Suella Braverman hit Sunak where it hurts

Sacked ministers seldom have nice things to say about the boss but Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak is a ferocious assault on the Prime Minister, his character and his style of leadership. If she’d taken a flamethrower to the man he’d have come away less severely burned. She claims they had a deal – a written agreement – that he would pursue certain policies in No. 10 in return for her backing him as leader following the Liz Truss debacle. 

According to the former Home Secretary, Sunak undertook to cut legal migration by tightening the rules on international students and driving up work-visa salary thresholds; to legislate ‘notwithstanding clauses’ so that efforts to stop the boats couldn’t be scuppered by the Human Rights Act or the European Convention on Human Rights; to deliver the original versions of the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law bills; and to hand schools ‘unequivocal statutory guidance’ that recognised biological sex, single-sex spaces and parents’ right to know what their children are being taught. 

Braverman claims to have repeatedly requested meetings, prepared legal guidance, and drafted policies that could have helped deliver these goals. However her endeavours, she says, were ‘often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest’. She tells Sunak he has ‘manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver’ and the reason is either that he’s ‘incapable’ or that he never intended to keep his promises. This is a ‘betrayal’ not only of their agreement but of his pledge to voters that he would stop the boats. 

Rebuking his ‘wishful thinking’ and ‘magical thinking’, which he uses ‘as a comfort blanket to avoid having to make hard choices’, she says he has left the country without a Plan B if the Supreme Court rules against the Rwanda plan. Even if the Court upholds the policy, she says the compromises Sunak insisted on will mean it is ineffective and will still be open to challenge from the European Court of Human Rights. 

In perhaps the most withering line of the letter – the competition is fierce – Braverman concludes that Sunak has ‘no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people’.

A close second in the brutality stakes is her assessment of his response to the outburst of Islamist extremism and antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October massacre in Israel, the subject of the now-notorious Times op-ed. She accuses him of a ‘failure to rise to the challenge posed by the increasingly vicious antisemitism and extremism displayed on our streets’. 

While Britain faces ‘a turning point in our history’ with threats from radicalisation, the Prime Minister’s response has been ‘uncertain, weak, and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs’. She notes that her urgings to ban ‘hate marches’ and crack down on intimidation and glorification of terrorism fell on deaf ears. 

Sunak, whom Braverman describes as ‘having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister’, emerges from the three typed pages as a liar, a coward, a ditherer, a weakling, a failure and a vanity Prime Minister. Given its timing, the missive is likely to be compared to Geoffrey Howe’s 1990 resignation speech, in which he spoke of Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England as opening batsmen stepping up to the crease only to find the team captain has broken their bats. 

Braverman’s letter isn’t the owlish and gentlemanly lamentation issued by Howe and perhaps its blunt, unvarnished tone will mean it does not enjoy the same political impact. But whether or not her words prompt some right-wing MPs to put in their letters to the 1922 committee, they will be heard loud and clear by the party grassroots and traditional Tory voters. This letter could not be more of a red rag to them, for it confirms their every suspicion that the government has no intention of fulfilling its promises on illegal migration. In fact, it may be worse than that. If the picture Braverman paints is remotely accurate, No. 10 seems to be working to frustrate action on boats, as well as extremist and anti-Semitic slogans at marches. 

Braverman’s letter is an evisceration of the Prime Minister’s brand of Silicon Valley liberalism as elitist, soft-bellied, driven by status, and too squeamish for a dangerous world. When she concludes with a vow to continue supporting ‘an authentic conservative agenda’, she is telling the Prime Minister and, more importantly, the voters that he’s not only clueless, out-of-touch and ineffectual, but that he’s not a Conservative.