Suella Braverman’s rhetoric about child sexual abuse and grooming gangs has cost her the support of an influential Conservative backer, Steve Baker, in a sign her hardline approach to culture war issues could hamper her chances of becoming Tory leader.
Baker, a Tory MP on the Brexiter right of the party, who is now a Northern Ireland minister, was Braverman’s de facto campaign manager when she stood to succeed Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and prime minister last summer.
While Braverman, now the home secretary, was eliminated in the second round of MPs’ voting, her candidacy was seen as a marker for a possible future contest, one likely if the Conservatives lose the next general election.
However, it is understood Baker has decided he would not back Braverman again because of serious concerns over the way she has approached the issue of so-called grooming gangs.
Braverman has been vehemently criticised for characterising the issue of groups of men targeting vulnerable girls as a predominantly British-Pakistani problem, one based on different “cultural values”, a view contradicted by the Home Office’s own research.
An ally of Baker said he strongly objected to Braverman’s argument: “If she had said this is a problem predominantly carried out by white men in their own homes but that in some areas it was carried out by Pakistani men and covered up for political reasons that would have been fine.
“But she has heaped shame upon innocent men. It is not that she is stupid but that she is unwise.”
While Baker’s decision last year to take a post in the Northern Ireland Office and his embrace of Rishi Sunak’s revised protocol for trade across the Irish border has prompted some criticism from MPs on the Brexit-minded wing of the Conservatives, he remains an influential figure on the party’s right.
His concern about Braverman’s rhetoric and approach echoes wider worries among other Tory MPs about the home secretary’s embrace of culture war issues, and what some see as a deliberately divisive approach.
In May, more than 50 researchers and organisations working in child protection, including the NSPCC and Victim Support, signed an unprecedented joint letter warning that “inaccurate or divisive claims” about grooming gangs undermined efforts to tackle the crime and almost certainly made children less safe.
The month before, when setting out new measures to tackle grooming gangs, Braverman singled out British-Pakistani men as a problem.
She talked about a “predominance of certain ethnic groups – and I say British-Pakistani males – who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values, who see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave.”
The comments prompted Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative peer and former party chair, to urge Sunak to distance the Tories from what she called Braverman’s “racist rhetoric”.
The criticism has not prompted Braverman to rein in her language. In May, speaking to the National Conservatism conference in Westminster, Braverman condemned the influence of “experts and elites”, and what she called the divisive politics of identity.
Arguing that Conservatism “has no truck with political correctness”, Braverman firmly tied this idea to her views about the predominant ethnicity of child sexual abusers.
“The ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators is the sort of fact that has become unfashionable in some quarters,” she said. “Much like the fact that 100% of women do not have a penis. It is absurd that we find ourselves in a situation where this a remotely controversial statement.”
A Home Office spokesperson said Braverman “will not shy away from telling hard truths, particularly when it comes to the grooming of young women and girls in Britain’s towns who have been failed by authorities over decades”.
They added: “As the home secretary has said, the vast majority of British-Pakistanis are law-abiding, upstanding citizens but independent reports were unequivocal that in towns like Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford cultural sensitivities have meant thousands of young girls were abused under the noses of councils and police.
“That’s why we have announced a raft of measures, including a new police taskforce and mandatory reporting, to ensure this horrific scandal can never happen again, and bring members of grooming gangs to justice for the victims.”
