentic, even if you give chunks to charities.
The most charitable act we could all benefit from would be for Meghan and Harry and their haters to talk about something else. You’ve grown very dull. Please spare us.
