The Tory MP and recipient of the email that forced Suella Braverman to resign as home secretary under Liz Truss has given his full backing to the embattled minister.
The Home Secretary, who was reappointed by Rishi Sunak despite her resignation from Ms Truss’s government only days earlier, sent draft immigration policy to Tory backbencher Sir John Hayes from a personal email address, inadvertently also sending it to a staff member of another Conservative MP.
In an interview on Wednesday, Sir John described Ms Braverman as a “close friend” and said she was someone who “understands the asylum system needs fixing”.
Ms Braverman has also been under fire over comments she made in the Commons on Monday, when she likened the arrival of migrants at the south coast to an “invasion”.
The Home Secretary has come under pressure for her handling of severe overcrowding at the Manston migrant processing centre, as well as questions about her own efforts to procure hotel accommodation for those seeking asylum in the UK.
Sir John told Times Radio that Ms Braverman was “right” to resign first time around, but defended her reappointment.
The MP said: “She was right, wasn’t she, and she acknowledged it herself. She resigned. But because of that, because she did so, and let’s be clear, what she sent me is, I think, this is well in the public domain. And I’m not going to go into great details, I think we’ve moved on from it.
“But what she sent me was the draft of a written ministerial statement, and written ministerial statements go to the whole of the House of Commons and are in the public domain. So essentially, I got a document that everyone would have got, 24 hours earlier. Now that isn’t right. And she said so, she resigned.”
He said that Mr Sunak was “right” to bring her back into Government, adding: “Thank goodness, we have a Home Secretary who understands the asylum system needs fixing.”
The system is being gamed— Sir John Hayes, Tory MP
Sir John said that the asylum system is “broken”.
“The system is being gamed,” he said.
“If you think that once you get here you’ll never be deported, of course you’re going to come, and the people traffickers will help you. We can’t allow that to continue, it has got to be fixed. And that means taking, I think the term that the Home Office used, radical action.”
Asked if he still advises the Home Secretary, he said: “I’m a close friend of Suella Braverman and I have been for a long, long time, long before she became Home Secretary.
“And of course we talk about all kinds of things. And including policy and politics, but I think that as I say that’s a different matter to this fundamental issue of the immigration system, which is out of control.”
