THIS is a politician many either love or hate. And some would say, love to hate and you get the impression she doesn’t care too much about those who feel that way.
In fact, she might actually relish and revel in this role of the anti-liberal, anti-woke, no nonsense, common sense, plain speaking, and yes, populist right wing politician.
She was elected to parliament in 2015 for the seat of Fareham, near Portsmouth in Hampshire and enjoys a large majority. At the last election, she got nearly 65 per cent of the vote and left her Labour rival trailing by over 26,000 votes. Just a tad popular, then.
Her life in politics has been meteoric – she started her ministerial career in January 2018 when she became a minister in the Brexit department. She backed the move from the very outset in 2016 and headed up the influential Conservative Parliamentary outfit, the European Research Group (ERG) for around six months from June 2017 till her ministerial appointment, under the premiership of Theresa May. The ERG has been described as one of the most influential political groups ever created. It formed in 1993 and developed from Euroscepticism into full blown Leave and withdrawal from the European Union.
After Boris Johnson won the 2019 General Election, Braverman became the Attorney General – the government’s top legal advisor and served in this office until Liz Truss became Prime Minister in September 2022 and was appointed home secretary.
She stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the summer of 2022, being eliminated in one of the earlier rounds.
Quite memorably, she announced her bid on live TV, speaking to ITV’s Robert Peston – even before Prime Minister Boris Johnson had formally resigned.
Her platform was not remarkably different to Liz Truss’ – who ended up winning that election on the promise of tax cuts. Braverman also promised to “get rid of all this woke rubbish”. And she also said that the country needed to “solve the problems of the boats crossing the channel”.
Her support of Truss in the run-off with Rishi Sunak led to her being made home secretary, but she resigned from her post on October 19 as she had breached the ministerial code by sending an official document to a colleague MP from her personal email.
She accepted she had made a mistake and tended her resignation which Truss accepted.
There was a fierce parting shot though in her resignation letter, telling Truss that her premiership was not delivering.
“Pretending we haven’t made mistakes, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have made them and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics. I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility; I resign.”
Truss resigned herself just a day after this furore. And Braverman found herself back at the home office just six days later and serving her third prime minister – Rishi Sunak. She continues in this role at the time of writing.
Many felt she returned because she is a totemic figure on the Right of the party and that Sunak needs all the allies he can muster in these early days of his premiership.
It is over the issue of sending refugees to Rwanda that Braverman has attracted perhaps the most intense criticism – not least too, for the way she expressed what has been government policy since April 2022.
At an event at the autumn Conservative Party conference last year, she said: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”
She made the comments before the High Court ruled that the policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was legal.
Last summer, a plane had been loaded and was all set to fly to the African country with ‘illegal’ asylum seekers aboard - but was prevented from doing so, due to a last minute successful legal challenge.
In December 2022, the high court ruled that the policy is legal and the UK can go ahead with sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.
It isn’t absolutely clear, why Braverman hasn’t yet delivered on her own dream – more legal challenges are in the works and the government perhaps has to pick and choose its battles very carefully. A lot of people will be watching when it happens.
The £140 million deal with the Rwandan government was signed with much fanfare last spring when Priti Patel was home secretary and Braverman welcomed the December high court ruling. It does also include the provision for Rwanda to send some of its ‘vulnerable’ refugees to Britain (as set out in summary of the deal in the House of Commons Library website).
“I spoke with my Rwandan counterpart, Vincent Biruta and we both confirmed our joint and steadfast resolve to deliver this partnership at scale as soon as possible. It’s what the overwhelming majority of the British people want to see happen,” said Braverman in December last year.
The policy is a response – and a supposed deterrent to those seeking to enter the UK via the Channel and small boats or dinghies. Some 40,000 people entered the UK through this route last year; and there continues to be disquiet about them. Braverman has referred to it an “invasion” again attracting criticism, including one from a Holocaust survivor at a local meeting.
Many asylum seekers are housed in hotels, while their asylum applications are processed. More than a 100,000 are in a system which to receive an overhaul, it was announced in late February.
An incident earlier in the same month, saw a disturbance outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Liverpool.
Critics say the language of government and politicians, such as Braverman, help to incite hostility and anger and far right wing groups feed off this sentiment.
It has been reported that they were behind violence which saw police personnel and their vehicles being attacked.
Braverman, while condemning the violence, ran into criticism for seeking to highlight the reasons why some people feel hostile towards asylum seekers.
“I condemn the appalling disorder in Knowsley last night,” she said in a statement. “The alleged behaviour of some asylum seekers is never an excuse for violence and intimidation.”
She is an unashamed populist and her relatively modest upbringing in Wembley, with a nurse mother from Mauritius and a father from Kenya, who worked for a housing association, gave her a certain grounding.
Her mother’s long years as a local Conservative councillor also helped to shape her political consciousness and her view of the world is based on simple principles – whether you agree with them or not is beside the point in trying to understand what she represents and what her policies mean.
It is best illustrated by her own words on her website: “I’m a Conservative because we are the party that says it doesn’t matter where you start. It's about where you are going. You can make your life and that of others better by taking responsibility, self-empowerment and service. Aspiration, to me, means: rewarding endeavour, enabling compassion and liberating people from the shackles of the state.”
Don’t write the 42-year-old married mother of two off, as a potential future Conservative Party leader… yet.
