Suella Braverman has said she is "sorry for the errors of judgment" after she was forced to make an extraordinary series of bombshell admissions about her carelessness with confidential government papers.
The Home Secretary, who has been dubbed “Leaky Sue”, revealed she had repeatedly used her personal mobile phone for official government business.
She also confirmed that it took her more than four hours to report a security breach when she accidentally emailed the wrong person with sensitive migration plans.
Mrs Braverman faced up in a letter to the chair of the Commons home affairs committee following a government investigation into her conduct.
Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his decision last week to reappoint Mrs Braverman as Home Secretary just six days after she had been forced to quit for breaching the ministerial code.
Here are five bombshells from her latest letter...
1: She sent confidential migration plan to backbench pal before Cabinet agreement. Ministers drew up a blueprint for how they could relax rules on immigration to boost the economy. Before the proposals had even been agreed by the Cabinet, Mrs Braverman sent them to Tory MP Sir John Hayes, who had helped run her failed leadership in the summer. She admits it was a breach of the ministerial code to send them to a backbench MP.
2: She used her personal mobile for work as she didn’t keep her official phone on her. Mrs Braverman says she asked one of her aides to forward the migration plan to her personal Gmail account as she travelled to the Home Office in her chauffeur-driven car. “I did not have my departmental phone (and therefore departmental email) on me at the time,” she wrote without explanation. She admits it was a breach of security guidelines to use her own phone for government business.
3: She went to meet constituents instead of immediately reporting security breach. As well as sending the migration plan to Sir John, Mrs Braverman tried to email it to his wife, who works as his secretary. However, she copied the wrong person into the message by mistake. When she was alerted to the error, Mrs Braverman quickly asked the recipient to delete it. Instead of immediately reporting the security breach to officials she went to meet some constituents.
4: She only admitted mistake after a Tory MP threatened to go public in the Commons. The person who was sent the migration plan by mistake worked for Tory MP Andrew Percy as his assistant. She apologised to him when she bumped into him in Parliament. He then sent her an email warning her he believed it was a “serious breach of security” that he was prepared to raise in the Commons. It was only after this message that she informed officials at around noon on October 19 - more than four hours after she sent her original email at 7:25am.
5: She sent official government documents to her personal email on six more occasions. The Home Office launched a review of Mrs Braverman’s use of personal email in the wake of the saga. She now admits she sent official documents to her Gmail account a further six times. This included papers on immigration, public disorder and protests. She claims this was because she was juggling using her work phone for virtual meetings, whilst reading the papers on her personal mobile.
