Suella Braverman: ‘queen of the right’ and home secretary again

Suella Braverman’s reinstatement as home secretary by Rishi Sunak just six days after she quit for breaching the ministerial code, has heaped pressure on the new prime minister.

Braverman handed in her resignation to Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss for sharing sensitive documents from her personal email address. She said last week that she had “rapidly reported” her mistake “on official channels and informed the Cabinet secretary”. But former Tory Party chairman Jake Berry told TalkTV last night that “as I understand it, the evidence was put to her and she accepted the evidence, rather than the other way round”.

That difference matters not only for Braverman’s reputation but because the prime minister told the Commons at PMQs yesterday that Braverman had “raised the matter and accepted her mistake”. If Berry is right, though, “it opens the possibility that Sunak has relayed an incorrect version of events to the Commons”, said Politico’s London Playbook.

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The incident has put Braverman and her short tenure as home secretary under the microscope. According to The Times, MI5 is “concerned about Braverman’s conduct and will give her lessons on what she can and can’t share”. Home Office officials who have worked with her told the paper she is a “human hand grenade” who will be “gone by Christmas”.

What is her background?

The reappointed home secretary was born Sue-Ellen Cassiana Fernandes in 1980 in west London’s Harrow district, but grew up in Wembley. She married Rael Braverman, a manager at Mercedes, in a ceremony at the House of Commons in 2018. They have two children together.

The Tory MP is the only child of Christie and Uma Fernandes, both of Indian origin, who immigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius respectively. Her father worked for a housing association and her mother was a nurse and a Conservative councillor in Brent.

Braverman attended state school before moving to Heathfield private school in Pinner on a partial scholarship. She went on to read law at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she also served as president of the university’s Conservative Association. She then completed a master’s degree in law at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, before qualifying as an attorney in New York.

Braverman was called to the Bar in England and Wales in 2005, specialising in public law and judicial review. As a barrister, she “defended the Home Office in immigration cases, the Parole Board in challenges from prisoners, and the Ministry of Defence over injuries sustained in battle”, said Bloomberg UK.

According The Mirror, Braverman’s “lust for politics” was inherited from her mother, who tried to stand as an MP twice, in Tottenham in the 2001 general election and in the 2003 Brent East by-election. The paper reported that Braverman agreed not to also stand as a candidate after her mother asked her to “let Mummy have a chance”.

Braverman had “showed ambition to become an MP from a young age”, said The Guardian. Her first bid was in 2005, when she lost to Labour’s Keith Vaz in the Leicestershire East constituency.

She then sought selection as the Conservative candidate in Bexhill and Battle, but was unsuccessful, before eventually winning her current seat, in Fareham in Hampshire, in 2015.

After becoming an MP, she served as Brexit minister under Theresa May and as attorney general under Boris Johnson.

What does she believe?

Braverman has “​​won many supporters among hard-line backbenchers with “her aggressive insistence that there is a culture war raging in the UK”, claiming that Twitter is a “sewer of left-wing bile”, said The Guardian’s home affairs editor Rajeev Syal. She was also an ardent supporter of Brexit and “described the British empire as a force for good”, he added.

The fact that she has “become the Left’s new hate figure is nothing less than a source of pride”, said The Telegraph’s associate editor Gordon Rayner. “As the current ‘queen of the right’ in the Government, every carping comment from a Labour MP or BBC commentator simply reinforces her popularity with Conservative Party members and a significant chunk of MPs”, he added.

Writing in The Telegraph to endorse Sunak as leader, Braverman suggested human rights laws could be gutted to “stop the boats crossing the Channel”, and that the UK must leave the ECHR’s jurisdiction in order to proceed with the Rwanda refugee plan. The Rwanda plan is something of a passion of Braverman’s and she courted controversy when she told the Conservative Party conference earlier this month that it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a photograph on the front page of The Telegraph of a flight taking off for Rwanda carrying illegal migrants.

On social issues Braverman is equally hard-line. She has urged Sunak “to take a firm line on trans ideology in our schools and in our public sector” suggesting according to Pink News “that trans lives could be erased from the classroom”.

Why has Sunak reappointed her?

Braverman’s endorsement of Sunak instead of Boris Johnson in the latest Tory leadership race came as a surprise given she “has long been regarded as a Johnson loyalist”, said The Spectator’s Katy Balls.

But she “knew that her endorsement in the leadership race had the potential to tip the balance of the contest”, said the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush. “She chose Sunak: or rather, Sunak chose to meet her price” by appointing her home secretary, he added.

The reappointment has prompted Labour leader Keir Starmer to claim that Sunak “was so weak that he’s done a grubby deal trading national security, because he was scared to lose another leadership election”.

But Nadhim Zahawi, the new Conservative Party chairman, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Braverman’s reappointment showed Sunak “believes in second chances”.

Sunak’s decision is primarily “about soothing an ideological group: the Tory right”, said The Times’s Henry Zeffman. “She remains the standard-bearer of the wing of the Conservative Party which believes firmly that immigration must be kept low, that asylum seekers should be sent to Rwanda and that human rights laws need toughening,” he wrote.

“Sunak has suggested before that he believes that too. His appointment of Braverman tells the Tory right that he really means it,” said Zeffman.