Suella Braverman Made A Grave Miscalculation This Week

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Don’t look to Suella Braverman, the populist UK Home Secretary responsible for law and order, for nuance. Braverman enjoys outraging liberal sentiment and this week she has been working overtime to cause maximum offense.

On Tuesday, the darling of the Conservative party’s right-wing said that some homeless people living on the streets were indulging “a lifestyle choice.” Two days later, she published an article in the that accused the Metropolitan Police of “playing favourites” with protesters after Commissioner Mark Rowley decided to let Saturday’s pro-Palestine march go ahead on Armistice Day, what many consider a time for quiet reflection.

Braverman’s article wasn’t cleared in full by Downing Street, a potential breach of the Ministerial Code. Her excuse is that the Code covers policy not opinion, however inflammatory. But if the home secretary refused to make the changes he demanded, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has cause to sack her, if only to uphold his authority over the Cabinet. Braverman’s political misjudgment was to deflect attention from Labour’s divisions over Gaza by igniting an incendiary row about political interference in police operations.

Loyalists argue that the boss is biding his time before giving her the push. The outcome of Saturday’s march will be carefully watched. On Wednesday, the UK’s Supreme Court will rule on the legality of Braverman’s flagship policy to process asylum claims in faraway Rwanda. An adverse decision might provide the excuse to remove her.

The PM is supposed to be preparing his last Cabinet reshuffle to fight the next general election. Sunak needs to plan his changes before ridding himself of his turbulent home secretary, but No. 10 will also be calculating whether Braverman will cause more trouble on the backbenches than inside the government. Up to 60 right-wing MPs share her views and Sunak originally gave her a top job as part of his strategy to reconcile his party’s factions. He fears another round of debilitating Tory civil war might follow her departure.

The home secretary may even welcome being sacked. A YouGov poll on Thursday gave Labour a 24-point lead over the ruling Conservatives. Braverman could stand in the next Tory leadership contest untainted by general election defeat. Devastating losses may reduce the parliamentary party to a radical rump sympathetic to her views.

Besides, liberal commentators forget that Sunak agrees with the home secretary on much of the substance of what she says. Rather, it’s her harsh tone, lack of collegiality and poor record as an administrator that offend the PM’s technocratic soul. Sunak likes his populism skinny latte-style, but Braverman goes for the jolting double-shot espresso version every time.

While her blunt language causes dismay across the political spectrum, left-wing anger at Braverman betrays racial stereotyping. Her ideological opponents believe a non-white child of immigrant parents from Kenya and Mauritius shouldn’t spout socially conservative views and take a “right-wing” position on restricting immigration. She must be faking her opinions in order to rise up in the Conservative party, they insinuate.

True, Braverman is hugely ambitious, but this is a gross misunderstanding. Many ethnic-minority voters are socially conservative, and it is only natural that Tory MPs from small-business backgrounds should lean to the right on economics and law and order. Braverman and Sunak supported Brexit out of conviction. It was Boris Johnson who was a late convert to the cause of leaving the European Union, knowing that win or lose in the referendum, he stood to become the next Conservative leader — the party’s membership and its MPs were becoming increasingly hostile to Brussels.

Right-wingers from ethnic minorities now ring the Cabinet table. Ironically, many of them owe their promotion to the modernizing leadership of former prime minister David Cameron, who prodded Tory constituency associations into selecting candidates who weren’t the usual stale, pale males.

Like their leader, many fellow Conservative MPs agree with Braverman in principle, but would prefer that she spoke more softly and carried a bigger stick. Most Tories do indeed think that the timing of the pro-Palestine march on the day that commemorates the country’s war dead is provocative. Sunak himself has called the demo “disrespectful” and says he will hold Met Commissioner Rowley “accountable” if the march disrupts Remembrance ceremonies. 

Braverman’s claim that the police take a softer approach with left-wing demonstrators than they do with right-wing protest also chimes with her colleagues. Last week, it was revealed in the  that senior officers had (unwittingly) invited two Hamas supporters to advise them on defusing tensions during the marches. Echoing the language of liberal critics who condemn the Met for “institutional racism,” Braverman detects institutional obeisance to fashionable liberal causes. Under Rowley’s predecessor, Black Lives Matter supporters who breached lockdown restrictions during the pandemic were given an easy ride — some officers publicly took the knee before their superiors called a halt. Anti-lockdown protestors and feminists who attended the vigil of a woman raped and murdered by a police officer, however, were arrested on the spot. Just as likely, this was institutional stupidity.

British Jews are also alarmed by an upsurge in antisemitic hate crimes. Calls by some demonstrators for “jihad” and chants to “liberate” Palestine “from the river to the sea” amount to a threat to wipe out Israel. Police have arrested suspects but not until the marchers have dispersed.

Yet Braverman went for overkill in her article. She repeated her charge that the demos are “hate marches,” and compared them to the sectarian marches of Northern Ireland that commemorate historic battles between Protestants and Catholics. It was this passage that she refused to remove. 

Braverman’s opinions make for lively reading in any newspaper column, but the home secretary is the woman ultimately in charge. If all she can do is rail against the police like an angry bystander, say her critics, what is the point of her? Time for Sunak to back her or sack her.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator.

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