After Suella Braverman announced her candidacy for the Tory leadership on ITV’s Peston show in the summer of 2022 the liberal left laughed at the very idea. Someone even asked Robert Peston online: ‘How did you keep a straight face when Suella B said she’d stand for Prime Minister?’
Well, as Bob Monkhouse once observed of those who scoffed at his youthful declaration that he wanted to become a comedian, they’re not laughing now.
Braverman’s Conservative conference speech confirmed what her recent Washington speech suggested: that she has become one of the most compelling figures in UK politics, unignorable indeed for the British left who find themselves lapsing into paroxysms of rage every time she opens her mouth.
The Home Secretary has a talent for an explosive soundbite that will propel her to the top of the news agenda. In the Commons last year she referred to the small boats problem as an ‘invasion’ of southern England. In Washington last week she spoke of the multiculturalism so beloved of the metropolitan elite as having failed. Yesterday’s key provocation was a reference to the world facing a ‘hurricane’ of mass migration.
In an apparent recognition by Labour that its hysterical reaction to her language has in the past done it no favours with the electorate, the party’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper this time avoided going into full scale moral outrage mode. Instead, she claimed Braverman had ‘totally lost control’ of the immigration system and was ‘devoid of practical policies’. This was the very criticism levelled by the new darling of the Conservative conference Nigel Farage and also by Priti Patel, her predecessor at the Home Office.
Given the Tories have been in power for 13 years, the idea that radical language on big policy areas now is ‘just talk’ ought to have traction with voters. And yet I can’t see that working against Braverman. So uncompromising is she and so prepared to utter hard truths that the electorate will – and already has to an extent – pick up on the idea that she is having to work with one hand tied behind her back.
It is obvious that were she running Downing Street then she really would be prepared to do whatever it takes to stop the boats and to greatly reduce legal immigration as well. In the former case if that necessitated leaving the European Convention and the Refugee Convention too, or setting up a camp on Ascension Island and transporting illegal arrivals there, she is the one major figure the electorate knows it could count on not to shy away from such action.
And in the eyes of a big chunk of voters, especially the lost tribe of disenchanted right-wingers who voted Tory in 2019 and must be wooed back, that adds up to a powerful case for wishing she was prime minister instead of the incrementalist-in-chief Rishi Sunak.
Yet Sunak seems to understand that rather than be threatened by this Brexit Spartan who was instrumental in the downfall of Theresa May and Liz Truss and then in blocking a return for Boris Johnson, he can benefit from her newfound superstar profile.
Keeping relations with her on an even keel and not explicitly ‘slapping her down’ will ensure that at least some of the metropolitan left will continue communicating the idea to voters that the government is the most hardline administration Britain has ever seen when it comes to migration matters, rather than the total opposite.
Along with Sunak’s repositioning on net zero, his ending of the ‘war’ on the motorist and allowing Kemi Badenoch to spearhead an alternative war against woke extremism, this starts to look like clear blue water that can reinvigorate the Tory base.
If it works and he pulls off an unlikely victory next year then Sunak will gain hugely in authority and then no minister will be unsackable. If it doesn’t then off he will presumably pop to California, leaving Braverman to be someone else’s problem or quite possibly the leader of the pack.
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