My initial response to the revelation that Suella Braverman, the over- eventful Home Secretary, had sent messages from a private email was forbearing. A lot of people who did not like a Rightwing Home Secretary or her policies were confecting outrage to slam her: it seemed better to focus on her tendency to make policy on the hoof than go to town on a single lapse of passing a document of draft legislation to a colleague from her gmail. The gremlins of fate and clumsy fingers intervened. Braverman sent it to someone else entirely, who alerted the whips’ office and Braverman (after a delay) apologised.
That would have been an end to it if it were the full truth. But it was not, and now a Tory leadership with a Pandora’s Box of an in-tray comes with the extra pressure of a Home Secretary who looks both careless and arrogant, a fissile combination in one of the most high-pressure roles in government. She did not, as she first suggested, err on a single occasion under time pressure, but sent sensitive official documents from her government email account to a personal one on six occasions. Politicians and technology are often a fraught interface. Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email to handle official documents when she was Secretary of State unleashed a scandal which helped deny her route to the presidency. As unscrupulous as the Trump manipulation of that story was, the awkward kernel of truth was that Clinton had grown sloppy in her communications, reflecting a broader haughtiness.
Braverman is a political novice by contrast — a street-fighting Brexiteer armed with a legal background and an appetite for a fight on immigration.
But she is entitled to make the case and some of the “Cruella Suella” stuff doing the rounds at Westminster has an undertone of sexism and perhaps a twist of inverted racism to boot. The centre-Left , as we saw in a foolish attack by a prominent MP on the transient former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng for being “superficially black”, is not immune from a bias which assumes that any ethnic minority politician should be liberal on immigration and asylum. Priti Patel and Braverman have certainly exploded that myth.
The remaining issue then is competence, which is where doubts must be beginning to foment in Rishi Sunak’s mind. Not least because putting Braverman into the Home Office was his most symbolic appointment of balancing his front bench between a return to more orthodox economic policy and a tougher outlook on immigration. There he sees an electoral dividing line with Labour and worries that those who voted Brexit in 2016 will become disillusioned if they see numbers of incomers rising again.
But the Commons session on the Government’s handling of the overcrowding of the Manston airfield camp in Kent looks like another own goal. The Home Secretary was warned that failing to provide alternative accommodation for asylum seekers could expose her to legal challenge (for which reason even her predecessor Patel signed off a similar agreement). Braverman herself seemed keen to emphasise in a Commons appearance yesterday that she has in fact tried to find emergency accommodation for those affected. This does not explain why so many sources have expressed concern at the delay — and the impression that Braverman was dragging her feet or inclined to ignore legal advice.
At any rate, Braverman is now the talking point and not in a good way.
Senior fronbenchers, including the multi-purpose Michael Gove, have had to be wheeled out to defend her. Gove is the Mr Elastic of logic when the occasion calls, but his claim that Braverman is “taking flak” because she is “over the target” was telling in its imagery. Braverman is endlessly in attack mode.
In truth, Sunak does want some of this in his Cabinet DNA — he is not so much a liberal on immigration as many of his fans assume and believes that the present asylum system has become too leaky to be effective or command public confidence. Hence the risky choice of a fire-and-fury Home Secretary.
But to do the job, she also needs accept its legal and practical constraints or create more trouble for her boss than she resolves. The last thing a PM taking office on a stability pledge needs is too more unscripted drama. Something tells me The Braverman Show has only just begun its run.
