The former home secretary Suella Braverman has denied spreading poison within her own party to get rid of Rishi Sunak.
In a combative interview after the resignation of the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, on Wednesday, Braverman told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme she was a “plain speaker” and not trying to remove the prime minister.
However, she refused to back Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plan, key to fulfilling one of his five pledges, insisting “the reality and sorry truth is, it just won’t work”.
She also again warned the prime minister of the “perilous situation” the Conservatives found themselves in given his pledge to stop the boats at the start of the year.
She made her remarks a day after delivering a personal statement in the House of Commons, in which she told MPs the Tories faced “electoral oblivion in a matter of months” unless ministers blocked all human rights laws used to halt deportation flights to Rwanda.
“The facts don’t lie, and we need to deliver on a key promise. That’s how we will win the next general election,” Braverman told Today. “The time for talk, the time for slogans and promises is over. We need to show delivery and that’s what this debate right now is all about.”
Braverman said she wanted Sunak to succeed in “stopping the boats as he said he would do whatever it takes”, but added that his draft bill would “allow a merry-go-round of legal claims and litigation”.
The emergency bill will give ministers the power to ignore some judgments that come from Strasbourg while stopping short of leaving or “disapplying” the European convention on human rights in its entirety.
Critics from the Conservative right have said that such a move raises the possibility that individual legal challenges would still be able stop planes taking off for Rwanda.
The draft bill does not allow the government to override the international laws that have stopped it sending asylum seekers to central Africa, which pushed Jenrick to stand down from his role as immigration minister.
Braverman was asked: “Isn’t the truth that you’re a headline grabber that does it by spreading poison even in your own party?”
She replied: “The truth is that … I sought to be honest, and sometimes honesty is uncomfortable. If that upsets polite society, I’m sorry about that.”
Jenrick, regarded until recently as a close political ally of Sunak, wrote in his resignation letter: “I am unable to take the currently proposed legislation through the Commons as I do not believe it provides us with the best possible chance of success.
“A bill of the kind you are proposing is a triumph of hope over experience. The stakes for the country are too high for us not to pursue the stronger protections required to end the merry-go-round of legal challenges which risk paralysing the scheme and negating its intended deterrent.”
Echoing Jenrick’s comments, Braverman said: “If you look at the wording of the bill, there are clear sections which allow a whole raft of individual claims to be made by people that we might seek to remove to Rwanda.
“They will be able to bring those claims through the courts via judicial review. They will be able to challenge the decisions made by the secretary of state and those challenges could take months, and potentially sometimes years.”
The former home secretary went on to emphasise on Thursday: “We can’t can’t tweak at this problem. We can’t do half measures. We have to totally exclude international law, refugee convention or the border avenues of legal challenge … people will bring legal claims.”
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, attempted to play down Tory divisions over the Rwanda policy. Asked if the vote on the safety of the Rwanda bill would be treated as a matter of confidence in the prime minister, he said that was a decision for the whips but he could not see why it would need to be as “all Conservatives will vote for it”.
The cabinet minister told Sky News: “The policy of stopping the boats is something that actually does unite the Conservative party.
“There’s elements in this bill where people would like to go further … there’s also people that say this goes too far. I actually think this bill strikes the right balance. It is a really strong group of measures to try and stop the boats in a completely legal and justifiable way. And I think it will work.”
