Tory MPs accuse Suella Braverman of making bid
for party leadership
Party colleagues condemn home secretary’s ‘outrageous’
National Conservatism conference speech, and say it undermined Sunak
Pippa
Crerar and Peter Walker
Mon 15 May
2023 19.28 BST
Despairing
Conservative MPs have accused Suella Braverman of undermining Rishi Sunak’s
authority and making a bid for the future leadership of the party with a
partisan speech railing against experts and elites.
The home
secretary delivered a highly personal blueprint for a political philosophy to
take on the “radical left” in what was interpreted as a pitch to be the right’s
next candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in London.
Senior Tory
MPs privately condemned her making an overture to become the party’s leader
should the Conservatives lose the next election. One said: “Rishi needs to make
it clear to her that she is either a team player or a backbencher.”
Tory MPs
have grown increasingly uneasy after a damning set of local election results
and with ministers braced for a record increase in immigration figures next
week, which threatens to undermine their pledge to cut arrivals.
Sunak has
also faced criticism from the pro-Brexit right of his party since it was
announced that just 600 of the 4,000 EU laws he pledged to revoke by the end of
the year would be scrapped.
Conservative
MPs were invited for drinks with the prime minister to mark the coronation in
the Downing Street garden on Monday night. Sunak was expected to try to calm
nerves there and draw a line under any potential mutiny.
However, MPs
suggested Sunak should warn Braverman to stick to her role as home secretary
and get to grips with problems in the immigration system, rather than giving
her permission to undermine his leadership.
One
minister said: “She’s not waiting for the election, but is pitching for prime
minister now. And she’s not the only one. Being in the cabinet is no longer a
collective endeavour but a position to pitch for the next job. It would be
better if she and others focused on the jobs they actually had. You would think
being home secretary was some side hustle.”
Another MP
described her speech as “outrageous”, saying: “It was rather rich that she was
highlighting the problems with our immigration system when she’s been in charge
of it for the past nine months. It was all about her ambitions, not about
improving things.”
A third MP
said the majority of Tory colleagues were “rolling their eyes” at Braverman’s
“unhelpful” appearance at the conference when she should be concentrating on
tackling migration.
“She’s
doing it because she wants an audience … but it’s going to take a lot more than
this one speech to make her party leader. It makes me despair. She should be
concentrating on the immigration figures and our strategy for dealing with
them,” they added.
In her
speech to the conference, organised by the rightwing populist US thinktank the
Edmund Burke Foundation, Braverman commented on the need for the UK to cut back
on legal migration and train domestic workers for jobs such as fruit picking.
But she
began with a description of her father’s arrival from Kenya in 1968, and her
mother’s move from Mauritius to train as a nurse. She said her politics, like
that of her parents, was “a politics of optimism, pride, national unity,
aspiration and realism”.
She said:
“The left’s is a politics of pessimism, guilt, national division, resentment
and utopianism. The left on the other hand sees the purpose of politics as to
eradicate the existence of inequality, even if that comes at the expense of
individual liberty and human flourishing.”
Braverman
argued that conservatism “has no truck with political correctness”, in a
section of the speech that squarely addressed culture war issues. In one of a
series of attacks on Keir Starmer, she said: “Given his definition of a woman,
we can’t rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister.”
She said
the left was “ashamed of our history” and could “only sell its vision for the
future by making people feel terrible about our past”, adding: “Nobody should
be blamed for things that happened before they were born.”
In apparent
criticism of academics and other advisers in “ivory towers”, Braverman said
Conservatives should be “sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts and elites
who think they know best what is in the public’s interest”.
The Labour
leader, Keir Starmer, told his MPs the Tories had responded to their election
drubbing with “a series of mad hatter’s tea parties” which were “carnivals of
conspiracy and blame”. The NatCon event came two days after Boris Johnson
revivalists gathered in Bournemouth in another challenge to Sunak’s authority.
Downing
Street played down suggestions of a rift between Sunak and his home secretary,
confirming it had approved the text of her speech and that Braverman was
speaking on behalf of the government.
The prime
minister’s official spokesperson said: “We want to see employers make long-term
investments in the UK domestic workforce instead of relying on overseas labour
as part of building a high-wage and high-skilled economy and we are supporting
those industries in doing that.”
The 2019
Tory manifesto promised that “overall numbers will come down” on immigration.
But next week’s figures are expected to show that more than 800,000 people
arrived in the UK last year.
The
chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, are
understood to have successfully watered down an immigration crackdown on
foreign students after arguing that it could damage the university sector as
well as the economy more broadly.
Braverman,
however, is expected to announce that one-year master’s students will be banned
from bringing family members with them to the UK as part of attempts to reduce
net migration.
One
government source suggested that family visas had been “overused and a bit
abused” by some universities to attract foreign master’s students, and that
Hunt and Keegan were “happy with the landing zone” on the family ban.
The number
of family members of students arriving in the UK has risen more than tenfold in
four years, from 12,806 in 2018 to 135,788 in the year to December.
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