After weeks of declining popularity and effectiveness, Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak has made risky changes to his cabinet that will create major political problems for him through to the general election expected late next year. The moves, which include the astonishing return of former prime minister David Cameron to the cabinet, may however strengthen the stability and authority of his government.
The problems and the stability both come from Sunak sacking Suella Braverman, the eruptive, headline-grabbing and arguably irresponsible Home Secretary, whose frequent controversial remarks climaxed with statements that exacerbated tensions at massive pro-Palestine demonstrations over the weekend.
Braverman was sacked, a Downing Street spokesman has suggested, because of her tone more than her policies and because she ignored collective cabinet responsibility. She was not it seems offered a new post and will now try to seal her role as a populist focal point for the turbulent right wing of the Conservative Party.
She might well become an active leadership challenger for Sunak, but he would have looked weak to the point of incompetence if he had not dared to sack her. He now faces potential unrest in the Conservative Party around the country where many ordinary members back her right wing views on blocking immigration and tougher police action.
Photo: X/@SuellaBraverman
Her successor, James Cleverly, has risen in prominence as foreign secretary in the past year. He has brought respect and rationality to the role after three predecessors generally regarded as failures – Liz Truss (later briefly prime minister), Dominic Raab (now out of politics) and Boris Johnson (whose reputation as prime minister lies in tatters).
That left a vacancy as foreign secretary which Sunak could have filled uncontroversially with an existing member of the cabinet. Instead, he has brought the former somewhat discredited prime minister David Cameron into the government, astonishing all political observers and indeed probably all MPs of all parties. Cameron is not an MP so has been made a member of the House of Lords.
That appointmnt drove Braverman’s sacking off the day’s media top headlines, but it will be widely ridiculed by the Labour Opposition and others. Cameron led Britain to its current Brexit existence outside the European Union by calling a referendum in 2016 that he assumed would be in favour of remaining in Europe.
He resigned in 2016 (having been prime minister since 2010) on the day the Brexit referendum result was announced and has been in the political wilderness since then, looking lost without any role. He was urged by Boris Johnson to try to become secretary general of NATO in 2017, but failed to secure the job and it seemed his public life was finished.
Since then his reputation has been harmed by lobbying he carried out for Greensill Capital, a scandal-hit financial services company that collapsed in 2021. His “significant lack of judgment” was criticised by a Treasury Committee.
The reason Sunak has given him the job, rather than more obvious cabinet candidates, is presumably that Cameron is widely experienced politically and is well known internationally. He will gain respect for UK policies in foreign capitals and multi-national organisations, which is especially relevant in the current Middle East crisis, even though he was involved as prime minister in controversial decisions including support for a NATO-led military intervention in Libya in 2011 that toppled Muammar Gadhafi but led to chaos. In 2013, he tried and failed to gain Parliament’s backing for UK airstrikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.
Foreign relations are an area where Sunak has little experience and, indeed, has at times seemed not to want to be involved. He did not go the UN general assembly earlier this year and tried to avoid the climate change Cop 27 summit last November.
Politically, Cameron is in the centre of Conservative Party politics and his appointment will be welcomed in what are known as “the shires and “blue wall” areas where Tory voters might switch to other parties at the next election.
For India, the appointment is good news because Cameron tried, albeit with little success, to strengthen two-way trade and investment when he was prime minister. He made three visits to India in that role and hosted Narendra Modi in London in 2015. His last publicised visit was as a private individual in December 2016, when he was paid a rumoured £200,000 to speak at a Hindustan Times conference.
It remains to be seen how far Cameron tries to move British policy towards China, where a balance needs to be struck between limited co-operation on key issues and protecting security concerns on inward investment. As prime minister, he talked about a “golden age” in UK-China relations and welcomed Beijing’s investment in key UK nuclear power and iother infrastructure projects. He tried after stepping down to set up a $1bn UK-China investment fund, but that was abandoned two years ago because of deteriorating relations with Beijing.
Cameron will support cautious moves that Sunak has been making recently to grow closer to Europe, backed by Jeremy Hunt, who remains Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister).
Braverman leapt to national prominence in July 2022 when she announced on a late night political tv programme her candidacy to success Boris Johnson (who had not by then resigned as prime minister). She immediately broke convention by refusing to resign as attorney general, an early indication of her scant respect for parliamentary convention.
