COMBATIVE, assertive and hugely popular among some in her party, Suella Braverman will attract active support from some – if and when she decides to contest the leadership of the Conservative Party in the near future. There can be little doubt – she is the great hope of a band of Tories who believe prime minister Rishi Sunak has simply lost his way. There is a little question Braverman would rally the Right of the Conservative Party. She remains a totemic figure for those who have slightly fallen out of love with the current Conservative government.
Increasingly, the former home secretary has staked out her turf and it is fiercely to the Right of many of Sunak’s own parliamentary sup porters – it is stridently anti-immigration, steadfastly against anti-multiculturalism, and believes that too many of our public services are in hoc to ‘woke’ policies and run by bureaucrats who don’t really understand the aspirations and hopes of ordinary folks. Despite the seemingly tough public persona – many and this publication too – would attest to her charm, grace and personal affability. She has had a rough and tumble parliamentary career of late – she was sacked by the prime minister in November last year. A year earlier she had been forced to resign from her home secretary role in the Liz Truss government after she sent an MP an official document from a per sonal email – in breach of ministerial guidelines. Behind her most recent demotion - she had written an article for the Daily Telegraph accusing the police essentially of going soft on the Israeli anti-war protests in London at that time. The police had caved to political correctness, she intimated.
As is the way with these things, the article should have been approved by No 10 It wasn’t – amendments were requested but not heeded. She was speaking out of turn and challenging the prime minister’s own authority. He could no longer tolerate her behaviour. The following day she fired a letter claiming he wasn’t living up to an agreement he had agreed in return for her support. “Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest (July 2022) and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key priorities.” Most strikingly, she said that he had no plan when it came to resurrecting the government’s Rwanda bill – if the Supreme Court deemed it unlawful. Two days in November 2023, it did just that – but Sunak has managed to placate the rebels and there is still a prospect of flights taking off for Rwanda with asylum seekers – especially if Su nak is playing the long game on a General Election.
Yet the MP for Fareham – who should be relatively safe from any significant predicted swing of voting from Conservative to Labour, enjoys a 26,000 majority – continues to exert a force that some in government will continue to find uncomfortable and irksome. Some would say that she simply espouses a brand of Conservativism that Sunak is not really comfortable with – she has decried ‘multi culturalism’ – saying it has ‘failed’. Some critics find it ironic that a woman whose parents are of Indian origin – her mum via Mauritius – and her father via Kenya and Goa before that – rises to become Attorney General (the highest law officer in the land and first so under Boris Johnson), then becomes home secretary (twice), and marries a man – Rael Braverman, a Briton with a Jewish heritage. While Braverman might accept she is the good side of a bad equation – her central thesis is that not enough migrants share ‘British values’ or are interested in integrating with the British population at large. Making a speech in the US in September 2023, she argued: “Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society.
” She has described the Middle East anti-war protests as ‘hate marches’ – claiming that those marching for peace, were also calling for the destruction of Israel. In late October, she urged the police to take action against those who expressed a hatred of Jews. “We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets after the massacre of Jewish people, the single biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map. To my mind, there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.
” It could be said that she enjoys riling the liberal establishment – and to understand her im pulse to do that – you need to look further back. When the GG2 Power List last spoke to her, it was struck by the way she talked about her Conservative councillor mother Uma and how she had become involved in local politics and fighting for the rights of people on the ground in Wembley, where Suella was raised. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that she was inspired by her nurse mother’s desire to help people and got the bug from her. Her father had arrived in the UK with qualifications but had to take factory work initially and did progress to an executive level; but was then severely hit by the financial turmoil of the 1990s. At a private secondary school and partly on a scholarship, she understood that if she was going to succeed in life – she would have to make the very most of her academic opportunities – and so it proved, Cambridge and the Sorbonne in Paris – she remains something of a Francophile – unusual for a Brexiteer.
But then again you need to look at the social milieu and outlook many migrants had when she was growing up – they were seduced by Margaret Thatcher’s emphasis on family, hard work and enterprise. The state, welfare, handouts were an anathema to them – they had not come to Britain to make their lives on benefits… What someone like Braverman banks on is that there are far more people in Britain who think like her than those in Westminster and/ or our metropolitan and university cities. It is a culture possibly too that sprung from Brexit and the simple mantra of having absolute control of your laws, borders and money. The fight for the soul of the modern conservative Party will begin in earnest post-election – and expect Braverman to have a major say and possibly wind up as prime minister later down the line. She has two children under six.