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Good morning. You’re dumping me? I’m dumping YOU! That’s the gist of Suella Braverman’s open letter to Rishi Sunak, in which she accuses the prime minister of breaking his promises to her and warns that his strategy is leading the Conservative party to electoral defeat. What does it mean?
As far as Sunak’s leadership is concerned, not that much. There are lot of pleasingly brutal lines in Braverman’s letter about his style of running the government and the shortcomings of his political approach. But in the end she falls short of calling for a change in leader, because there is no plausible route to removing Sunak at present, and she has no plausible argument as to how she would turn around the party’s fortunes this side of an election.
In terms of the balance of forces on the Tory right, however, the letter has changed quite a bit. Some more thoughts on all that below.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further
Rishi Sunak is prime minister because he is the preferred candidate of the party’s left and centre. Taken together with the government payroll vote, that means he has the near-guaranteed support of two-thirds of the parliamentary party. Its right flank, and disgruntled MPs who have lost preferment under Sunak, have the numbers to force a vote of no confidence in Sunak’s leadership, but they don’t have a big enough base of support to push through a change in the leadership.
Frankly, all that has really changed is that the left of the party — which a week ago would essentially in private say things such as “it’s dreadful, Rishi is not one of us, but after him comes the flood” — now feel rather more enthusiastic about things. David Cameron is back, Laura Trott and Vicky Atkins are sitting round the cabinet table. A number of moderates are in junior ministerial roles for the first time.
That feelgood factor may not last long. Even if it dissipates, what matters in terms of Sunak’s leadership is that the right can get crosser and crosser with him, but angry votes do not count double. Suella Braverman accusing him of all sorts is not going to materially shift the balance of forces within the parliamentary party.
To the extent that Braverman’s letter matters, it is how it shapes perceptions of the former home secretary. She claimed that Sunak made her a number of promises to secure her support in last autumn’s leadership race, but he has not kept them. Here’s the woman herself:
1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;
2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, ie exclude the operation of the European convention on human rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;
3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;
4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.
There’s an obvious problem here: three out of four of these promises have very obviously been dead in the water for some time. Revealing these broken promises only after she has been sacked will only deepen the argument by some of Braverman’s critics on the right of the party that while they agree with her aims, in practice she is all mouth and no trousers.
The politician making that argument the most forcefully and openly is Priti Patel, Braverman’s predecessor as home secretary and, I think, the biggest threat to Braverman’s hopes of emerging as the right’s standard-bearer at the next leadership election.
To the extent that the former home secretary’s missive has changed Tory politics at all, it is in damaging her own hopes of uniting the whole right of the Conservative party and accentuating concerns, even among MPs who broadly agree with her politically, that she wasn’t up to the job. The politician whose position has been changed the most isn’t Sunak: it is Patel. Her chances of emerging as the candidate who can unite both Sunak’s implacable critics and some from the middle of the party have gone up quite a lot as a result of Braverman’s letter.
Now try this
I do not care for the new Paramount Plus mini-series The Curse at all. There is the guts of a decent 90-minute to 120-minute movie in there somewhere, but it is stretched well past its welcome across a padded and crushingly unsubtle series. Watch Funny Pages instead. But I did enjoy talking about it on the FT’s revamped Life and Art podcast alongside Lilah Raptopoulos and Rebecca Watson.
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