Suella Braverman has ‘fired a warning shot’ at Sunak with her resignation letter | Kate McCann

the most concerning thing for Rishi sunak in this letter is that soel bravman is is indicating that Rishi sunak is weak that he doesn't take decisions that he diers and that when presented as she says here and and of course we're only listening to her side of this when she presents him with detail legal advice and policy action to take that he fails on every single opportunity to do that and remember that stopping the boats is one of Richie Zak's five priorities for the country so this is not something that's a a sort of Fringe issue is front and center of his his guarantee as prime minister I mean I don't think I've ever I have never read a letter like this we know that soel bravman was asked to leave the government Yesterday by the Prime Minister and we were waiting for an exchange of letters which is customary when someone very senior does do that it was very unusual not to have had them and it's very clear now why this is a three-page letter from the former Home Secretary and it holds back in absolutely no way it's clear that sella bravman has no intention of staying quiet and that she is is going to hold the prime minister to account for everything she believes he has done wrong it ranges from accusing him of lying accusing him of betraying her trust and the trust of the public and undermining his leadership role as prime minister there really is very little more that she could do to suggests that he is the wrong man for the job I can't read all three pages of it although I suggest it is worth reading but it's just worth I mean the first sentence of this letter thank you for your phone call yesterday morning in which you asked me to leave government while disappointing this is for the best she goes on in the first page to list her achievements but she also says that she only agreed to support the Prime Minister because and I quote of the firm assurances you gave me on key priorities she lists four of them which include specific non- withstanding Clauses on legislation to stop the boats and this is really important because tomorrow we will hear from the Supreme Court on whether the government has won or lost its its case uh to go ahead with the Rwanda policy she says this was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign I trusted you it's generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest unless enabling you to become Prime Minister I've sent numerous letters to you over the last year as Home Secretary on key subjects contained in our agreement made requests to discuss them with you in your team and put forward proposals about how we might deliver those goals I worked up legal advice policy detail and action this was often met with equivocation disregard and a lack of interest you have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these policies either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so or as I must surely conclude now you never had any intention of keeping your promises and she goes on to set this in a context and and what she talks about is how this is not just her own policy Cru say this is something that he promised the British people and that riak had made her a very clear promise that he would stick to them a lot of this centers around the ECR which of course is the convention on human rights that is up for discussion now about what happens tomorrow when it comes to the Supreme Court if the Supreme Court blocks the government from going ahead with its Rwanda policy the argument to leave the ECR will become a very live one and we know the government hasn't taken it off the table but it is incredibly complicated not least because of its implications for Northern Ireland now in this letter she goes on to talk about how she has warned the Prime Minister repeatedly and consistently that he should be prepared to lose that in the Supreme Court and she's tried to give him a plan B in order to mitigate the impact of that she then later goes on to talk about her article in the times and essentially that she feels that he hasn't done enough I've become horse urging you to consider legislation to ban hate marches and help stem the T Rising tide of racism intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening the country I regret to say your response has been uncertain weak and lacking in the qualities of leadership this country needs I mean there are still another five paragraphs that I haven't read towards the uh towards the end of the letter and that is just some of it I mean she's she's saying here somebody needs to be honest your plan is not working you need to change course I may not always have found the right words but I've always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019 I've endeavored to be honest and true to the people who put us in this position I will of course continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda which is not the same as supporting the prime minister in full how does how does it end exactly with best wishes sincerely sincerely okay right uh that is SU govern's resignation letter and um can we just wrote back a little bit she said she basically enabled him becoming prime minister there's some truth in that isn't there there is truth in that it was a time when runak needed the the rightwing of the party to show that he was a credible leadership candidate even though actually he is quite a right-wing politician himself he's a brexiteer he is by no means to the left of the party but I think up until that point he'd been relatively unknown and he had a reputation for the Furlow scheme and some quite significant financial interventions which people thought