As Home Secretary Suella Braverman struggles to keep her job in the face of vicious attacks from the official opposition, her fate will be the first big political test for new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
If Sunak bows to the almost hysterical shrieks for Braverman’s scalp she will be the fourth big beast brought down by a combined Labour and media assault – aided by a handful of usefully idiotic backbench Tory MPs only too willing to publicly undermine the government – since the Tory election victory in 2019. Already Labour MPs such as Chris Bryant have called on the Home Secretary to resign, while Keir Starmer has said Sunak should sack Braverman as she could pose a security risk. But sacrificing her will only demonstrate beyond all doubt that the smack of firm government is being administered by the opposition rather than those impotently sitting in Whitehall – with Sunak’s government in office but definitely not in power.
Sacrificing her will only demonstrate that the smack of firm government is being administered by the opposition
The first scalp the opposition claimed was the shiny pate of Dominic Cummings – hated as the architect of both the Leave victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election win with his snappy three word slogans ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Get Brexit Done’. Cummings was fatally wounded by the media in the spring of 2020 after the exposure of his much mocked drive to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight at the height of the Covid pandemic. His reputation shot, Cummings quit Downing Street that year after losing a power struggle with Mrs Boris Johnson.
The next beast to fall, of course, was Johnson himself. He too was a marked man as the colourful figurehead of Leave’s campaign in 2016, and because of his unforgivable 80 seat landslide election in 2019. The long and relentless campaign to destroy him – admittedly aided by the PM’s own efforts – began the morning after his win and never let up until his forced resignation in September.
Johnson’s hapless successor Liz Truss was the next to go in very short order – this time brought down not only by a media drunk on the blood of their previous victims, but by the all-powerful markets who thought nothing of trashing a Prime Minister who dared to contradict the prevailing financial Holy Writ.
Suella Braverman is hated with particular virulence not for any so-called national security breaches she may have made, but because as a successful woman of colour and a Tory she offends the assumptions many on the left make about race and victimhood. A person with brown skin speaking out against an ‘invasion’ by illegal immigrants reduces them to apocalyptic fury.
As for the government, losing a chief of staff and two prime ministers not to elections but to a baying media mob looks very much like carelessness. Can a third Conservative PM buck the trend and stand firmly behind the woman he appointed in the face of bitter criticism? Or will this habit of weakly appeasing the opposition lead to yet another sacking?
If Sunak crumbles and dismisses Braverman he will be sealing his own fate. A Prime Minister who lets a resurgent opposition and a hostile media dictate his agenda and even decide on his ministerial appointments will have lost all authority and invite his own inevitable demise at the next election.
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