To no one’s surprise, Suella Braverman wasted no time in lashing out at UK prime minister Rishi Sunak who had fired her as home secretary for her intemperate remarks about demonstrators and the homeless. In what has been described as a ‘brutal’ three-page letter, she accuses Sunak of being a feckless betrayer of promises made to her to gain her support, and who would never have become prime minister without it.
The prime minister has also been accused by a group of “red wall” and rightwing Conservatives of abandoning the voters who brought the party to power in 2019, as anger among some backbenchers grew over Braverman’s sacking and the surprise return of David Cameron.
In her letter, Braverman claimed that Sunak had agreed to a secret pact to introduce key measures to secure her backing during the Tory leadership contest in October 2022, against Boris Johnson, but then “betrayed” the country by failing to deliver.
These included policies to cut legal immigration, override the European convention on human rights (ECHR) to stop small boats crossing the Channel, deliver key post-Brexit laws and toughen up guidance for schools on transgender issues.
“Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest 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 policy priorities,” she wrote.
She added: “This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you … Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.
“You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.”
I have no idea of how much support Braverman has with the Conservative members of the House of Commons. She is clearly going to be a thorn in the side of Sunak, sniping at him constantly. Sunak must know her well enough to have expected this kind of attack. This is why I was surprised that Sunak fired her instead of taking the advice that “One should keep one’s friends close and enemies closer” (attributed to Sun Tzu and made popular by Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part 2) and keeping her in the cabinet. At least on paper, being a cabinet minister requires some level of message discipline and public support for the prime minister, whereas as a backbencher she can be an attention-grabbing bomb-thrower, a role that she clearly relishes, somewhat like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor-Greene over here.
To add to Sunak’s woes, the supreme court today ruled that his deportation plan for asylum seekers is unlawful.
Rishi Sunak’s key immigration policy has been dealt a blow after the UK’s highest court rejected the government’s plans to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda.
Five judges at the supreme court unanimously upheld an appeal court ruling that found there was a real risk of deported refugees having their claims in the east African country wrongly assessed or being returned to their country of origin to face persecution.
The ruling undermines one of the prime minister’s key pledges: to “stop the boats”. The government claimed that the £140m Rwanda scheme would be a key deterrent for growing numbers of asylum seekers reaching the UK via small boats travelling across the Channel, a claim that refugee charities have rejected.
Another thing that puzzles me is why Sunak brought David Cameron back as foreign secretary. He clearly wanted him badly enough, since he was willing to rush through his appointment to the House of Lords. But what exactly does Cameron bring that is so essential? As a former prime minister, Cameron has some knowledge but is that sufficient to overcome his liabilities? As the leader of the Remain campaign that lost and led to his resignation, he must surely be viewed with suspicion by a party that is dominated by the Leave faction. Doesn’t Sunak weaken his own position by aligning himself with Cameron?
Maybe someone who is more knowledgeable of UK politics can provide an explanation.
Who the hell knows any more? I’ll share my thoughts, but I have no idea what they’re worth at this point. Almost certainly no more than you’re paying for them…
She wasn’t playing by those rules. She was playing the attention-grabbing bomb-thrower anyway -- it’s hard to see how she could get any worse on that score, backbencher or not. If anything, doing it whilst Home Sec was just adding even more import to her antics. If he’d kept her on after that Times editorial and the events of the weekend, that would have been the last straw for any semblance of cabinet discipline and would have sent the signal that he’d completely lost control.
The modern Tory party is an uncomfortable coalition between traditional conservatives and Faragist nutjobs. (Gross oversimplification, but let’s go with it for now…) Sunak is currently at risk of losing both -- he’s too in hock to the nutters for the traditionalists and too much of a “cosmopolitan global citizen of nowhere” for the Faragists. Bringing Cameron back is an attempt to shore up support with the more traditional wing, and the (largely remain-voting) “nice” posh folk of the south-east who have always been the party’s backbone, and who are looking increasingly like they might jump ship to the Lib Dems. I think that’s probably not a bad political calculation, because those people can be mollified, at least theoretically, whereas the nutjobs on the hard right can’t and would rather burn the entire country to the waterline than compromise on anything.
Will it work? No, I don’t think it will. What Sunak is finding out (and what Braverman will find out in turn, if she gets her chance) is that no matter what policies he pursues, what school he went to, which tailor he uses, or how much money he’s got, he will never really be “one of us” (by which I mean “one of them”) as far as the grandees in the shires are concerned. And the nutters on the right are now completely off the leash and howling at the moon… They won’t be happy until we’re rolling out barbed wire on the beaches and bringing back public hangings.
Dunc,
Thanks. That was helpful.
One explanation that I have heard for the return of David Cameron is that, right now, nobody who is anybody in the Torysphere wants to be part of the sinking ship that is the Sunak government. All his senior MPs have seen the writing on the wall, and think that tying their colours to his mast as it drops below the waterline would be a career setback at best.
David Cameron is not an elected MP anymore. In fact he seems to have spent the last seven years as some kind of slimy fixer for big corporations to get access to politicians (see the Greensill affair a few years back for a taste of his antics), and doesn’t have an ounce of credibility left with anyone. He is, therefore, someone who can go down gracefully with the ship without it having an effect on his future career -- the only people willing to employ him at the moment don’t care about his standing with the public, and this is not going to change when he inevitably buggers up being Foreign Secretary for a year.
@cartomancer: That is also entirely plausible. It’s certainly not like there’s a deep pool of talented candidates queuing up for these jobs.
