Close your eyes. Let the words of the prime minister and the home secretary wash over you. Now tell me that you don’t think that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will be completely gutted if this Saturday’s pro-Palestine Stop Bombing Gaza march goes off peacefully. Everything they say is barbed. Twisted with malice. The opposite of what they really mean. What they feel. They are driven by hatred. A desire for conflict. Neither will be truly happy unless it all kicks off.
Then they can say they were right all along. That they always knew that everyone who claimed to want a ceasefire had murderous intent. Almost as if it suited their narrative to stoke antisemitism and Islamophobia. Division is their life-blood. The idea of peaceful protest anathema. A march with no more disturbances than the average football match an impossibility. Everything must be reduced to a binary equation. One racist idiot equals the subconscious desire of 100,000 others who would quite like people to stop killing each other.
There was a time when we looked to our politicians to heal divisions in society. Not to widen them. That point has long since passed with Suella and Rishi. All week they have been talking up the planned Armistice Day march as the tipping point into the breakdown of civil society. Willing it to happen. Please, please hate. Hate more. Hate better. It’s the only way they can indulge their cruelty fix.
Suella was at it again on Thursday morning. This time writing an opinion piece for the Times in which she questioned the impartiality and independence of the police. Furious that the Met hadn’t bowed to her will and banned the march. They had been far too indulgent of the left. Apparently wanting peace is now leftwing. If it had been a march of British fascists, then the Met would have called time days ago. Stand up for Tommy Robinson. There’s a man who speaks for England.
A march that wasn’t even going anywhere near the Cenotaph. A march that wasn’t even scheduled to start until two hours after the two-minute silence. Much to Braverman’s fury. She’s secretly been trying to get the march moved to Whitehall and to crash Armistice hour. Then there might be trouble. Hooray! Game on!
All this was too much for Labour, which predictably asked for – and was granted – an urgent question on the home secretary’s assault on the police. Yvette Cooper could barely contain her anger. Where was the home secretary for a start? Why had the brown-nosing gofer, Chris Philp, a policing minister without a mind to make up, been sent to the Commons in Braverman’s place.
Did Suella have no idea of what remembrance was all about? That it was supposed to bring people together, not tear them apart. That people had died for the right to free speech. Even if you didn’t necessarily agree with what they were saying. Had Braverman missed that bit? Of course she had. She’s dim as well as unpleasant. All she had done was light the blue touchpaper on extremism.
So had the prime minister signed off on her hate screed? In which case he was as bad as her. Or was she freelancing again in her bizarre death spiral leadership campaign? Then Sunak was just too weak to sack her. Allowing what remains of his time in No 10 to drift ever further to the far right. An echo chamber for Douglas Murray.
Philp got really snarky. He remains the only person to take himself seriously. As deluded in his own way as Nadine Dorries. Cooper shouldn’t have bothered to ask where the home secretary was in public. Because Suella was with a close relative in hospital. Philp didn’t seem to have any qualms about making that public.
But this was big news. Suella did have a heart after all. She apparently cared about someone else.
Through gritted teeth, Philp went on to grudgingly accept that the police were more or less independent. Though they had become dangerously woke. The police retain the confidence of the prime minister, the home secretary and me, he said pompously. As ever Chrissy missed the point entirely. The real question now was whether the prime minister, the home secretary and Philp retained the confidence of the police. One suspects not. Why should the police be any different from the rest of us?
“There is no room for hate speech on London’s streets,” screeched Chrissy. Though there seems to be room in the pages of the Times and in parliament. It’s become the ministerial lingua franca. Any excuse for an incitement to violence. Just read the subtext.
Opposition MPs queued up to demand the home secretary back down. Or, better still, step down. Philp umm-ed and ahh-ed. Trying to keep it vague whether he agreed with his boss. Refusing to say whether Sunak had signed off the article. Later it would emerge that he hadn’t. But Suella hadn’t cared one way or the other. Rishi would either sack her or not. Probably not. He was a weak nonentity. She was playing the long game. To lead the Tories after they lost the next election.
Only two Tories could bring themselves to speak up for Braverman. Michael Ellis, recently made a sir for services to extreme sycophancy, who will defend any old nonsense. And Theresa Villiers who rarely seems to know what exactly she’s doing. No one else. The lack of support for Braverman is telling. Imagine going so far to the right in inciting violence that you lose the support of Lee Anderson, Jonathan Gullis and Danny Kruger. You’re on your own, Suella. Apart from Rishi.
By chance, Priti Patel was also on view giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. She appeared worryingly normal. Someone who had cared about what she was doing as home secretary. Someone who had tried – more or less – to do the right thing. Remarkable. How things change. Not so long ago, it seemed that we had sunk as low as we could go with Patel as home secretary. Cruel, vindictive. Now she seemed almost like a beacon of hope. That standards did exist. Almost. The irony was lost on no one.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
