How do you solve a problem like Suella? Rishi Sunak is facing calls to expel Braverman from the Conservative party following her remarks about the LGBTQ+ flag, according to the BBC. The Beeb felt fit to run the story even though it was only able to find one failed parliamentary candidate and one failed council candidate to go on the record making such a call. Braverman’s purported sin was to state opinions about trans issues and the ‘progress Pride’ flag that some on the left of the Tory party, as well as activists in designated left-wing parties, considered disgusting. ‘The Progress flag says to me, one monstrous thing: That I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals,’ she told a conference in Washington.
Sunak has already had a taste of what throwing Braverman overboard can do
So Sunak is now being lobbied at least to follow a carbon copy approach to that deployed against Lee Anderson when he mouthed off about Sadiq Khan having handed over London to Islamist extremists. The former PM withdrew the Tory whip from Anderson – a sanction that in the event led to Anderson putting rocket fuel into Reform and comfortably holding his seat in the insurgent party’s colours at the general election. So that went well then.
Given Braverman’s media profile and large following among politically engaged people with right-wing views, it is to be hoped that Sunak has learned his lesson. Because her rage against his premiership’s failures on border control, penal policy, taxation and the like is very widely shared among the remnants of the Tory activist base.
Indeed, Braverman is in a vaguely analogous position to that which Jeremy Corbyn occupied in the eyes of Labour activists after their party’s flop at the 2015 general election: given that ‘centrism’ had failed at the ballot box there was an enormous appetite for someone with firmer convictions to preach a more fundamentalist creed. Tory MPs will not allow Braverman to put a leadership candidacy before the wider membership, as Labour ones permitted Corbyn. But expelling her at the moment of her maximum emotional connection with a mutinous Tory tribe would be the biggest gift the party has ever given Nigel Farage. And he’s had quite a few down the years.
Not only would the Tory hierarchy be signalling that anyone zealous about tax cuts, immigration control, anti-wokery and stronger law and order is regarded as beyond the pale. But it would also be creating a pathway for Braverman to become the latest right-wing household name on the Reform roster. Tory MPs briefing lobby journalists that she is not as big a name as she thinks are deluding themselves. Arguably she is the best known remaining Tory MP of any apart from Sunak himself. And of course, the parallel with Corbyn falls down on the point that her views chime with those of the wider public in a way that his never did.
Indeed, Sunak has already had a taste of what throwing Braverman overboard can do to a Tory leader. His sacking of her as home secretary back in November coincided with a Reform surge in the polls that lifted it to double-digit scores for the first time and convinced Farage it could be a serviceable springboard for a political return.
To double-down on such a disastrous strategy would indicate that complacent self-regard still has a grip on the collective Conservative leadership even in the wake of a catastrophic election defeat. Most Tory MPs have yet to appreciate that they are no longer in a conventional political environment in which the pendulum is bound to swing back to them once Labour has enacted the many stupid or unpopular policies it concealed from voters in the run-up to polling day. No, they are now in a fight for their lives against the greatest showman of British politics.
So how do they solve a problem like Suella? By changing their own mindset to appreciate that she is not the problem at all, but perhaps some of them are. They don’t need to be swallowed whole by her agenda, but they certainly do need to convince voters with staunch conservative views to stay in their tent rather than decamping to Farage’s.
Comments