Suella Braverman “will be forgotten”, the former Conservative party leader Michael Howard has declared.
Lord Howard criticised the “tirade of abuse” in Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak, but rejected claims that the former home secretary’s words had left the Conservative party “turning on itself again”.
Howard believes Sunak is doing his “level best” to confront the challenges facing Britain and is “making very considerable progress”, using the latest inflation figures as one example.
In a scathing three-page letter published a day after she was sacked as home secretary, Braverman warned Sunak that she intended to spearhead a Tory rebellion over the government’s Rwanda plan.
She wrote: “Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.”
A group of rightwing Conservatives have accused Sunak of abandoning the voters who brought the party to power in 2019, as anger among some backbenchers grew over Braverman’s sacking and the surprise return of David Cameron.
Howard told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme: “It’s not unusual for there to be disagreements within government. If you have a disagreement with the policy of the government or the policy of the prime minister. you either resign or you accept it.
“She chose not to resign and it’s only since she’s been sacked she comes out with this tirade of abuse.”
He added: “I don’t think the party is turning on itself again. I think Suella Braverman will be forgotten.”
Howard recalled the first time he met Braverman soon after she was elected, and they “reminisced about the byelection her mother had fought” under his leadership of the party.
Writing an op-ed for the Telegraph, Howard said he had watched Braverman’s conduct “with regret” in recent weeks, as she had failed to reflect on the meaning of her own words.
“Thinking of the common good requires one to put the common good before personal ambition and pique. Braverman has failed to live by those words. The government is better off without her,” he wrote.
Braverman was sacked on Monday after opponents accused her of stoking tensions before pro-Palestine marches in London, days after claiming that police had applied a “double standard” to protesters in a newspaper article.
