Rishi Sunak has been accused of putting “party before country” by making Suella Braverman Home Secretary only days after she quit the job under Liz Truss after being accused of breaching the ministerial code.
Downing Street confirmed Ms Braverman, who caused controversy with a string of provocative comments during her previous six-week stint in the role, will return to the role in Rishi Sunak’s Government.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the move showed Mr Sunak had put “party before country” and said her appointment was “irresponsible”
At noon Rishi Sunak promised “integrity, professionalism & accountability”
— Yvette Cooper (@YvetteCooperMP) October 25, 2022
At 5pm he made Suella Braverman Home Secretary, 1wk after she resigned for Ministerial Code breach/security lapse
He put party before country. Security is too important for this irresponsible Tory chaos https://t.co/AU9OmMnn9T
Ms Braverman threw her support behind Mr Sunak in the contest to replace Liz Truss, in what was widely seen as a significant endorsement by a darling of the Tory right.
She originally left the role last week after making what she said was a “technical infringement” of the rules by sending an official document from a personal email. Her exit made her the shortest-serving home secretary in modern political history.
Ms Braverman also raised eyebrows as Home Secretary when she accused opposition parties of being a “coalition of chaos” during a debate in Parliament on the Public Order Bill.
She told the Commons: “It’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, dare I say, the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption that we are seeing on our roads today.”
At the Conservative Party conference earlier this month, Ms Braverman told a fringe event she would “love to be here claiming victory.
“I would love to be having a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda.
“That’s my dream. That’s my obsession”.
She said it will be “amazing” if the first UK flight carrying migrants to the African country takes off by Christmas.
Ms Braverman is also said to have criticised the civil service for being too “woke”, reportedly lashing out earlier this year at the decision by the Government Legal Department to go on “divisive” diversity training at taxpayers’ expense.
She has enjoyed a rapid rise through the party, running in the last leadership race to replace Boris Johnson with a promise of “rapid and large tax cuts” and saying she would suspend net-zero targets to deal with the energy crisis and pull the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The first person to launch a bid, she was knocked out of the race in the early rounds of MPs’ ballots, after which she rallied around eventual winner Ms Truss.
The 42-year-old, the MP for Fareham in Hampshire since 2015, studied law at the University of Cambridge before gaining a masters at the Sorbonne in Paris.
She also qualified as a lawyer in New York and was called to the bar in Britain in 2005, specialising in public law and judicial review.
