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I have been watching Suella Braverman’s appearance before the Court of Appeal in November 2021, when she was attorney-general, and seeking a longer sentence for a man called Sam Pybus who had choked a woman to death during sex.
He had been jailed for four years and eight months after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Sophie Moss by strangulation. He claimed that she had consented to “erotic asphyxiation” and this became notorious as the “rough sex defence”.
Sitting in the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, the judges decided that the jail term Pybus received was not “unduly lenient” and the appeal was denied.
Much outrage had been provoked by the original sentence of Pybus. Braverman decided to appeal against it in person. The film of the proceedings is worth watching because it shows her in action in a professional setting in which her abilities can be objectively assessed as her arguments are subjected to polite but relentlessly penetrating queries by a senior judge.
Not quite up to the job
At no point is her performance shamefully inadequate, but neither is it impressive as she displays a shaky grip on both the law and the evidence. Relying heavily on her junior counsel to explain her points, she comes across as somewhat unconvincing when she is questioned on details by the judges.
Most likely the appeal would have failed even in the hands of a more effective lawyer than Braverman. But the proceedings give the impression that she is an amateur among professionals and not quite up to the job.
What happened in the Court of Appeal 18 months ago tends to confirm Braverman’s reputation as being essentially a soundbite machine, a British version of the American right wing radio hosts who seek to generate outrage, controversy and shock regardless of truth or consequences.
Donald Trump is the past master at this sort of demagoguery which invariably guarantees him maximum media coverage. There is nothing very different or mysterious in Braverman’s approach, which leads her to demonise asylum seekers as criminals and parasites, 100 million of whom are supposedly soon to invade our shores.
Post-Brexit trauma
What makes Braverman’s meteorically successful career so interesting is why, with no visible achievements inside or outside politics, she should have twice become Home Secretary at a moment when immigration is racing up the political agenda.
Putting to one side, for the moment, the tactical calculations of Rishi Sunak as he tries to hold together a divided Tory party, it is important to explain Braverman’s rise since this may provide valuable clues about the decline in quality of the British political elite. Is it simply the remediable outcome of the post-Brexit trauma? Or is there something deeper at work which will make the trend irreversible?
Sunak is trying to cleanse the reputation of the Tory leadership of being over-populated by careerists, crackpots and crooks but scandal after scandal keeps reinforcing this image. What makes Braverman significant is not that she is uniquely bad, but that she has so many toxic doppelgangers still in the cabinet or who have recently departed in scandalous circumstances.
Yet the well-publicised personal flaws of ministers, such as bullying or mistreating their staff, serves as a smokescreen masking deeper failings such as a basic inability to do their jobs. The media is partly to blame for this. When Dominic Raab resigned as deputy prime minister and justice minister, all the focus was on his misbehaviour and whether he had been targeted by civil servants. Commentators scarcely mentioned that his grotesque failure as foreign secretary when he extended his holiday at the same time as the Taliban were capturing Kabul and ending in humiliation two decades of British military engagement in Afghanistan.
Rogue’s gallery
A recent government report into the Metropolitan Police noted sourly that among the service’s failings was an almost complete divorce between competent performance and promotion. Much the same now appears to be true of the British government, which has acquired in the course of a few years an absurdly long rogue’s gallery of over-promoted ministers who have been forced out of office such as Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Owen Patterson, Matt Hancock and the like.
I try to keep a sense of proportion when thinking about these things and not to idealise – or over demonise – the squeaky-cleanness of British institutions in the past. Practically the first story I wrote as a teenage journalist was about a senior Met officer’s participation in a drug smuggling gang. About the same time, the papers were full of corruption scandals involving Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, the architect John Poulson and a hospital on the Maltese island of Gozo.
Present day commentary is often over-dismissive of current scandals and gives a comforting but misleading sense of plus ca change, but misses the vital point that scandals about waste, misappropriation or theft now involve billions of pounds and not the more paltry sums that used to go missing.
Unprecedented in British history
A crucial turning point was the rise to power of a new cadre of leaders in the Tory party in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum. I have always argued that the worst problem was not Brexit but the Brexiteers. Leaving the EU was a big deal for Britain, but seeking national self-determination for good or ill has been an almost universal phenomenon throughout the world over the last century. The disintegration of countries, federations and empires has been the norm in Europe since 1900 – witness the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. So why should Brexit have so traumatised the British political elite? And why should one of the ablest political and administrative classes in the world have imploded so spectacularly in the last few years?
