Suella Braverman’s fall from darling of the Conservative right to political outcast has been sharp and brutal.
One minute, she was the favoured future leader of MPs on the pro-Brexit wing of the party. The next, she had been swapped out in favour of a candidate who one aide wryly notes “talks like her but looks like David Cameron”: her former political ally and Cambridge University friend, Robert Jenrick.
For years, the former home secretary was vying with Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch to position herself among the next generation of Tory leaders.
Her sacking from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet for writing an article for the Times accusing the police of leftwing bias, her hostile rhetoric on immigration and push for the UK to leave the European convention on human rights appeared to set her up as the standard-bearer of the right.
But over the last few months, Braverman’s supporters ebbed away towards Jenrick, who had been her number two in the Home Office. Former members of Braverman’s camp were quietly working on a Jenrick campaign even before the election.
By mid-July, relations between Braverman and Jenrick had deteriorated to the extent that she publicly branded him a “centrist Rishi supporter” and a remainer “from the left of the party”.
But this attempt to paint him as a centrist faltered as it became clear Jenrick had convinced many colleagues that the Home Office had “radicalised” him to push for action to bring down migration. One of his allies described him as an incredibly hard worker who had bent over backwards to persuade colleagues of his sincere rightwing credentials.
When it emerged that the New Conservatives co-leader, Danny Kruger, was switching to Jenrick, as well as the Eurosceptic peer Lord Frost, Braverman’s hopes appeared to be over. Her mentor and longtime adviser, John Hayes, had even flirted with supporting Jenrick.
On Monday, she declared she was out of the race, citing a belief that she could not lead a party when her colleagues thought her “mad, bad and dangerous”.
One Tory MP on the right of the party said Braverman’s problem was that she had been “too aggressive” and made colleagues “uncomfortable” with her disruptive interventions and language describing migration as an “invasion”.
“Her criticism of Rishi in the election campaign was not wrong, but it was not the right moment to start a leadership bid,” said one, also citing her openness to some kind of deal with Farage as a barrier to many Conservative MPs supporting her.
Another senior Tory said Braverman’s allies had deserted her because “her biggest problem is taking advice”.
“She has simply stopped taking advice and doesn’t listen to people in the same way any more,” they said. “Basically she won’t listen to her advisers, or her old friends.”
Braverman’s standing among MPs has also been damaged by persistent rumours that she could defect to the Reform party – with the majority of Tories in parliament opposed to a deal with Nigel Farage.
Speaking to GB News this week, she denied this was her plan, saying she was “not going to defect to Reform, no”. But she added that she hoped that she was not “driven out to Reform by my colleagues”, hinting that she could copy former colleague Lee Anderson by joining Nigel Farage’s party if the whip were ever to be withdrawn.
“I look at Lee Anderson, Lee Anderson’s a good friend of mine and it’s a tragedy that we lost him to Reform. He is someone who speaks with an authentic voice that resonates with a lot of people in Britain,” she said.
This is a scenario that is worrying some of the Tory leadership camps, who are mulling over what to do with Braverman and whether the eventual winner should shun or embrace her rhetoric.
“How do you solve a problem like Suella? Do you bring her in or leave her out?” one senior Conservative said. “The worst possible scenario is for her to be a Conservative MP who is on the backbenches but you can’t control her. At some point you’ll be confronted with her saying something, and do you take the whip off her or not?”
He suggested the best course of action could be giving her a brief outside the realm of home affairs, “somewhere where you want someone a bit vitriolic and a magnet for attention”.
“What you can’t have is people outside carping on the side because it kills you,” he said.
