July 8, 2024 - 8:45pm

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak laid out a programme that Labour could “happily do”, Suella Braverman has claimed.

Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Washington D.C., the former home secretary argued that Sunak’s premiership contained “farcical gimmicks” that Labour would adopt in office. “When Rishi Sunak became prime minister, he laid out a programme that our new Labour government could quite happily do and probably will,” Braverman said. “There were farcical gimmicks like the proposed smoking ban. And there was more nonsense like letting criminals out early and scrapping shorter sentences for low-level crime.”

Sunak sacked Braverman as home secretary at the end of 2023 after she defied No. 10 by writing an article accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in its handling of protests. A few days later, Braverman accused the then-PM of breaking his pledge on lowering immigration, saying that he was trying to “avoid making hard decisions”. Today, she doubled down on her attacks, warning that Sunak “refused to do what was necessary” over stopping the boats. “Rather than live up to the pledge he made in Downing Street, he refused to do what was necessary,” she said. “The reason we failed to stop the boats and implement the Rwanda scheme was because Rishi Sunak didn’t want it to happen.”

Braverman admitted that the Tories took a “shellacking” in last week’s election, blaming liberal Conservatives such as Sunak who failed to enact promises made by the party in the 2019 general election. “We had won a truly great majority in 2019,” Braverman said today. “We were going to use newfound Brexit freedoms to stop illegal immigrants, cut taxes, and to stop the lunatic woke virus from infecting our British state.” The Conservative MP expressed regret that these promises remain unfulfilled, and attacked her fellow Conservatives for “searching for phantoms to explain our own failures”.

With just 121 Tory MPs remaining in Parliament, the pool of potential candidates to replace Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party is smaller than usual. Braverman, as standard-bearer for the Right, lost to Liz Truss when she challenged for the position two years ago, coming sixth. She has called for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and argued Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage should be allowed to join the Tories, which other Right-wingers such as Kemi Badenoch have not supported.  According to a Times report today, Braverman’s campaign is “dead before it has even started”, with one of her most high-profile supporters, Danny Kruger, expected to back Robert Jenrick instead.

Braverman did not mention the unofficial leadership contest in today’s speech. Instead, she implored conservatives to tack to the Right, warning that this “is not just a defeat for my party” but “an existential crisis from which we may not recover”. She added: “The Tories governed as liberals and were defeated as liberals.”


is UnHerd’s Newsroom editor.

james_billot