I used to think this process was unprecedented in British history and that the emergence of the likes of Braverman, a useful symbol of British decline, as a leading politician had never occurred before. But I have been reading recently about Britain in the second half of the 1930s, as the war clouds gathered, and I began to recognise similarities in the political landscape between then and now. Britain faced one issue that has not changed: what was its relationship with continental Europe?
Lady Astor
A peace agreement with Nazi Germany might avoid war and preserve the British Empire and these were not stupid objectives. Hitler would expand in central and eastern Europe but Britain would not be too concerned by events on the continent. As with Brexit, the experts all said that this was a terrible idea and British concessions would be interpreted by Hitler as a sign of weakness and an encouragement to make war.
Among those vigorously calling for a deal with Germany was Lady Nancy Astor MP, an arch appeaser whose vastly wealthy husband owned The Times and The Observer. She immediately struck me as a sort of Braverman, Truss and Patel rolled into a single self-confident, shallow, ill-informed and opinionated individual. Lady Astor’s impact on British political life was almost entirely malign, but, more optimistically, her name today is almost entirely forgotten – and so too perhaps, a century hence, will be the names of her modern-day equivalents.
Further Thoughts
Screeching political U-turns are to be expected from politicians desperate to fend off imminent defeat at the polls, but Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has reversed course with an abruptness and shamelessness that is almost unparalleled since his unexpectedly poor showing in the presidential election on 4 May.
Pundits and pollsters had virtually written off President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid for another term in office after an earthquake had killed 50,000 people and the economy was in deep trouble. It now looks almost certain that Erdogan will be re-elected on Sunday, having failed to win by a whisker in the first ballot, much to the chagrin of his opponents. Given that Kilicdaroglu was behind by almost five percentage points, he has a lot of ground to make up.
Up to two weeks ago, Kilicdaroglu had been presenting himself as Turkey’s Mr Conciliation, making heart signs in the air, and giving the general impression of intending, once in power, to spread nothing but sweetness and light. Quite suddenly, he is repackaged as Mr Tough Guy who plans to “to send home” 10 million refugees in a last minute attempt to win over Turkish ethnic nationalist voters, though the real figure for Syrian refugees in Turkey – the community targeted – is about 3.6 million.
Nor did the exaggerations end there as the previously ever-so-moderate Kilicdaroglu claimed that Erdogan had failed “to protect [Turkey’s] borders and honour… you knowingly brought more than 10 million refugees to this country… I am announcing it here – as soon as I come to power, I will send all refugees home. Period.”
Western leaders will certainly not be happy with the return of Erdogan with his close relations with Russia. Tut-tutting over Erdogan’s authoritarianism and monopoly control of the Turkish media is understandable. But there is a big dollop of hypocrisy in these democratic pretensions as the presidential election, though unfair in some respects, appears to have been essentially democratic – unlike recent phoney polls in Egypt and Tunisia. This is a point well made here.
Beneath the Radar
I feel a mild sense of threat when I hear news of great advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for two reasons: like everybody else, I dislike the idea of machines taking over entirely from human beings, though this may still be a distant prospect. AIs are not robust – they will occasionally make silly, costly mistakes that a human would never make. This might make using AIs impossible in some situations like calling 111 in Britain where a bad mistake can cost lives.
More immediately, I know from grim experience that wherever online services have taken over from real people – in booking tickets, filling in forms, banking services – it invariably means that the customer has to do unpaid work that was previously performed by paid staff. Technological advances are frequently a smoke screen for this change which it passes off as inevitable technological progress, unwanted though it may be by customers.
I worry also when I hear that AI will soon replace humans on help desks, which are already time-consuming to reach and frequently useless when it comes to useful assistance. The humans simply tick boxes and are seldom able to resolve real-life problem. AI will similarly lack authority to take autonomous decisions that cost money so real help is as far away as ever.
Cockburn’s Picks
I found this interesting because so much of Ukraine war coverage appears to exaggerate the armed strength of Ukraine and belittle that of Russia. A contrary or more nuanced view seldom get much space in the mainline media whose military pundits – retired generals and think tankers for the most part – are invariably self-confident and usually wrong.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
