I think being recognised on a speed awareness course would actually have played quite well for Suella Braverman, suggesting she takes her slaps on the wrist like any ordinary person. Getting a speeding ticket is not the worst thing in the world. Let’s face it, it probably wasn’t even the worst thing she did that week. It would certainly have played better than trying to weasel out of the standard course, with or without the requested assistance of the civil servants she usually likes to insult as “the blob”. (Sarah Palin’s abortive pitch-for-power book was called Going Rogue. If the home secretary does write an equivalent tome during her next spell in the political wilderness, I’d like to see it called On the Blob.)
For now, there is much to enjoy in Braverman’s sense that she was simply too famous and too distracting to do an online speed awareness course with the plebs. In fact, as attorney general at the time, Suella surely enjoyed a greater degree of anonymity than that afforded by even the better witness protection programmes. Yet the Dua Lipa of SW1 instead opted to take the three points on her licence – a genuinely ridiculous piece of judgment that will somehow not permanently disqualify her from suggesting she’s the best person to have her hands on the nuclear codes.
But as we head into an Ashes summer, you honestly shouldn’t be able to look at the home secretary without lightly adapting that famous sledge chucked at Phil Tufnell: “Oi, Braverman, lend us your brain – I’m building an idiot.” Maybe Suella was worried she’d get the speeding course questions wrong? You get the feeling it takes her 18 goes at a reCaptcha before she can prove to the Karen Millen website that she’s sentient. Look, I’m not saying that Braverman deployed civil servants to establish whether or not a square contained an image of a traffic light – I’m just saying she asked for advice on the possibility of civil servants establishing whether or not a square contained an image of a traffic light. Big difference. Huge!
Still, does madam give a toss about how her latest cock-up is playing out? It doesn’t seem like it. Even at the best of times, Braverman’s resting face radiates diddums-level concern. She always looks like she’s just asked a pupil: “And who do you think they’re going to believe – me or you?” Suella’s is the carefree self-satisfaction of someone convinced they can stay awful way longer than you can stay angry.
The Office for National Statistics publishes its 2022 migration figures on Thursday, with a very significant rise expected, and Braverman has for some time been regarded as searching for the right moment to leave the government so as not to be tarnished with the failure to hit targets (to say nothing of various other failures coming down the slipway). So maybe the speeding story emerging now is Suella’s intricately plotted long-range attempt at suicide-by-cop and being fired from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, having spent much of her time in it trying to make her predecessor, Priti Patel, look like Gary Lineker.
That said, other far-fetched conspiracy theories are available. Tory Clouseau Miriam Cates MP yesterday declared: “It’s no coincidence that someone has leaked this private information in the same week that Suella has publicly spoken out about the need to reduce legal migration.” She’s literally the home secretary, but OK. Strong words from Miriam, who spent some of last week informing the NatCon conference that thanks to “cultural Marxism”, raising the birth rate was the most pressing policy issue of the generation. After a full 13 years in power, it seems like a bit of a self-own to find members of this Conservative party ranting about the low birth rate. You’d think they’d avoid drawing attention to having helped established an atmosphere of such profound hopelessness that young people judge it simply unwise to continue the species.
Whichever way you slice it, the whole affair does seem to be being oddly stage-managed by Braverman’s spads, or simply lied about, when that’s easier. Even when definitively rumbled on the story, her team seem to have pushed her to talk about it in the past continuous. On at least five occasions yesterday, Braverman chose to deploy the weird formulation “last summer I was speeding”, which makes it sounds like a phase rather than a single incident. You know the sort of thing: “Last summer I was speeding, I was cutting class, I was wearing my hair too long, I was spending a lot of time hooked up to a daiquiri machine. I was, in short, a hot mess.” As I say, I think I’d have gone with something simpler, like: “Last summer I got a speeding ticket.” But who are we to judge the genius strategists of the Suella Braverman war machine?
As for the question of whether Rishi Sunak will sack Suella, this feels like something we’ll be able to consider at leisure. The PM has spent the past few days debating whether or not to launch an ethics probe into her conduct. That would seem to be an exercise with about as much point as launching a survivors’ probe of the wreck of the Titanic. Mate, I don’t think they’re going to find any ethics down there. Then again, the sheer number of probes into the home secretary’s antics that have been called for, even over the past year, suggest some kind of specialist Suella unit may be the answer. Working title: Braverman Two Zero.
Ultimately, one of the main reasons that Sunak acceded to the post of prime minister at the second time of asking last year was that he won the coveted … sorry, I can’t believe I’m going to have to type these words … the coveted Suella Braverman endorsement. Yup, that was the reality – try not to choke on it. At the time, Braverman backing Sunak was regarded as the clincher that definitively headed off the possibility of Boris Johnson making the least welcome comeback to British life since measles. You may recall, Suella was in the middle of a spell in the political wilderness, which we can regard as very modern in that it lasted precisely six calendar days, and saw her restored to precisely the same office of state she had vacated less than one big shop ago.
The very idea that Braverman could once again be embroiled in a potential breach of the ministerial code, and indeed it not even be her first potential breach since re-assuming office … well, who among us? Who among us could have possibly foreseen it?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
This June, Marina Hyde will join fellow columnists at three Guardian Live events in Leeds, Brighton and London. Readers can join these events in person and the London event will be livestreamed
What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
