At times she brings to mind Glenn Close, leaping from the water at the end of Fatal Attraction. Or the relentless Michael Myers in the Halloween movies.
The talk is that sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman remains intent on coming back to haunt Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. So this country has to ensure it is from the Opposition benches where she can howl at the moon, after he calls a General Election. We also need a conversation about how the most immoral and malicious Cabinet Minister – by some distance – that the country has seen for years was twice placed in such a powerful position. There was no truth she wouldn’t twist, no fact she wouldn’t misrepresent and no group safe from her lust to see their world burn.
Braverman’s attempt to incite a central London riot at the weekend is well documented. She’d branded peace protesters using Armistice Day to call for a Middle East armistice “disrespectful”. Just as this column predicted last week, her dog whistle rhetoric pricked up the ears of thugs who answered, claiming to defend this country’s honour but who were captured on social media fighting and racially abusing those calling for an end to the loss of life.
Last week’s setting on fire of a homeless Birmingham man who suffered potentially life-changing injuries, came after Braverman had described those sleeping on the streets as exercising a “lifestyle choice”. She called illegal immigration to the UK an “invasion”. She was confronted by 83-year-old Joan Salter, a Holocaust survivor and one of her constituents, who said Braverman’s language reminded her of that used by the Nazis.
You already know about her dream of a plane packed with immigrants, bound for Rwanda. And the easy thing is to dismiss her as barking mad. She was anything but. She knew exactly what she was doing. So her tenure as Home Secretary was a glimpse into the abyss. A warning of just how deep some on the Right remain intent on taking this country even further back into the dark ages.
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Braverman was a poster girl for racists. Her rhetoric about a “hurricane” of migration in her most recent Tory party conference speech was akin to a rally for the British National Party. It is to this country’s shame that it was televised live, reported as mainstream discourse and lauded as progressive in some quarters when in truth it took us back to the racist Seventies. It also resulted in millions of people feeling vulnerable, exposed and isolated. That it wasn’t the reason for her sacking tells you everything you need to know about how low the bar remains.
This column warned when she was promoted – first by Liz Truss, then by Sunak – that Braverman and her willingness to weaponise her colour made her this country’s most dangerous Cabinet Minister for years. Don’t kid yourself that replacing her with clueless James Cleverly, an oxymoron if you’ve ever seen one, or bringing in David Cameron as Foreign Secretary represents progress.
It was Cameron – whose career owes more to nepotism than actual talent – who set the wheels in motion for the Brexit lies that resulted in Boris Johnson as Prime Minister – and the toxic environment spawning blind nationalism confecting the garbage that anything foreign in this country had to be rejected.
Some mourning Braverman’s exit do so because she’d hoodwinked many into believing that diversity represented a danger to them. For others, hate sells. There really are those out there who would rather we were at each other’s throats than living peacefully side by side. Let’s be happy to disappoint them. We can start by drinking a toast to Braverman’s exit.
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