It reads, with hindsight, uncannily like a prophecy. Long before Suella Braverman became home secretary, when Mark Rowley was enjoying a brief career sabbatical ahead of being appointed chief commissioner of the Metropolitan police, he published an unexpected literary debut. A strictly fictional thriller, co-authored by the journalist David Derbyshire, The Sleep of Reason is set in a world where shrill competing political ideologies make the job of policing infinitely harder and real people consequently risk getting hurt.
“Between you and me, I despair with this generation of politicians,” says a senior police officer at one point. “We’ve got the rise of extreme-right terrorism, the continued threat from Islamists and we’re in the middle, supposedly protecting the public. And meanwhile the political class on every side seems more interested in chucking fuel on the fire.”
Where the authors got their inspiration for a novel about a female officer struggling to head off terror plots on multiple fronts, while battling not only sexism in the ranks but a rabble-rousing, populist minister who does nothing but pour petrol on the flames, who can say? But as the country approaches an emotionally fraught Remembrance Day weekend, it seems uncomfortably far-sighted.
Not content with suggesting that homelessness might be a “lifestyle choice” best controlled by confiscating the tents over rough sleepers’ heads, on Thursday Braverman became the first Conservative home secretary I can remember to actively undermine public order with an eye-poppingly dangerous political attack on serving police officers that risks an already tense situation spiralling out of control.
For days, now, Braverman has been locked in a bad-tempered standoff with Rowley over the pro-Palestinian march scheduled for this Saturday, which cannot by law be banned without clear intelligence that it poses a risk of serious disorder that cannot be controlled in any other way.
In her article for the Times, Braverman grudgingly conceded Rowley’s point that he can’t ban marches simply because people don’t like the idea. But she then went on to hurl the incendiary accusation that “there is a perception that senior officers play favourites” with protesters, going easy on left-leaning and minority causes, such as Black Lives Matter, while giving no quarter to rightwingers.
Branding the Met excessively woke may sound to some readers too ridiculous an idea to be taken seriously. But at a time when the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson is calling for vigilantes to come and “defend the Cenotaph” this weekend, despite the march being routed well away from this understandably sensitive area, there are few things more likely to increase the likelihood of violent clashes between rival camps than a home secretary implying that the police can’t be trusted to hold the line by themselves. If anyone is hijacking what should be a solemn moment for Britons to come together and honour our war dead, it’s the government itself.
By seeking to interfere with the operational independence of the Met in this way, meanwhile, Braverman has, if anything, only made it harder for Rowley to back down. As London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, put it, what next? Do we want to become the kind of country where home secretaries dictate who should be arrested? What worries me almost as much, however, is the prospect of becoming a country whose Trump-lite politicians are reckless enough to start riots.
For some months now, Braverman has been visibly drawing inspiration not from Tory traditions but from Tea Party Republicanism. She was the star speaker at this spring’s conference held by her party’s emerging National Conservatism wing, whose emphasis on faith, flag and family is heavily influenced by US evangelical politics, though at the time she warned the British context would naturally differ in some ways. By last month, in a speech denouncing multiculturalism to a Washington thinktank audience, she was warning of European culture being “diluted”, in language that carries an uncomfortable echo of great replacement theory, or the conspiracy theory that white Americans are being deliberately “replaced” with black or brown immigrants.
This week, she cited the sprawling homeless encampments of urban California – which Republicans blame on liberal progressive policies, rather than poverty and crippling housing costs – to justify her war on rough sleepers. If Britain didn’t act, she claimed, we’d go the way of San Francisco or Los Angeles, “where weak policies have led to an explosion of crime, drug taking and squalor”.
Even if that were true, confiscating tents is a policy as heartless as it is useless, tackling only the visible symptoms and not the cause of homelessness. But then, workable policy solutions are not really Braverman’s thing. In the words of the former Tory cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi; “She doesn’t fix things; she breaks things.” It’s what culture warriors do: start fires and then blame everyone else when the house burns down to ashes.
What remains of the old Conservative party still has its doubts about following her down this road, judging by the internal backlash against Braverman’s proposed tent ban (which is currently on hold, pending arguments in cabinet). The Dover MP, Natalie Elphicke – on the right of the party, but also a former housing policy specialist – tweeted that in all her years working on homelessness, “at no time ever has anyone said the answer lies in the removal of tents”. Others wonder what possible electoral good can come from such blood-curdling warnings about supposed social crises that make life in Britain sound worse than it actually is. Her latest outburst, however, crosses the line from exaggerating tensions to potentially inflaming them.
Downing Street now says that her words weren’t cleared in advance, a breach of cabinet protocol that makes this potentially a resigning matter. But whether or not he approved the article, Rishi Sunak too has piled excessive levels of pressure on the Met of late, suggesting Rowley would be held personally responsible for any violence this weekend. What he doesn’t seem to have understood, until too late, is that the old convention of politicians leaving operational policing to the police ultimately benefits both sides. It allows the law to be enforced with some degree of public trust, but also occasionally absolves the government of taking difficult decisions. Well, not this time.
It is to be profoundly hoped that Saturday’s protests still end peacefully, that nothing disturbs the sanctity of Remembrance Sunday, and that even a public this ill served by its leaders can still conduct itself with dignity and respect in difficult times. But if the worst comes to the worst, the country will remember how many different hands lit the touchpaper. And we will not forget.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