meant that he was more sort of centerr than he was and so Alan was his ticket to keeping the other wing of the party on board which did allow him to get over the line in the end so he must have known that she expected him to do what she wanted and he hasn't done that so some certainly her supporters would argue the woman's got a point here and she's certainly making it pretty vifly she is and and you know one of the problems with sacking your home secretary in a week like this is that that she always was going to have the receipts she she's somebody who's been in the home office which is you know not the most well functioning of government departments it has to be said for over I think a year now and she's been at the heart of this boats policy and we know that she's been pushing Rishi suak to go further and to go faster and to do more now you would expect that from a secretary of state that's not necessarily unusual they don't always get everything they want from the Prime Minister but I think the most concerning thing for Rishi sunak in this letter is that sella bravman is is indicating that riak is weak that he doesn't take decisions that he diers and that when presented as she says here and and of course we're only listening to her side of this when she presents him with detail legal advice and policy action to take that he fails on every single opportunity to do that and remember that stopping the boats is one of Richie Zak's five priorities for the country so this is not something that's a a sort of Fringe issue this is front and center of his his guarantee as preister he he made it so he made it so and even when he made it so he knew it was a tall order and it was always very it there was always a question about what stop the boats actually means really because stopping the boats altogether was probably always going to be impossible but I think what we can take from this letter is that soel bravman is firing well the warning shot has been fired and there are probably more to come because what she's talking about is that that she had drawn up an idea for a credible Plan B when it comes to losing the Supreme Court case and I you know that may well happen tomorrow and that Richi zuk hasn't done that I think the the point about the ECR which the braan here says would be the way to securely and swiftly deliver our Rwanda policy would be to leave that that is disputed it has to be said it is not clear that leaving the ECR would mean that the government could push ahead with this but it was never clear that the Rwanda plan was going to stop the boats was it I mean the whole thing is flawed I mean you can you can make any number of different arguments against the policy yeah I mean the government would say that the number of people crossing the channel has come down and that they would contribute Rwanda for that in that it is a deterrent that people don't want to be deported to Rwanda I think the bigger picture is that they have also agreed a returns agreement with Albania which has had a significant impact on the number of people arriving here one of the options that the government could look to is agreeing more of those return agreements with safe countries but they're not quick and they're not necessarily the Catal solution and what happens if the government essentially wins in the Supreme Court tomorrow what sense does that make of that that letter tomorrow well she includes a paragraph on that uh in this in this letter here she says on the other hand if we win in the Supreme Court because of the compromises you insisted on in the illegal migration act the government will struggle to deliver our Rwanda partnership in the way the public expects your insistence on uh indications binding in international law for example will leave us vulnerable to being uh thwarted Again by this uh by the Strasburg Court what she's talking about there is that this court case for the UK government is the end of the line This is an appeal now if they win it it can still be appealed by anyone else so and it individual it is likely that it will be so it's likely if the government wins tomorrow which I have to say I don't I don't expect to happen but it could if the government were to win it would be appealed there is no uncertainty about that in the Strasburg Court under the ECR rules and that appeal the government could do nothing about even if the UK government sought to leave the ECR it is unlikely that they could do that quickly enough for it to make make any difference to that appeal so if they win it will be appealed if the government loses there are options it doesn't necessarily mean no doesn't necessarily mean it's never going to happen there could be some mitigating factors those are quite complicated but if it's a very firm no then it would be the end of the road for this policy what do you think the tone of that letter does for her reputation amongst members of the party who perhaps were wavering about her I think among members of the party who are not fans of soel bravman it will reinforce their notion that actually she is not a person that they would like to put their you know votes behind and remember there isn't a leadership contest right now or likely to be one I think for people on the rightwing of the party they will see what she is doing as being honest with the public and I think one of the frustrations and the difficulty that actually runak has here is if he had a very clear narrative a very clear story that he was telling voters it would be easier for him to deal with things like this because he could say well you know no I've told you where we're heading long term this is a staging post on the road and this is where we're going he doesn't really have