Herbert Morrison, a past chief of the Home Office, once said that its “corridors are paved with dynamite”. Which is why it is of such critical importance that the home secretary is a person who is careful around explosives rather than someone who can’t be trusted with a box of matches.
Opposition parties have been joined by Tory MPs of the liberal persuasion in recoiling in disgust at the deliberately inflammatory provocations of Suella Braverman. “Mad” and “bad” are among the descriptions to be heard from moderate Tories. They’re pressing Rishi Sunak to get a pair of cojones and fire her, both for what she has done and for defying Number 10’s instructions not to do it. Expressions of horror are also to be heard from some Conservative MPs that you’d associate with the traditional right of the party. One of their number, who once worked in the same government department as Ms Braverman, fumed to me that she is “too fucking dangerous” to hold the most junior ministerial rank, never mind occupy a great office of state with such grave duties in so many sensitive areas.
The charge list against the home secretary is a severe one. Given the tensions around pro-Palestinian protests taking place during this Remembrance weekend, a responsible home secretary would select every word they uttered with great care and seek to be a calming influence while working with the police to keep the streets peaceful. She instead made a conscious choice to ramp up the temperature. In her opinion piece published in the Times, she demonised the protesters by describing them as “mobs” and using the false blanket label “hate marchers”, as well as attempting a bizarre conflation with marches in Northern Ireland. That angered those organising pro-Palestinian protests and politicians on all sides in Northern Ireland, one of whom put it well when he charged her with “aggressive ignorance”.
Unforgivably, in the eyes of many in her own party as well as many outside it, she has sought to undermine the police and fundamental principles of the free society. It is one of the most crucial foundations of our liberties that politicians do not issue operational orders to the police. That is the way of autocracies, not our democracy. It is another fundamental tenet of free speech that the right to protest is only curtailed in exceptional circumstances where there is a clear threat of serious disorder. Yet she attempted to bully Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, into seeking a ban on the march in the capital, even though the man in charge of policing London said he had not seen evidence that would lawfully justify taking that extraordinary step.
Ms Braverman coupled her attempt to lean on the commissioner with the accusation that the police “play favourites” when it comes to demonstrations, alleging they are soft “on politically connected minority groups who are favoured by the left”, while “giving no quarter” to those who are not. She rowed back on Friday in a statement that said the police had her “full backing”, but damage was already done. It is hard not to conclude that she helped to incite and embolden the so-called “counter-protesters” from the far right who clashed with the police near the Cenotaph yesterday and attacked officers elsewhere in central London.
Sir Tom Winsor, the chief inspector of constabulary during the time of four previous Conservative home secretaries, had it right when he said that Ms Braverman had crossed a sacrosanct line: “It’s unprecedented. It’s contrary to the spirit of the ancient constitutional settlement with the police… A home secretary of all people is not the person to do this.” Except when her name is Suella Braverman, a woman who cannot see a line without wanting to trample it into the dust or hear an injunction from Number 10 to shut up without wanting to disobey it.
This abuse of her office adds to a catalogue of shockers. People in her own party were among those appalled when she recently described being homeless as a “lifestyle choice” and argued that charities should be banned from providing tents to people on the streets. More humane heads in the cabinet prevented that from appearing in the legislative agenda unveiled in the king’s speech, though I’m told there’s an ongoing argument about it within government. She has described multiculturalism as a “toxic” failure and migration as an “existential threat” to western civilisation, a trope favoured among nativist extremists.
At first sight, this looks outlandishly cavalier with both the office she occupies and her cabinet career. Hence a popular theory doing the rounds among Conservative MPs. They think that she is much less interested in being home secretary than she is in being Tory leader after the election defeat that looms over their party. Some even reckon she is conducting a deliberate campaign to goad the prime minister into sacking her. The idea being that she could then put distance between herself and her party’s defeat while projecting herself as a “martyr” to Tory activists. With them, she is quite popular. The ConservativeHome website runs a regular survey of how Tory members rate the cabinet. She is in the top five and 18 places higher than the prime minister. In its crudity and its flagrancy, her incendiary pose-striking is certainly consistent with what a politician would do if they wanted to establish themselves as the prime standard bearer of a belligerent, nationalist, anti-constitutional, authoritarian Trump-like right in a post-defeat Conservative party.
This poses an immediate-term challenge for Mr Sunak and a longer-term one for the moderate Tories who shudder at the thought of a Braverman takeover of their party. Sack her or stick with her? The question for the prime minister is how much longer he can tolerate a recklessly irresponsible and serially disloyal home secretary who can never see division without wanting to fan its flames in the cynical pursuit of her own ambitions.
It is his own fault that Mr Sunak faces this question. Ms Braverman was not home secretary when he became prime minister. She’d been forced to quit during the brief reign of Liz Truss for a serious breach of the ministerial code. Mr Sunak brought her back, not because he thought she had the character and qualities to be a capable home secretary, but because he made a desperate bargain with her in the belief that he needed the support of the party’s hard right to secure the Tory leadership. Since then, and despite the repeated trouble and strife she has caused Number 10, he has retained her in the cabinet on the Lyndon Johnson principle that it was better to have her “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in”. Mr Sunak must surely now see that she is inside the tent pissing all over him.
He has had a lot of advice to fire Ms Braverman with immediate effect, including calls to eject her from the cabinet from Labour and the Lib Dems. That doesn’t make it politically easier for the prime minister to sack the home secretary. It may make it a little harder, because some of his people will tell him that doing what opposition parties have told him to do will look weak while her claque will accuse him of sacrificing her to satisfy the Tory party’s enemies. Yet he will look even more feeble if he leaves in place a palpably unfit home secretary who has blatantly defied his authority. “She’s a disgrace and she has to go. Any previous home secretary under any previous prime minister would have been out within a day,” says one former Conservative cabinet minister. “If Rishi doesn’t sack her, he will be permanently weakened.”
The question facing all Tories, especially the party’s more moderate MPs and members, is whether they want their party to become defined by Ms Braverman’s toxic brand of politics. There is no doubt there are some votes in being an unashamedly and explicitly “nasty party”, but history suggests there will never be enough backers for it to win an election in Britain.
Yet there is clearly a significant risk that the Conservative party will fall into the hands of Ms Braverman, or someone like her, in the nearish future, and especially so if an election defeat deranges Tory activists. The challenge for the party’s moderates is whether they can muster the resolve, the arguments and the numbers to prevent that from happening. That this is a question for Conservatives underlines what a dystopian direction their party is travelling in.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
