She speaks! At last. For the last week or so, Suella Braverman has been rather kept under wraps. Not let out of the Home Office. Both for her own good and Rishi Sunak’s. It’s been left to ministerial colleagues Robert Jenrick and Jeremy Quin to answer urgent questions that were meant for the home secretary. Leaky Sue owes them both big time.
But on Monday the hiding came to an end. The home secretary was forced out into the open. Not just to explain conditions in the Manston refugee processing facility, but also to give her version of why she, as the current home secretary, thought that she, as the then home secretary, had been right to resign less than a fortnight ago. Every time you think the government couldn’t get more absurd, some member of the cabinet finds a way of upping the ante.
It felt very much make or break for Leaky Sue. There were plenty of backbenchers in the chamber, but not all of them were wholehearted in their support. Only the true believers were prepared to go out on a limb for a minister who might not be in post by the end of the week. On the front bench, only Jenrick and his fellow European Research Group traveller Steve Baker had bothered to show their faces. Everyone else had an urgent appointment with their offices. When even Priti Patel and Tom Pursglove are briefing against you, then you’re counting the days.
Not that Braverman appeared to be feeling the pressure. Before she began her statement, she looked up at the press gallery and waved at me. A disconcerting moment. I thought it only polite to wave back. There’s no accounting for masochism. Within minutes, she was on her feet. The firebombing at the weekend had been deeply regrettable, but she was doing her best to fix the issues.
The main problem, Leaky Sue insisted, was that the previous home secretary – whoops, she didn’t mean Grant Shapps, who had lasted less than a week. She meant the home secretary before the two previous home secretaries. Actually, scrub all that. That was far too complicated. Cut to the chase. It had all been Priti Patel’s fault. The immigration system had got broken on her watch. Not that she wanted to blame Priti Vacant, as that wouldn’t be fair. She had done a good job under the circumstances. She just hadn’t been very capable.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was decidedly underwhelmed by what she had heard. How come there were now 4,000 refugees on a site with a capacity for just 1,600? Why were there inadequate facilities with outbreaks of diphtheria, scabies and MRSA?
Perhaps Braverman would also like to cast her mind back to 19 October. She shouldn’t have any trouble remembering it, as it was the day she had already admitted twice breaking the ministerial code by forwarding government emails to her private email and then forwarding it to her old mucker, the perennially useless John Hayes. Would she now like to admit she had gone for the hat-trick of ministerial code breaches in one day by ignoring legal advice to provide accommodation for the refugees?
Leaky Sue was outraged. She had no idea why the opposition might think she had been avoiding the Commons. She had been forwarding all her emails to her usual sources – including herself – and had assumed they had all been leaked. In which case everyone would have known exactly what she was doing. Even if she couldn’t quite remember.
But she was certain she hadn’t ignored any legal advice. Because she had gone out of her way to find someone who agreed with her after all the Home Office lawyers had said she was bang out of order. Or something like that. She was adamant that she had done the right thing. No one cared more about refugees than she did. Which is why she had tried to find them all tents to live in, as all the refugees that she had met much preferred camping outdoors. And it was far better to keep them all in squalid conditions rather than let them out.
“The system is broken,” she said repeatedly, continuing to dump both on Priti Vacant and every Conservative government of the last 12 years. The Tories should be ashamed of what they had done. Bizarrely, this brought the first cheers from her own backbenchers. They also loved it when Leaky Sue talked about an “invasion” of immigrants and sending people back to where they had come from. They relish their own unpleasantness.
Opposition MPs kept trying to pick away at the inconsistencies in Braverman’s statement. How she reconciled her claims that she had gone out of her way to provide the extra necessary hotel accommodation with her subsequent claims that she had left people to sleep on the floor rather than – er – allowing them out into inappropriate housing. How she squared the £150 cost per night of providing hotel accommodation with up to six or seven people sharing a room.
But Leaky Sue wasn’t bothered about any inconsistencies in what she was saying. She wanted one last fling at the dispatch box. A final chance to tell her truth. Or what passed for it. She had doubled down on her claims that she had never broken the ministerial code by ignoring the legal advice. But there were countless home office civil servants and government ministers queueing up to say otherwise.
Something has to give. And if it turns out she’s been lying, then she’s toast. Some Tories were secretly trying to claim that it had all been one of Rish!’s cunning plans, to appoint Braverman and watch her self-destruct. Right. Because what the country has always needed was another prime minister in charge of a chaotic government. No. This one’s not just on Leaky Sue. It’s also on Sunak.