that he has ideas so he has we want to stop the boates and we want to you know cut inflation but that's those are those are policies they're not a vision they're not they're not a something that links everything together and without that people fill the vacuum was he not helped by uh the relatively peaceful demonstrations at the weekend certainly that didn't have rupt into the kind of hateful chaos that soel bravman was predicting and people have suggested actually slightly promoting I think it depends how you look at it so for some people they will say what sella bravman did in writing a a letter a comment piece in the Times newspaper was add some kind of flames if you like to the simmering row which was already to be fair happening among the far right about the need to protect British values about the need to turn up at the Senate half they people will some people argue that soel bravman actually inflamed those tensions and therefore while the protest in the main was not necessarily Rowdy from the pro Palestinian side it was incredibly Rowdy from the far right side there are other people who will argue well look at some of the placards that we could see on that March you have very clear examples of anti-Semitism you have people dressing up as Hamas terrorists walking the streets of London there is an example of a child wearing what appears to be a Hamas Terror costume quite extraordinary that image standing for a photo with two police officers there are those who will argue that sella bravman is entirely right that is incredibly inappropriate for the police to be condoning that kind of behavior and that there is a double standard at play here the police will say operationally they police violence and the kind of placards that we saw in a very different way because if you try and take somebody out of a protest with a placard you gum up the police trying to arrest them and if it gets violent they cannot come back to police the protest so it's an operational policing decision I think at the end of the day none of that matters ultimately the Prime Minister f she'd undermine the police and she had to go uh there's so much we could ask you because this is incendiary staff isn't it but do you think this letter makes it more or less likely that she'll lead the conservative party I still think it's quite unlikely that she I mean anything can happen I suppose it's a difficult question to answer in the next year it's very unlikely because for that to happen you would need enough Tories to write a letter of no confidence in the Prime Minister and currently we only have one Andrea Jenkins you would need 53 of those to do that then you'd need to fight a leadership contest and remember these arguments were made in the last leadership contest post election it depends how badly the conservatives lose the election if they lose it there's a world in which they don't lose the election too badly and maybe the fight for the party continues in a similar vein to now which is do we move to the center what are we who are we what do we stand for if the conservative party loses the election in a terrible fashion then people like so bravman will want to make a case that the right way to go is to tack to the right and she may well be the candidate but there are other credible candidates too for that KY Bok for example is seen as a much more palatable if that's the right word candidate for that kind of office who has a broader appeal within the party and without it okay but um your plan is not working you're uncertain you're weak I thought you're talking to me then no I mean just no I'm not I was going to say paraphrasing I'm doing my best you're doing brilliantly uh but it's it's just when you actually see that your plan is not working it's just it's very difficult isn't it we've gone through a period of government the last a couple of years where how many times have we all said we never saw that coming and we didn't see David Cameron coming yesterday but at the same time this really is a moment I cannot stress enough how unusual it is for a home secretary who up until a day ago was responsible for Terror policing and some of the most important jobs in state to be essentially not just not just criticizing the Prime Minister after she's left but laying be how bad their relationship had got while she was in office this is not something that just happened as a result of a sacking this is somebody who has kept a very detailed record of all of the times that this person the Prime Minister has let her down with a view one day to making it public this is something that she has had in the back of her mind and something that she knew would come to light one day and it just shows you how impossible that relationship must have been but how dysfunctional as well incredibly dysfunctional incredibly dysfunctional and so what does rishy sunak do now in terms of a response well I mean the expectation is that the Prime Minister will respond uh we were asking the spokesman whether he would be responding to that letter and there and you know that the notion is that yes you would I mean the tone of prime ministerial responses can be anything from a short couple of lines to say thank you for your service to a very kind you know open I've always appreciated your help and support I doubt we will get something in that direction I suspect Richi sunak probably will respond but with a very Curt thank you for your time it's not going to be a it's me not you letter I doubt it very much but hey look we didn't you know we didn't know it was going to be like this

Channel: Times Radio

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Id: Wpv06llI078

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023