Braverman making her “the hurricane is coming” speech at the Conservative Party conference, October 2023
Her candidacy was not treated seriously, and she was quickly eliminated from the contest, but the move launched her rapid elevation with her extreme anti-immigration and pro law and order statements.
Earlier this year, Braverman attracted widespread criticism when she said floods of people who come to the UK across the Channel in small boats “possess values which are at odds with our country” and there were “heightened levels of criminality”. She told The Guardian her claims were based on briefings from unnamed senior police officers, not data.
A claim that Albanian people arriving in the UK by small boats were exploiting modern slavery laws was challenged in an analysis seen by the Guardian.
She became home minister under prime minister Liz Truss last year, but resigned just before Truss fell from office after being accused of breaching confidential guidelines. Sunak surprised commentators by reappointing her to the same job when he became prime minister – presumably because it was safer to have her in the cabinet than outside because of her outspoken right-wing views.
Throughout her time as Home Secretary, there has been a debate about whether her controversial speeches are made from conviction or are simply part of her campaign to become the next prime minister by winning support from grassroots Conservative members who align themselves with what she says.
She has a complex ethnic identity as the daughter of a Hindu Tamil mother from Mauritius and a Goan Christian father born in Kenya – they emigrated to the UK in the 1960s. She is a Buddhist, belonging to the sometimes controversial Triratna sect, and her husband is Jewish. They live in what a family friend has described as “a very Jewish part of the country in Hertfordshire,” adding: “She does have a strong relationship with the Jewish community. People have been very quick to say she is Machiavellian, but she sees this as a values issue.”
Despite this very wide multi-cultural background, Braverman delivered an incendiary speech at the Conservative party conference in October saying “multi-culturalism has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it”.
‘The hurricane that is coming’
She also made a speech that had chilling echoes of a famous “rivers of blood” warning made in 1968 by Enoch Powell, a leading Conservative politician about how Britain would be swamped by immigrants “The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared [with] the hurricane that is coming,” she said. “Because today, the option of moving from a poorer country to a richer one is not just a dream for billions of people. It’s an entirely realistic prospect.”
In the last few weeks she drew criticism when she claimed that destitute people living rough on city pavements had made a “lifestyle choice”.
Her remarks have escalated since pro-Palestine mass demonstrations have been held in London each Saturday involving over 100,000 people. Contrary to the evidence for anyone who watched the marches, she has said several times that they were “hate marches”.
At the end of last week she ignored requests from the prime minister’s office to tone down an incendiary article in The Times in which she said “we have seen with our own eyes that terrorists have been valorised, Israel has been demonised as Nazis and Jews have been threatened with further massacres” She also accused the London police of “playing favourites” towards Left-wing protesters.
With this article, Braverman was behaving as no Home Secretary has done in living memory, stirring up hatred and undermining the police instead of showing calm leadership. It was an especially controversial time because it coincided with the weekend’s annual Remembrance ceremonies for those fallen in two world wars and other battles. She wanted the marches cancelled but the London police chief said that was neither necessary not justified by current laws.
She said she would not hesitate to change the terror laws “if there’s a need” in order to combat “utterly odious bad actors” exploiting gaps in the legislation to stir up anti-Semitism.
‘No-one better than Suella…’
The problems Sunak now faces were illustrated by Sir John Hayes, a prominent right-wing MP and a member of a group that wrote to the prime minister this morning asking him not to sack Braverman. “There’s no one better than Suella Braverman to help Rishi Sunak deliver what he has made a defining (immigration) policy for him and the Government. I am sure they will collaborate to do so,” he told The Times (UK)
On policy, her main setback has been that she has failed to solve the major problem of stopping boat people crossing the Channel from France. The supreme court will rule on Wednesday on the lawfulness of the government’s controversial plan to deport plane-loads of these asylum seekers to Rwanda. Both Sunak and Braverman have seen this as a key policy. It will now become the first challenge for Cleverly – and an opportunity for Braverman to stake out her future policy priorities.
The significance of her role as home secretary, and of her dismissal, goes far wider than the boatpeople. At a time of rising populism internationally and growing nationalism, her extreme views strike a chord among Conservative Party grassroots and she could replace Sunak as party leader if, as seems likely, he loses the next election.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog.
John Elliott is a journalist.
