All it took was a thirty-minute speech. In the crucial days leading up to Conservative conference, Suella Braverman seized control of the news agenda this week in the only way Britain’s sabre-rattling, controversialist-in-chief knows how.
Here’s a not very short summary: on Monday evening, Braverman’s comments for a forthcoming speech on migration to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington won a clean sweep of coverage in the following morning’s papers. Her prime targets in the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express were gushing — fulsomely endorsing her message that the UN refugee convention must be reformed.
Then, on Tuesday lunchtime, she made her much-anticipated speech to a small room in Washington DC — and her comments trailed overnight hardly scuppered its shock factor.
Braverman attacked the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism”, “uncontrolled immigration” and “inadequate integration”. She said the UN’s refugee convention is “absurd”, arguing it conjured into existence 780 million refugees across the world. She continued that migrant arrivals posed an “existential threat”. And, in a coup de grâce that will linger long in the collective consciousness of SW1, insisted it is too easy for LGBTQ+ refugees to seek asylum.
The Murdoch-owned New York Post, for one, was giddy: “Few dare challenge this madness for ‘fear of being branded a racist or illiberal’”, read an editorial in the American paper, which quoted the home secretary’s speech extensively. It thanked Braverman “for making the case better than any American politician has”.
The intended outrage henceforth flowed. For politics.co.uk, Sonya Sceats, Chief Executive at Freedom from Torture, accused the home secretary of “inflaming anti-refugee sentiment”. Former prime minister Gordon Brown waded in, labelling Braverman’s comments “completely wrong”.
Facing concerted criticism, including from within her own party, the home secretary sat down for an exclusive interview with ITV News, ready to spark another storm of controversy: there have been “many instances where people purport to be gay when they are not actually gay in order to get special treatment”, she explained. “That’s not fair and it’s not right”.
Soon it was confirmed that No 10 had approved Braverman’s speech, suggesting that the home secretary was in fact pronouncing on government policy in Washington. But the prime minister later subtly rebuked her comments, telling the BBC East Midlands amid his local media blitz on Thursday that the UK has, in fact, “done an incredibly good job of integrating people from lots of different backgrounds”.
And, today (Friday), Braverman will appear on GB News — amid the right-wing broadcaster’s biggest scandal since its launch in 2021 — for a “grilling” from deputy chair of the Conservative Party Lee Anderson.
Back in the first Conservative leadership contest of 2022, Anderson backed now-business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch as his first choice, not Braverman. But the ideological affinity between the Conservative home secretary and the party’s deputy chair has arguably strengthened since — they both, for example, appeared at the National Conservative conference in May to further similar ideological goals.
Anderson-on-Braverman is set to be broadcast at 7pm tonight (Friday), and it may just ensure the home secretary continues to figure prominently in the news agenda going into the weekend — with Conservative Party conference set to kick off on Sunday. (Braverman will speak to the conference floor from the main stage on Tuesday; it will be interesting to see how far the tone and substance of speech depart from the minister’s migration message this week).
Braverman’s endgame
It is worth relating Braverman’s antics over the past few days at length because it reveals how tight a hold the home secretary has on our political culture. She, more than any other parliamentarian — let alone minister — knows how to make the media work for her own ends. What are those ends? On this pertinent point, there is little debate.
Indeed, the home secretary’s comments this week have sparked a further wave of speculation about her future leadership pitch. Braverman, equal parts polarising and ambitious (she was the first leadership contender to declare in the summer contest, even before Boris Johnson announced his resignation), intends to become the accepted candidate of her party’s right flank.
In this way, there is little point in pondering the policy rationale behind Braverman’s speech this week. Her pitch to a small room of right-wing Washington wonks was never going to convince the rest of the world to ditch its obligations to the 1951 UN refugee convention. Her audience was not UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres (who last year criticised Britain’s plan to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda), but the selectorate of Conservative members have in recent years taken to choosing the candidate perceived to be more right-wing when consulted in a leadership contest.
And the emergent data suggests Braverman’s approach is working. The home secretary now has a net satisfaction rating of plus 47.5 per cent among her party’s membership, according to a new grassroots poll published this morning by Conservative Home. She is the fourth most popular cabinet minister — albeit behind Penny Mordaunt, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch, all of whom have run for Conservative leadership before and have been tipped to try again.
But what may prove significant in the long run is that, of these four cabinet ministers, Braverman has the most fully-formed political profile and pitch. Few doubt now that she will emerge as the standard bearer of the party’s right flank in a future leadership contest.
Can Braverman overcome the curse of the Home Office?
Crucially, on top of this, Braverman appears to be avoiding the trap Priti Patel laid for herself as a former ambitious home secretary — and is in this way outbidding the government discursively on migration policy.
One long-term political risk for the home secretary has been that, in winning the “stop the boats” pledge for her department — one-fifth of PM’s pre-election offering, she could be styled as culpable if the government failed in its crackdown. This was the fate of Priti Patel in 2022 who, despite ushering the Nationality and Borders Act through parliament, earned a negative 13.4 per cent satisfaction among surveyed party members in ConservativeHome’s final cabinet “league table” of Boris Johnson’s premiership.
As home secretary, Patel discovered that the expectations raised by hardline rhetoric in the Home Office make a perceived lack of delivery even more politically potent.
But Braverman is widely perceived to be rather more bracing when it comes to illegal migration than Sunak — and might reasonably make the case in a future contest that her representations in government, on the European Convention of Human Rights for example, were consistently overlooked.
Perhaps tellingly, immigration minister Robert Jenrick, a key ally of the prime minister and the minister who is frequently tasked with fronting the Home Office’s trickiest parliamentary and media assignments, has a negative 23.7 approval rating according to Conservative Home’s latest league table. He is, in stark contrast to his high-flying departmental head, the least popular member of Sunak’s cabinet.
Still, Braverman may have to perform a difficult balancing act in months to come. The Rwanda policy, which she inherited from Patel, continues to languish in limbo ahead of a three-day hearing due to start on 9 October in the Supreme Court. What is more, the Times is reporting that Braverman has been authorised by Downing Street to float the prospect of leaving the ECHR.
If Sunak does opt to leave the ECHR, continuing on a right-wing trajectory following the recent announcement on net zero, Braverman’s tilt at outbidding the government discursively may become trickier — if it is not then underpinned by real advances on “stopping the boats”. In this scenario, the home secretary may become more associated with a lack of perceived success and, in turn, have a target placed on her back ahead of a future leadership contest — ripe for exploitation by someone like Kemi Badenoch.
Right now, however, one obvious consequence of Braverman’s attempt to position herself as the right-wing frontrunner for a future Conservative leadership contest is that it contributes to the sense of fin de régime that so engulfs Sunak’s government.
Indeed, with a parade of Conservative leadership hopefuls set to march on party conference next week, Sunak’s messaging on a “reset” could struggle to cut through amid all the blue-on-blue.
Another consideration is that Braverman’s rivals in a potential future contest will naturally want to stop the home secretary from gaining an upper hand in the tricky political battles to come. It means the Conservative fringe looks set to become a forum for further dispute about the political trajectory of the party not just under Sunak — but in a post-Sunak scenario now taken for granted by many.
In this, the prime minister may be destined to play the role of spectator — as his cabinet colleagues jostle, ever more vigorously thanks to Braverman’s speech this week, for position.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Twitter here.
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