There’s an awful lot of noise out there today. Big swinging changes in the Cabinet, the complete reversal of Rishi Sunak’s insistence that he was a change candidate, the reintroduction of David Cameron to frontline politics. But for all that, at the end of the day, when we tuck ourselves into bed, one beautiful sentence will be playing in our minds. It is a lovely, elegant, heart-warming sentence, which will assure us of a blissful night’s sleep: Suella Braverman is no longer home secretary.
In the great pantheon of terrible home secretaries, only Braverman can make a water-tight claim to be the worst of them all.
It’s not a position that encourages decency. Even fine politicians who took the post, like Jack Straw, say, or David Blunkett, proved hopelessly authoritarian during their time there. But Braverman was not a fine politician. She was among the least talented of them, so when she ascended to the department, she proved much more malicious, cynical and irresponsible than any of her predecessors. Even Theresa May and Priti Patel looked reasonable in comparison.
The list of embarrassments is too long to fit in a single column. She bleated about “tofu-eating wokerati”. She said it was her “dream” to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. She indulged in antisemitic tropes by saying the UK was “engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism”. She deployed far-right rhetoric to say refugees landing at Kent were an “invasion”. She branded multiculturalism a “failure”. She said homelessness was a lifestyle choice. She put asylum seekers on a barge as a form of punishment and then found bacteria which can cause serious lung infection in the water. She was sacked for breaking the ministerial code, only to be instantly put back in place again.
And then last weekend we reached the nadir, a level of disgrace and misbehaviour which is rare in British public life, even now. For weeks ahead of Remembrance Saturday she spread division and distrust, branding Palestinian demonstrations “hate marches”, accusing the police of favouritism, and drumming up a vitriolic campaign warning of Hamas-supporters attacking the Cenotaph. She aimed to intensify division, instead of healing it. She behaved as a provocateur rather than a figure of authority.
And then we saw the result. Far-right thugs barging onto Whitehall, attacking the police, demeaning the country at the moment of remembrance. Taking one of the very few moments in our national life still defined by consensus and making it another wretched culture war.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s violence, she put out a statement which showed no contrition, no remorse, and no indication that she would behave differently in future. She didn’t even pay lip service to the roving gangs of far-right hooligans, who police said were responsible for the vast majority of the violence and whose presence on London’s streets was down to her.
Over the course of her time at the Home Office she has demeaned British government with her hyper-online right-wing-discourse dimwittery, encouraged toxic division and spread hatred. But the true monument to her time as a secretary of state is not really composed of that. It is constituted through absence. You can best summarise her by asking the following question: what did she achieve?
The answer to that question is nothing. She has accomplished nothing.
In May, Braverman’s Public Order Act received Royal Assent. It introduced a whole host of new draconian restrictions on protests, including a new offence of “locking on”, an extremely trivial test of what constitutes “serious disruption”, massive new powers for stop-and-search and the introduction of Serious Disruption Prevention Orders.
But none of these measures were the least bit helpful when Braverman wanted the pro-Palestinian marches restricted. She hadn’t even succeeded in her own authoritarian efforts to be able to clamp down on protests. The people who are typically targeted by the law are anti-monarchy campaigners and environmentalists.
Braverman’s Illegal Migration Act received Royal Assent in July. It acted to close down the UK asylum process altogether, after years of failure to process people’s claims. Instead, they would be detained, held and removed, except she wasn’t able to remove people either, because she had never considered the original claim. She managed to pass the Act through Parliament but it has still not been activated, because the Government knows that doing so would leave it unable to do anything about asylum.
This is the defining quality of Braverman and her ilk. They can’t govern. They have all the powers of the state behind them, the ability to do whatever they choose. But instead of actually addressing the problems they claim to care about, they shout from the sidelines, like an angry commentator.
She is emblematic of the populist approach to politics: sound and fury, signifying nothing. They’ll tell people who to hate, but they won’t do a thing to improve their lives.
She has one achievement to her name and one only: tonight, we will sleep better for her departure.