One point in Cameron’s favour: he almost certainly knows where France is, which is famously more than we can say for some…
When she claims Sunak made promises to her, remember while Sunak is an experienced liar, so is she.
I’ve said this before…
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.
It wasn’t a blanket license to be as stupid, hateful, disgraceful and embarrassing to your boss as you wanted to be either.
And I’m sure she understood this from the start. Her “Fatal Attraction” outrage over being dumped is as phony as Trump’s “successful businessman” shtick.
ETA: We should probably take this letter as her announcement of her candidacy to be the next PM.
That’s funny. And here I thought that was the standard modus operandi among conservatives.
Let’s think back to the last two prime ministers who were elected as party leaders by the tiny minority that is conservative party members… Mrs
LettuceTruss and a fellow named Johnson.Both clearly sterling examples of how not to govern. This leads me to believe that anybody who is elected as party leader by the conservatives should automatically be disqualified as Prime Minister.
Dunc @1
You could change “Tory” to “Republican” and “Faragist” to “Trumpkins”, and it would be equally valid. Interesting parallel. Another thing they have in common is a certain lack of competence.
BTW, I’ve found at least one positive outcome from Brexit; Farage and his fellow nutjobs got flushed out of the European Parliament. Thanks UK, and please keep them.
QFT. In fact, #1 more eloquently says pretty much everything I had to offer. cartomancer, also on the money. Raging Bee, ditto at 6 AND 7.
Another point: Sunak surely must, at this point, after his failure to relaunch at conference, failure to control Braverman, failure to stop the boats, failure to retain safe seats in by-elections, failure to deport anyone to Rwanda -- by now must surely have given up? His position is similar to that of John Major in about 1995 -- dead man walking. He can’t have any realistic expectation of a win next year, the best he can hope for is a reasonably dignified exit. Cameron can at least be trusted (probably) not to metaphorically stab him in the back any time in the next year or so -- why would he? He has nothing to gain from undermining Sunak. Foreign Secretary is a rather nice hobby for him between actual jobs, presumably. It’s not like he needs the money. He’s not as rich as Sunak, but he’s beyond bribability at this point -- he’s BEEN PM, there’s nothing anyone can promise him to stitch Sunak up. His chapter is already written. He’s *safe* -- that’s why I think he’s there. That, and my own take on cartomancer’s point -- there simply aren’t any people who might want the job who could actually do it -- the Tories scraped the barrel with Johnson, scraped through the barrel to reach Truss, and Sunak is a part of the layer of literal human shit the barrel was standing on. From here, as far as the parliamentary party are concerned, it’s just shit all the way down.
@9:
And to continue to draw the Prime Ministerial salary until the GE, and pocket as much of the house silverware as possible on the way out.
She was playing the attention-grabbing bomb-thrower anyway…
So, the UK version of Margorie Traitor Greene, but with a good bit more chance at real power.
Bee, nope. The UK is not the USA.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Secretary
(Too hyperliteral of me? 😉 )
@10, xohjoh2n
The sum total Sunak has EVER earned from his time in Parliament is the sort of money his wife loses down the back of the couch. It’s really not about the money.
Doing the job properly would be admitting that Tory policy of the last decade or so was not just badly implemented, but also that it was wrong to begin with. And then working to fix those mistakes.
Personally, I don’t see the conservatives doing that any time soon.
@13:
There’s never *enough* money to not want to grab some more.
(Anyway, a PM he gets to set policy which allows all his mates to grab some more too.)
True, and true -- I was referring only to his actual salary, which is less than £170k.
I really don’t get Braverman. Does she try to be especially awful and fascistic so she can appeal to the racists who will never consider her as British?
Tabby Lavalamp @ 17
Remember, rules are for the others.
Neo-fascist leaders get special dispensation.
We had a murderer in Sweden who was both black and a bona fide neo-nazi.
Ernst Röhm got away with being homosexual until he outlived his usefulness.
Göring’s minion Erhard Milch was Jewish, but Göring didn’t care.
Another take on the Cameron appointment, cross-posted from an earlier thread, similar to Dunc’s #1:
birgerjohansson@18,
That’s certainly true: all but the most doctrinaire racists (or sexists, homophobes…) can make exceptions: “Good old Suella, she may be a w*g, but she’s one of us”. But she and others like her (there are a surprising number near the top of the UK Tory Party at present) should remember that this exceptional licence can always be retracted if they step out of line or if it’s convenient to do so.
Further to #19, Sunak’s response to the Supreme Court judgement suggests that he’s still trying to appeal to the red wall racists as well as the blue wall Remainers (but it may just be that he’s trying to keep his position in the face of mounting discontent within the parliamentary party). He’s promised to pass legislation that asserts that Rwanda is a safe country, so that deportation flights can start before the election; and has blustered that he won’t let the Labour Party, or the House of Lords, get in the way. Cruella wants him to just legislate the awkward human rights laws and international treaties out of the way (saying they don’t apply to these deportations), which at least has the advantage of not implying that Parliament could make the world flat by passing a law asserting that it is. But whether either approach can actually stop the courts again ruling against the deportations is unclear. My guess is not: as soon as we get back to a situation where the chosen victims are about to be deported, there will certainly be legal challenges, and in the normal way of things, these would inevitably wind up before the Supreme Court again, the flight being postponed meanwhile. So we may well reach a point where Sunak (or his successor if enough of the headbangers put in letters of no-confidence and he gets ousted) has to decide whether simply to ignore the courts and openly break the law, or to back down.