My initial response to the revelation that Suella Braverman, the over- eventful Home Secretary, had sent messages from a private email was forbearing. A lot of people who did not like a Rightwing Home Secretary or her policies were confecting outrage to slam her: it seemed better to focus on her tendency to make policy on the hoof than go to town on a single lapse of passing a document of draft legislation to a colleague from her gmail. The gremlins of fate and clumsy fingers intervened. Braverman sent it to someone else entirely, who alerted the whips’ office and Braverman (after a delay) apologised.
That would have been an end to it if it were the full truth. But it was not, and now a Tory leadership with a Pandora’s Box of an in-tray comes with the extra pressure of a Home Secretary who looks both careless and arrogant, a fissile combination in one of the most high-pressure roles in government. She did not, as she first suggested, err on a single occasion under time pressure, but sent sensitive official documents from her government email account to a personal one on six occasions. Politicians and technology are often a fraught interface. Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email to handle official documents when she was Secretary of State unleashed a scandal which helped deny her route to the presidency. As unscrupulous as the Trump manipulation of that story was, the awkward kernel of truth was that Clinton had grown sloppy in her communications, reflecting a broader haughtiness.
