Suella Braverman: ‘Hate on Britain’s streets proves that multiculturalism has failed’

An end to round-the-clock telephone calls requesting approval for intelligence-service operations might seem a happy by-product of being suddenly ousted as home secretary. But, says Suella Braverman, as a parent of a two-year-old, that has not necessarily meant more sleep. “My daughter still wakes up at 3am,” she sighs. “But, yes, I don’t need to worry about the national-security issues.”

Braverman, 43, describes the responsibilities of home secretary – which include signing off on MI5 surveillance warrants – as a “heavy burden”. “[Officials] do call at any time and you’ve got to be able to respond immediately,” she says. However, it isn’t just the national-security element of the role that the former attorney general has found to weigh heavily.

Now freed from the restrictions of collective responsibility, Braverman reveals that she has been fighting a series of behind-the-scenes battles on key policies since her appointment in the autumn of 2022 – and not only those directly relating to the work of the Home Office. She has been at the forefront of arguments to take the toughest approach to extremism – and connects her concerns about what she terms “hate marches” in London relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict to her insistence on the need to tackle rising levels of migration.

The former home secretary refers back to a controversial speech in September to highlight the anti-Semitic slogans that have emerged during pro-Palestine protests in central London as “a reflection of the failure of multiculturalism”. Braverman has been attempting to hold Rishi Sunak to account for a series of commitments she says he made in exchange for her support following Liz Truss’s demise as leader last year – on issues from cutting EU red tape to issuing “guidance to schools on trans matters”.

At the heart of the commitments Braverman sought were meaningful reforms to bring down levels of migration. Sitting in the kitchen of her Hertfordshire home, once again a backbench MP, Braverman sets out why she believes Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill to get deportation flights up and running is “not fit for purpose” due to the “gaping holes” she believes it leaves open for legal challenges. Braverman also says that she was pushing to introduce sweeping restrictions on legal migration as early as last autumn, but was “blocked” by Downing Street as the Prime Minister repeatedly refused to meet her to discuss the issue over the course of a year.

She now fears that the changes announced last week will fail to have any impact on official figures until mid-2025 – after a general election at which the Conservatives are, on current course, likely to be punished for failing to deliver on promises to cut levels of migration. Elsewhere, Braverman reveals that she was privately opposing plans by Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, to scrap prison sentences of less than a year for most criminals, to help tackle the prison-overcrowding crisis. “The solution is not to let criminals off the hook – it is to build more prisons, and quickly.”

That Braverman, a standard-bearer of the Tory Right and a former head of the European Research Group of MPs that now threatens to block Mr Sunak’s Rwanda law, should have ended up a disillusioned member of Sunak’s government is perhaps one of the less surprising political developments of recent years, given the Conservative Party’s deep splits.

The pair were unlikely allies when Braverman, then a possible leadership contender herself, announced on October 23 2022 that she had decided to back Sunak’s second attempt to become Tory leader last year, having lost to Liz Truss in the summer. The move appeared to all-but guarantee Sunak’s path to No 10.

“When it became clear that Liz’s time was coming to an end, the [now] Prime Minister did approach me, and he asked for my support,” says Braverman, whose own leadership pledges on migration and cutting tax forced several of her rivals further to the Right last summer. By the time Sunak approached her, Braverman had quit as Truss’s home secretary after sending an official document from her personal email address.

“I supported Liz because I thought that on illegal migration primarily, she was very robust from the outset. “So, Rishi spoke to me, we had several conversations and eventually I decided to support him, on very firm assurances that he gave me, an agreement that we made, that if I were to support him, he would take particular specific steps on several very discrete policy areas [including] illegal migration, legal migration.”

The agreement included raising the minimum salary threshold required for foreign skilled workers from £26,000 to £40,000 – a proposal almost exactly adopted by Mr Sunak only a couple of weeks after sacking Braverman. Braverman drew up a physical document that Mr Sunak then agreed to in front of witnesses, she says. “In person, a document was considered by both of us, we went through it in a lot of detail and he agreed to it – with other people in the room.”

