Of all her achievements thus far in politics, Suella Braverman’s latest feat is perhaps her most notable: being sacked as home secretary twice in little more than a year. Her first departure, just weeks into the role under Liz Truss, was officially labelled a resignation, but in fact Braverman had no choice but to step down for sending an official document from her personal email to a fellow MP, a serious breach of ministerial rules. Braverman was back in the Home Office less than a week later under Rishi Sunak after Truss’s administration collapsed. This time, however, she seems out for good – or at least for as long as Sunak stays in No 10. Sunak’s decision to sack Braverman brings down the curtain on a turbulent and often controversial tenure, one succinctly and accurately summarised by her Labour counterpart, Yvette Cooper, in the Commons on Thursday: “No other home secretary would ever have done this.”
“This” was writing an opinion piece in the Times that accused the police of being inherently biased towards left-leaning protests, including clumsy comparisons with Northern Ireland, which caused genuine anger. The article was sent to Downing Street for approval, as the ministerial code sets out, but a series of changes demanded by No 10 were seemingly ignored, or at the very least not made. It is hard to think of a more direct challenge to a prime minister’s authority, especially from a minister who has spent months playing her own tune, seemingly intent on positioning herself as the choice for the right of the Conservative party in a post-Sunak future. In her time as home secretary, it is arguable Braverman has stoked more political rows than any predecessor, on subjects as varied as the supposed bias of police, which is raging now, to homelessness, sexual abuse, golly dolls and “the tofu-eating wokerati”.
For all her current position as the hard-talking darling of the populist Tory right, the 43-year-old Braverman, an MP since 2015, is a politician of stark paradoxes. An avowed Francophile who studied in Paris, she became a staunch Brexiter. The child of immigrant parents, she publicly yearns to deport immigrants. A hate figure for many in parliament, colleagues insist Braverman is nonetheless kind and polite in private. Born Sue-Ellen Fernandes in Harrow, north-west London, she is the only child of Christie Fernandes, a Kenyan of Christian Goan origin, and Uma Fernandes, a Mauritian of Indian origin, both of whom had arrived in the UK during the 1960s. Named after Sue Ellen Ewing, the leading female character in the 1980s US television drama Dallas, who was largely defined by her turbulent personal life and struggles with alcohol, Braverman shortened her name after teachers started to call her Suella. Unlike Truss, Braverman did not begin her political life on the left. Her mother, an NHS nurse, was a Conservative councillor and stood unsuccessfully for parliament. After attending the fee-paying Heathfield school in Pinner, where she was on a partial scholarship, Braverman studied law at Queens’ College, Cambridge, becoming president of the university Conservative association. She took advantage of the EU’s Erasmus scheme for overseas study, no longer available to UK students since Brexit, spending two years in France studying at the Sorbonne, gaining a love of French language and culture. While she threw herself into a career as a barrister, practising in the UK and the US, passing the New York bar exam, Braverman was also set on politics, unsuccessfully fighting the solid Labour seat of Leicester East in 2005. When she finally made it to the Commons in 2015, via the ultra-safe constituency of Fareham in Hampshire, Braverman immediately allied herself with the Brexit ultras of the European Research Group, not an obvious career move under David Cameron. The EU referendum came to her aid and by 2018, under Theresa May, she was junior Brexit minister, rising under Boris Johnson to her first cabinet job as attorney general two years later. Having entered parliament as Suella Fernandes, she was now Suella Braverman, after marrying Rael Braverman, a manager at Mercedes-Benz, in 2018. Controversy was never far away. In 2019, after Braverman had resigned from May’s government in protest at its Brexit plans, she was criticised by Jewish groups for using “cultural Marxism” in a speech, a term linked to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and antisemitism. It was, however, after her ascent to the Home Office under Truss that Braverman’s notoriety increased at pace. She was filmed saying it was her “dream” to watch asylum seekers being deported to Rwanda, told the Tory party conference that net migration should be “cut to tens of thousands”, and then prompted laughter from MPs by telling the Commons that “the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” were to blame for disruptive protests. Following her return under Sunak, Braverman showed a keenness to step into every controversy going, being criticised for inflammatory language over an “invasion” of asylum seekers in small boats, and what she termed a preponderance of British Pakistani men in so-called grooming gangs, even managing to be contradicted by Essex police in a row over racist golly dolls seized from a pub. In recent weeks, Sunak and his ministers have politely declined to endorse a series of Braverman views, including that multiculturalism in the UK has failed, that homelessness is largely “a lifestyle choice”, and that pro-Palestine protesters are taking part in “hate marches”. All these were potentially tolerable for Sunak, with Braverman the public face of a hardline Home Office policy platform fully endorsed by No 10, notably the much-criticised plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Even calling the independence of the police into question might have been brushed over. But defying a prime minister so openly? That was too much.