Suella Braverman, the Conservative party MP and the UK’s home secretary, is not a politician afraid of being a lightning rod for criticism. But despite support from some colleagues, friend and foe probably agree with the words of Yvette Cooper, her opposition Labour party counterpart: “No other home secretary would ever have done this.” In a year-long stint leading the Home Office, Britain’s interior ministry, it is arguable that Braverman has stoked more political rows than any predecessor. Subjects as varied as the supposed bias of police, which is raging now, to homelessness, sexual abuse, golly dolls and “the tofu-eating wokerati” have all been remarked upon. The 43-year-old is a politician of stark paradoxes: an avowed Francophile who studied in Paris but became a staunch supporter of Brexit; the child of immigrant parents who yearns to deport immigrants; and a hate figure for many in parliament who, colleagues insist, is nonetheless kind and polite in private. The common thread of her eight-year stint as an MP, most of it also spent as a minister, has been a propensity to court controversy, even division, with her views, and to court the support of the culture war-favouring hard right of the Conservative party.
It is clear that Braverman sees herself as a potential successor to her boss, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Cooper, an experienced Labour politician who scrutinises Braverman from the opposition benches, accused her of being less interested in her day job than in running “an endless Tory leadership campaign”. This future darling of the Conservative right was born Sue-Ellen Fernandes in Harrow, north-west London, the only child of Christie Fernandes, a Kenyan of Christian Goan origin, and Uma Fernandes, a Mauritian of Indian origin, who had both arrived in the UK in 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 Liz Truss, a leading figure on the right of the Conservative party who had a fleeting stint as prime minister last year, 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 going to the fee-paying Heathfield school in outer London on a partial scholarship, Braverman studied law at Queens’ College, Cambridge, becoming president of the university Conservative Association. She then took advantage of a European Union 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, and 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, through 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 the then prime minister David Cameron. The result of the referendum came to her aid and by 2018, under the then prime minister, Theresa May, she became a junior Brexit minister, before rising under Boris Johnson, May’s successor, to her first cabinet job as attorney general, just 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. She has described her husband as a “proud Jew and Zionist”. 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 – a key plank of this government’s plans to cut immigration, which is currently caught up in the courts. She later told the Tory party conference, an annual gathering for members and journalists, 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.
To cap all that, she was then forced to resign by Truss just weeks into the job after sending an official document from her personal email to a fellow MP, a serious breach of ministerial rules, making her the shortest-serving home secretary since 1834. In a twist not even her most ardent fans could have predicted, she was back in the Home Office less than a week later under Rishi Sunak, after Truss’s administration collapsed, and so took up where she had left off. She has since shown 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 police in the county of Essex in a row over golly dolls seized from a pub. Now she has taken on the Metropolitan police over pro-Palestinian protests, again using language that very few other Tory MPs want to support. Is Braverman daring Sunak to sack her? Possibly. Does she believe everything she says? Probably. Is she about to back down? Almost certainly not.