Suella Braverman’s parting shot to Rishi Sunak after he sacked her is a stinging letter in which she makes a series of attacks on his policies and style of government. Here we analyse her key points.
Braverman wrote:
As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities … This was a document with clear terms.
As soon as Sunak unexpectedly appointed the outspoken Braverman last autumn, it was rumoured that it had been part of a secret deal to help Sunak’s leadership campaign gain rightwing supporters who might otherwise have clamoured for the return of the exiled Boris Johnson.
Here, Braverman makes the incendiary claim that not only did such a deal exist, but Sunak actually signed up to a series of written pledges. If the prime minister did indeed make such a deal, it raises serious questions about his political judgment – such a document is an extraordinary hostage to fortune, as Braverman is now demonstrating.
But a deal like this also makes Sunak look weak, suggesting he was so uncertain about his standing within his own party that he was willing to subcontract large areas of policy to a rightwinger whose stance appears to be quite different from his.
It may also help explain Braverman’s apparent sense that she did not need to abide by collective cabinet responsibility, as well as the ongoing ambiguity over the past year about what Sunak’s government actually stands for.
Braverman claims the following demand was one of four set out in the “document” Sunak signed up to during what she cuttingly called his “second leadership campaign”:
Include specific “notwithstanding clauses” into new legislation to stop the boats, ie exclude the operation of the European convention on human rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue.
Its inclusion here will be particularly explosive if the supreme court rules against the government’s Rwanda asylum policy on Wednesday.
Elsewhere in the letter, Braverman claims she has repeatedly urged Sunak not to assume the government will win the case – but has been ignored.
Leaving the ECHR is regarded as a minority view among Conservative MPs, overturning, as it would, decades of UK membership of the body set up to safeguard human rights after the horrors of the second world war – and setting the country well apart from the European mainstream, alongside the only other refuseniks in Europe: Russia and Belarus.
This approach would also set Sunak’s government on a collision course with many of its own more moderate MPs.
Braverman wrote:
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you had no intention of keeping your promises … These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people which led to our landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 referendum.
Here, Braverman tries to suggest Sunak has failed not just her, but the Brexit supporters who helped deliver Boris Johnson’s general election victory four years ago.
As Johnson did, she apparently hopes to ride the wave of Brexit betrayal to the top of the Tory party.
Yet it is unclear that “red wall” voters who threw their weight behind Brexit are likely to have been particularly exercised about her demand for the delivery of the EU retained law bill, let alone her call for the issuing of “statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex”.
Braverman and her colleagues are standing up for a particular, doctrinaire brand of Brexit, and, in doing so, claiming to be representing voters; but recent polling suggests leave and remain are becoming much less salient as voting identities, being overtaken by concerns about the cost of living and the state of the NHS.
Braverman wrote:
I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion.
Here, Braverman is filling in the political backstory to her unedifying public row with the Met over the policing of the growing weekly marches calling for a ceasefire in Palestine.
Evidently, she had urged Sunak to take steps to ban the marches, which she claims are part of a wider picture of dangerous radicalisation in the UK.
This private frustration may help to explain Braverman’s increasingly strong language – calling the gatherings “hate marches”, for example.
Her approach has been widely regarded as potentially inflammatory – and the Met themselves hinted that they partly blamed her for the presence of numerous violent counterprotesters in the capital on Saturday, apparently intending to confront the marchers.
The wider arguments here, which touch on multiculturalism and freedom of speech, are likely to continue to play out in the coming days.
Braverman wrote:
In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Much of Braverman’s letter amounts to an extended character assassination of Sunak, who likes to paint himself as a straight-talking public servant.
But this paragraph is particularly brutal. It was a criticism often levelled at Johnson and the newly minted foreign secretary, David Cameron, that they were more interested in becoming prime minister than what difference they could make to the UK as its leader. Cameron once reportedly said he wanted to be prime minister, “because I think I’d be good at it”.
Despite being another product of an expensive public school who studied at Oxford, Sunak likes to paint himself as a different kind of politician to these two; but Braverman is putting him firmly in the same category; as self-serving and lacking in vision (though no doubt she herself would exempt Johnson from that criticism) – and not only that, but weak and indecisive.
