My Mr and I waste a lot of argument capital circling around the probable consequences of politicians’ misdemeanours. He thinks we’re in last-days-of-Rome territory, and all it will take is a revelation that Grant Shapps yelled at a waiter and the whole thing will come down like a Jenga tower. I, conversely, think the last days of Rome went on for a long time and, in a post-Johnson world, the bar is so low for probity and whatnot that a minister would have to commit murder for the consequences to even ricochet into the next week.
So I don’t think Suella Braverman has torched her own career if she did ask Whitehall officials to fix it for her to do a speed awareness course in private (although she says she did “nothing untoward”). But in the fanciful event that Mr Z is right and I am wrong, that Braverman’s trivial but telling act dispatches her to the wilderness of her party, it will have been the dumbest imaginable thing to lose a portfolio over. She could have done that course in a room full of people and nobody would have recognised her – not because she hasn’t made quite the name for herself with the frothing Nazi-lite crowdpleasers, but because the speed awareness course is a place of such pure alienation that nobody notices anyone.