On Mr Sunak’s part, while Braverman was appointed to run the Home Office, the Prime Minister’s close ally Robert Jenrick was installed as a Cabinet-level immigration minister, whom some journalists were told was there to “keep an eye” on the home secretary. But the arrangement was somewhat painless for Braverman, who says that she and Jenrick had been “friends for decades”, having been contemporaries at Cambridge University.

“We were partners at the Home Office,” says Braverman of Jenrick, who quit last week having failed to persuade Mr Sunak to introduce a tougher Rwanda Bill. That alliance may now prove deadly for the Prime Minister’s legislation as the two former ministers team up to warn their party that it will not stop the flow of boats crossing the Channel.

Braverman makes clear that she feels let down. While in September her public assessment of Sunak was that he was doing a “very, very hard job very well”, she restricts herself now to saying that the Prime Minister is “doing a very, very hard job”. Primarily, she insists that the bill due to be debated on Tuesday – which is intended to overcome a Supreme Court ruling blocking deportation flights to Rwanda – fails to deliver on Sunak’s promise to do “whatever it takes” to get the scheme up and running as a deterrent to help stop the passage of small boats carrying migrants across the Channel.

“Ultimately, he’s not stopped the boats. He made the promise at the beginning of the year. He’s not fulfilled the promise. I want him to fulfil the promise. We are not there yet and I want him to do whatever it takes. He said he will do whatever it takes. He needs to prove it now.” The bill “does have some commendable elements to it”, she says. She welcomes the inclusion of a “notwithstanding” clause that disapplies parts of the Human Rights Act. But, like Jenrick, she fears that it is used in “an extremely narrow way” that could still leave plenty of room for legal challenges.

Braverman believes that the Conservatives should campaign on a platform to leave the European Convention on Human Rights at the next election, saying that the treaty is “far too elastically interpreted, it has operated to thwart our ability to control our borders, control our national security, and properly take back control”. But she concedes: “This Government won’t do it, and it is a debate for another day.”

Her other concerns about the bill include a clause that allows individuals to make claims that they cannot be sent to Rwanda – a measure Braverman believes could add on six months to the wait for any deportation flights. “There will be individual claims brought by every person who is put on the first flight to Rwanda. That’s what happened in June 2022 [when flights were grounded by an order of the European Court of Human Rights]. “It took six months for those individual claims to get a decision from the High Court. So clause four of this bill basically adds on a minimum of six months to any scheme that is built by this legislation.”

Braverman, who practised as a barrister before becoming MP for Fareham, Hampshire, in 2015, suggests that the provision is likely to be gamed by migrants, with the bar set at a requirement for individuals to produce “compelling evidence” if they wish to argue that Rwanda is an unsafe country for them. “In all of the claims that we’ve dealt with... pretty much all of the claimants were able to adduce medical evidence from a doctor, which said, ‘Yes, this person will commit suicide if they move to Rwanda; yes, this person will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder if they move to Rwanda.’”

Another concern is the absence of an “automatic block” on so-called “pyjama injunctions”, or interim Rule 39 orders, from the Strasbourg court, one of which was used to ground flights last year. “In the bill, it clearly states that ministers decide whether to use the Rule 39 block or not. I know that our attorney general has advised that to ignore a Rule 39 injunction would be a breach of international law, so therefore, as it stands, Rule 39s will block flights.

“Couple that with the Prime Minister’s rather strange claim that Rwanda doesn’t want us to breach international law, despite there being a clear argument ignoring Rule 39s isn’t a breach, and it follows that Strasbourg will be able to effectively stop any flights taking off.” The “rather strange claim” is Mr Sunak’s declaration in recent days that he was unable to pursue a “full-fat” version of the legislation – blocking off individual claims under human rights laws – because the Rwandan government insisted that it would not tolerate the UK reneging on its international legal obligations. She finds this “unconvincing”.

Vincent Biruta, the Rwandan foreign minister who released a statement supporting Mr Sunak’s claim, never mentioned such concerns in his discussions with Braverman, she says. Braverman’s remarks speak to a lack of trust that developed at the top of the Government.

