I think being recognised on a speed awareness course would actually have played quite well for Suella Braverman, suggesting she takes her slaps on the wrist like any ordinary person. Getting a speeding ticket is not the worst thing in the world. Let’s face it, it probably wasn’t even the worst thing she did that week. It would certainly have played better than trying to weasel out of the standard course, with or without the requested assistance of the civil servants she usually likes to insult as “the blob”. (Sarah Palin’s abortive pitch-for-power book was called Going Rogue. If the home secretary does write an equivalent tome during her next spell in the political wilderness, I’d like to see it called On the Blob.)
For now, there is much to enjoy in Braverman’s sense that she was simply too famous and too distracting to do an online speed awareness course with the plebs. In fact, as attorney general at the time, Suella surely enjoyed a greater degree of anonymity than that afforded by even the better witness protection programmes. Yet the Dua Lipa of SW1 instead opted to take the three points on her licence – a genuinely ridiculous piece of judgment that will somehow not permanently disqualify her from suggesting she’s the best person to have her hands on the nuclear codes.
