So Andrea Jenkyns’s letter to Graham Brady calling for Rishi Sunak to go was, it turns out, just the warm-up missive of no confidence. “Our democratically elected leader Boris Johnson,” she wrote, “who bravely fought for Brexit when parliament was in deadlock. Yes Boris, the man who won the Conservative Party a massive majority, was unforgivable enough.”
It seemed like the main event to me: clumsy syntax, pantomime histrionics, Jackanory cadence, ham-fisted recapping for the gerontocracy; could a Conservative sound any dumber? Well, happily, yes. Later in the same letter, Jenkyns warned of Keir Starmer and his imminent “socialist cabal” in Downing Street, and the who-are-these-idiots bingo card was complete.
But that was before Suella Braverman and her three-pager, which has been variously described as “brutal”, “stinging”, “excoriating”, all those words in the up-yours cluster, none of which means “nonsensical” – which is strange, because her letter, triumphantly, makes no sense. This, way above any sideswipes at the prime minister and his probity, is its purpose: to introduce a large number of facts and ideas that are either very easily disproved or are rendered ridiculous by their own internal logic.
Braverman rattles through her “successful programme of reform” on crime, with a number of key words about knives, gangs, sexual violence; anyone would think criminals had had a hard time over the past year of her tenure, which is the exact opposite of the truth. It’s never been easier to get away with breaking the law, and in the rare event that a conviction is secured, there’s no room to imprison you anyway. Those assertions were just Braverman’s low-hanging fruit, to distract the number crunchers.
She goes on to list the policies that Sunak has failed to prioritise: reducing legal migration; stopping the small boats; delivering the Northern Ireland protocol; issuing unequivocal statutory guidance to protect biological sex in schools. There is, throughout the letter, this strong but haphazardly expressed suggestion that these policies were always part of the Conservative platform, either as a promise of Brexit, or as a pledge of the 2019 manifesto.
Perhaps this sounds churlish, but just to retain some objective reality: hating on trans people was never part of the Brexit promise, nor was “biological sex” ever mentioned in the 2019 manifesto. No offence to the architects of the Leave campaign – if they’d realised how much division and unpleasantness they could generate with this debate, I have no doubt they’d have shoehorned it on to a bus: but single-sex spaces are a relatively recent front in the war against woke, and the only way to frame them as a long-term promise of the Tory right is if we accept that Suella herself is its representative on Earth, and any thought that passes through her is by definition its will.
The text is peppered with legal-ish language – “notwithstanding clauses” and “inter alias” – and this set off all the lawyers, wondering not for the first time whether her skills in this area really match those one would expect from a former attorney general. Whenever she reaches for her silk-speak, she gives off the vibe of a litigant-in-person, raging around a court room with a glossary hacked off Google, unaware that some of the language is quite technical and has a specific meaning, hoping to mask her lack of command with the vivacity of her ill-will.
To those who know the disconnect between what she thinks she’s saying and what she’s actually saying, the impact is quite painful to watch, a permanent blow to the sanctity of the law. To the rest of us, it’s quite fun in a basic way, like a Channel 5 drama in which the villain is just about to get some comeuppance.
Her core proposition is this: she put Rishi Sunak into his position, in spite of his lack of mandate from party members, by securing from him a secret agreement in October 2022: that agreement, which included but was not limited to a promise to ignore international law and become, necessarily, a pariah state, by definition had no mandate, having occurred in secret. So while we can pore over its terms in more detail when she publishes it, as seems likely – that’s the main message of the letter – we know already that her thundering moral and political certainties are built on quicksand. How can one person without a mandate undermine another on that basis? How can one person who operates in secret and follows no rules accuse another of those infractions? The more closely you look at Braverman’s arguments, the thinner they are.
So here we are, in our wokerati happy place, finding the bit in the Venn diagram where circular logic, authoritarian back-to-frontery and fantastical self-belief conjoin. “These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit referendum.” Narrator: neither the 2019 manifesto nor the notion of Brexit circa 2016, in any of its forms, mentioned any of her pet interests besides immigration.
The word “Orwellian” comes up way too often in 2020s politics, but relax: I use it the way Brandon Lewis likes to break international law, in a “specific and limited way”. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there’s a division of the Ministry of Truth called Pornosec that produces porn to distract the proletariat. These letters of no-confidence – Jenkyns’s, Braverman’s and whoever’s comes next – are curiously distracting, aren’t they? Fun like puzzles, dramatic in their unbridled conflict, emotionally compelling as they describe the disintegration of a discourse we all have to live in – I feel a bit Pornosecced. I can’t help wondering what’s going on behind this scene.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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