During four days of all-out staggering incompetence and brutal recriminations, one short and truly horrific moment still soared above all others at the Conservative Party conference.
And that was the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman – now out of office – saying the most nauseating words to have been said by any leading British politician for as long as I can remember.
She did it in her usual quiet, bashful way, too. Part of it she said only to be polite, to be friendly. She was at a panel event hosted by The Daily Telegraph when she said: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, by Christmas. That’s my dream. That’s my obsession.”
It’s hard for anyone even vaguely normal to view the footage and keep down their most recent meal. Despite it taking six long years of ratcheting chaos and misery to get to the place in which we now find ourselves, it is almost comforting to know that the Tory party, in its current, most malignant iteration of all time, still retains the capacity to shock.
It seems staggering that any functioning human being would let those words pass their lips. To seek to paint a picture to an audience, to carry them with you as you share with them your “dream” – which is to look up into the sky and see an aeroplane full of desperate people, being flown entirely against their wishes, and at your personal behest, to a future in a country that all the available evidence makes abundantly clear will likely offer them nothing but a hellish existence.
“That’s my dream,” she said. Most damning of all is that it wasn’t actually her idea. The Rwanda plan was cooked up by Priti Patel, and made public in a desperate hurry, within hours of Boris Johnson becoming the first ever British prime minister to be found, by the police, to have broken the law while in office.
It speaks the wrong kind of volumes about Braverman that her dream, now over, was not even her own. She is as lacking in basic human compassion as she is in originality. But it was a remark that certainly elevated her to the big time. Before being appointed home secretary, Braverman was attorney general under Boris Johnson. No prime minister before Johnson, or probably since, has valued basic incompetence so highly. Gavin Williamson, Nadine Dorries, Patel – these people were the headline stealers in the cabinet of none of the talents, but Braverman’s role was especially important.
As attorney general, it was her job to provide independent legal advice to the government. In scenes that really did feel important at the time, her predecessor, Geoffrey Cox, had to tell Theresa May that her Brexit deal risked the UK remaining in the “backstop” indefinitely, and in so doing he killed it off.
Braverman, meanwhile, had to provide advice on whether there would be any legal problems with regard to the government’s self-declared plan to break international law “in a specific and limited way”. She found no such problems.
Sue-Ellen Fernandes was born in Harrow, northwest London, in 1980 to a Kenyan father and a Mauritian mother, both of Indian origin. Her father worked for a housing association; her mother was a nurse and later a councillor.
She attended Heathfield School, an independent school in Pinner, and studied law at Cambridge, where she was also president of the Conservative Association.
Braverman is a Brexiteer, though she is much further to the right than the far more capable politicians who actually made Brexit happen. At the Tory party conference, she received a standing ovation for her promise to “take back control” and stop the European Court of Human Rights from intervening to declare the government’s Rwanda deportation policy illegal. There is only one real way to do that, and that is to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, something Brexit voters were assured in 2016 was not something any of the leading Brexiteers – Michael Gove and Johnson, primarily – wished to do.
Given that it is also not the policy of the government, it is hardly surprising that Braverman was pilloried for saying it and is departing her post not too long afterwards. It is part of her unique way of doing things, that for a time looked canny.
In early July, when it had become impossible for Johnson to cling to his position any longer, Braverman went on TV and called for him to resign. She did not actually submit a letter of no confidence in the prime minister, nor did she resign from his government. She also, at this moment, launched her own leadership bid, while still a member of the government, serving under a prime minister who had not resigned.
This kind of thing is, well, completely insane, yet several months later, Braverman ended up holding one of the most senior jobs in all of government. At the Tory party conference, when Gove went on TV and threatened that he might not vote for Liz Truss’s 45p tax rate cut – a course of action in which he would only need 35 Tory MP followers to bring down the government – Braverman accused Conservative MPs of orchestrating a “coup”.
To accuse Truss’s opponents of staging a coup to undermine the prime minister is to show loyalty to the prime minister, and – given the coup’s success – to undermine the prime minister yet further. That is deft politics. Egregious, but deft.
It is widely considered that Braverman won the Tory conference. Her speech was clapped like mad, as it reached yet further into dubious legal territory. She, the government’s former legal adviser, described herself as a “recovering” lawyer, and took aim at the lawyers who had thus far held up the Rwanda plan (in other words, sought to uphold the law).
For a long time, aspiring Conservatives have taken the view that the place to outflank the competition is on the right. A party that has dispensed with the services of the likes of David Gauke and replaced them with the likes of Braverman is a party travelling in a very clear direction.
Unfortunately for Braverman, it looks to be the case that the country is tacking in the other direction. It’s had enough. “When the tide goes out,” said the American super investor Warren Buffet, “that’s when you find out who’s been swimming naked.”
Britain’s newest home secretary would have had two years to make her fantasies come true, but she has always been swimming against the tide. She doubtless thinks of herself as tomorrow’s news, but she’s clearly labelled herself with yesterday’s politics.
She finally hit the big time. But the show has been shut down.
