“Thank God Suella Braverman is back,” writes one Telegraph columnist. “Her determination to crack down on crime and illegal immigration undoubtedly chimes with the views of the country, and especially voters in the Red Wall. Thank God there is someone in the Cabinet to put forward those views.”
Her return is not an oddity, not a pantomime joke, but proves how deeply Rishi Sunak is in hock to the hard right, like every Tory leader from John Major onwards. The party will rewrite the past week’s knife-edge drama as a smooth and inevitable coronation of its princeling, but his frantic scramble for the wrong votes tells another story. Restoring Braverman to the Home Office and boasting of party “unity” unites him with the obnoxious wing that drove the Tories to this post-Brexit dead end. The Express, closest to that faction, reveals that in the last hours battling with Boris Johnson, Sunak was so needy for rightwing support that he called Braverman no fewer than six times begging for her backing and that of the wing she represents; Keir Starmer called that out in PMQs as “a grubby deal”. The first heady days are a leader’s moment of maximum power with every job in their gift – and yet Sunak emerges as another Tory PM too weak to face down those old wrecking “bastards”.
Braverman is their missile. When she stood for leader, Steve Baker instantly stood aside, tweeting: “Happily I no longer need to stand. @SuellaBraverman will deliver these priorities and more.” Yesterday, ex-party chair Jake Berry told TalkTV that far from committing what she described as a “technical infringement of the rules”, “from my own knowledge, there were multiple breaches of the ministerial code”. The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, is reportedly “livid” at her reappointment after six days, as Labour’s Yvette Cooper rightly calls for an investigation to see what she leaked, who to and how often.
Fellow rightwingers rush to her defence: MP Bernard Jenkin defended her reappointment, saying he could “vouch for the highest integrity of my right honourable friend the home secretary”. Here is an early hard landing for Sunak’s rashly boasted integrity, accountability, professionalism, seriousness and competence.
Her blunder exposed more than her failure to follow security rules. She attempted to send a confidential document to, among others, Sir John Hayes: known as her mentor, a rather less fascinating svengali. His Common Sense Group, launched two years ago in the wake of Black Lives Matter with about 40 MPs and reviving the old Cornerstone Group (faith, flag and family), inhabits the shifting sands of rightwing diehards. “Common Sense” is a useful catchphrase suggesting anything less than hard right is nonsense, just as canvassers recognise that when someone says “I’m not political”, they usually vote Tory: any other politics is abnormal.
If she regularly sent policy for approval from the Hayes faction, it’s worth knowing who he is: he was knighted along with Sir John Redwood and Sir Edward Leigh in Theresa May’s frantic wooing of troublesome rightwingers against her Brexit deal. Here are his views, unpopulist as none of them are very popular these days: a Brexiter, he has voted to restrict access to abortion, and is against equal marriage and onshore wind turbines. He’s for standing up in football stadiums and capital punishment. One of his outside jobs is as strategic adviser to BB Energy, a global energy trader. In the middle of the summer heatwave, Hayes condemned “a cowardly new world where we live in a country where we are frightened of the heat. It is not surprising in snowflake Britain.”
Braverman ran wild at the Tory conference, declaring that “a plane taking off to Rwanda … That’s my dream. That’s my obsession.” Her glee at longer prison terms for peaceful climate protesters is repugnant: “We’ll keep putting you behind bars,” she says. If Sunak cuts benefits yet again, he has an ally; she said this month: “I want to cut welfare spending. We have far too many people in this country who are fit to work, who are able to work … the benefit street culture is a feature of modern Britain”, needing “a bit more stick” to get people back to work.
But she will be blamed for the near collapse of the Home Office: from passport chaos to police recruitment in England and Wales that is still 7,000 below the number of officers cut since 2010. The more she promises impossibly few asylum-seekers and refugees, the more glaring are Home Office failures, processing virtually none of the rising numbers, with the shameful squalor of their living conditions revealed by a chief inspector who said he was left “speechless”.
Labour can weaponise Sunak’s dependence on the Tory right. That’s real, unlike the constant tired refrain at PMQs that Starmer served in the shadow cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn, a man now deprived of the Labour whip, while Braverman is Sunak’s personal choice as home secretary. Sunak is handcuffed to his hard right – no one thinks Starmer is in hock to the hard left.
ConservativeHome’s assistant editor, William Atkinson, suggests there’s political method in the danger of this appointment. Culture wars whipped up by Braverman and her allies will hide the new austerity. Sunak will stand by as they let rip on immigration, on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the online safety bill and the green wokerati. He hopes their foghorns on statues, colonialism, museums and immigration will drown out everything else. But people feeling the pain of a 17% rise in food prices, doubling energy bills and soaring mortgages and rents are not easily distracted. As for Braverman’s “obsession” with immigration, that now sits just eighth on the Ipsos list of public concerns.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