On legal migration, she says, “I worked out the proposals, I wrote officially to the Prime Minister. I asked for meetings to discuss the matter with him. I was never granted a meeting in 12 months by the Prime Minister on this subject. And so I was left to do it through official correspondence. “It was about six times that I put in a request through myself or officials to talk about the plan on legal migration.”

Braverman says her only one-to-one time with Mr Sunak discussing possible measures to restrict legal migration was five minutes during a meeting on the Rwanda scheme. Braverman suggests that the apparent uninterest in significantly reducing legal migration was not exclusive to Downing Street and that, supported by Jenrick, she was the only Cabinet minister “arguing forcefully for [reducing] net migration”.

Braverman argues that the Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility only calculate the estimated economic benefits of increased migration and not the costs, including its impact on the NHS, schools and the housing market.

“It’s a real pressure on resources: GP places, school places, house prices,” she says. “The sector is now coming out and saying increased migration is pushing up house prices. And yet, the OBR and the various economic departments do not see it that way. They say more people coming into the country, taken at face value, is a good thing for the economy. They ignore the cost that those people will bring with them, particularly when so many of them are bringing in more than one dependant.

“We’re not building enough houses, we’re not creating enough school places or GP places to support this rapid increase in migration. It’s also straining community cohesion, and parts of our country are changing very rapidly. And that affects issues like the social fabric of our country. And that goes to the point that I’ve made previously about multiculturalism.”

In September, weeks before the October 7 attacks by Hamas and subsequent pro-Palestine protests in London, Braverman drew controversy for a speech in which she suggested that multiculturalism had failed. Now she says that events since then have proved her point.

“I think it has utterly failed in parts of our country, where communities are not integrating, they’re not learning the language, they have values totally at odds with British values. I think that’s been borne out by some of the hate marches that we’ve seen since October 7. [It is] astonishing, staggering, shocking and shameful that, on the streets of Britain in the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of people are jubilant about what Hamas did, glorifying, celebrating, in a way which is horrific to see and has intimidated, harassed and been racist towards the Jewish community. And I think that is a reflection of the failure of multiculturalism.”

Braverman adds: “Extremism on the streets has been allowed to get out of control. I think these marches represent the highest risk of extremism and terrorism that we’ve seen for 20 years since 9/11. There is radicalisation going on around our country, in mosques, in schools in communities around the country, where violence is being preached, hatred is being preached, and anti-Semitism is being normalised.”

While a month ago, Braverman might have been conducting such an interview at the Home Office rather than in her own kitchen, a lighthearted reminder of the realities of post-ministerial life arrives in the form of her husband, Rael, a finance manager for Mercedes, returning home for lunch. He jokes: “I don’t want a photo, I don’t want to be asked a question.” Braverman has previously spoken about how their household is run on spreadsheets that dictate which parent or grandparent is responsible for nursery and school drop-offs, dinners and bedtimes on any given day. The couple have a four-year-old son, George, as well as a two-year-old daughter called Gabriella.

After four years in Cabinet, “there’s been a lot of rejigging of the household spreadsheets. I’m doing a few more pick-ups and dinners.” But there is no sign of Braverman considering herself removed from the crisis she believes is facing the Conservative Party, potentially the country, over migration.

Addressing Mr Sunak’s decision to take a middle way on the illegal-migration issue, she says: “I think populist parties will gain support on the back of this. And the far Right, I’m afraid. This is why it’s so essential for the moderates, and the centre-Right party, the Conservative Party, to deal robustly and compassionately with the issue of migration. Because if we don’t, then far-Right political parties will gain increasing support.”

Asked, amid a growing backlash against Mr Sunak’s leadership, whether the party could really stomach yet another contest, Braverman insists: “No one wants a leadership contest for a very, very long time.” However, she does not entirely rule out a future attempt to run the party herself, simply insisting: “It’s not about that and I’m not thinking about it at all. I want the Prime Minister to succeed, and that means bringing forward a bill that will actually work and get flights off to Rwanda. We can’t afford to fail again and let down the British people.”