My blog

Tag: Suella Braverman

  • Suella Braverman and the Art of Ministerial Sacking: Part II

    Christopher Jackson

    Sometimes it’s your privilege as a journalist to call events precisely wrong. Yesterday, some minutes before Suella Braverman was fired by Rishi Sunak, I published a blog here explaining why Sunak wouldn’t do exactly that.

    Humbling though it is to be faced with a political reality diametrically opposed to the one you thought you were living in, I would still argue that Sunak has made a mistake. He seemed relieved at the Lord Mayor’s banquet last night, but it was the look of someone who has asserted himself when he’s not used to doing so, and finds belatedly that he’s enjoying it. Sunak is now dangerously exposed on his right flank, and faces an immediate potential trigger of that situation tomorrow should the government lose its appeal on the Rwanda issue.

    His reasoning also seems petty. The main logic for the firing is that “the Prime Minister was sick and tired of it”. Suella Braverman has obviously stretched the bounds of Cabinet responsibility and been an irritant. But Sunak must also be aware that everybody around that table, with the possible – but not definite – exception of the newly returned Lord Cameron, would like to be in his job this afternoon if at all possible. To suddenly break out in anger about this looks like an immature reaction to an unchanging fact of high politics.

    One sympathises to an extent. The far right of the Tory Party can indeed be very annoying: their mode of expressing themselves is frequently hyperbolic; they often act as though the British people would rise up en masse behind them if only Boris Johnson were made the absolute monarch of the nation; and they sometimes seem to have forgotten that reality is complex and admits of no easy fixes. But to hope to nudge them to one side is wishful thinking.

    When I’m playing chess I might very well be slightly annoyed to have a group of pawns in a poor position, or a knight underdeveloped – but they are my pawns and my knight, and I need to take them under proper consideration as part of my strategy. They are an aspect of the only thing which matters: the facts of the board.

    There are signs that the Chief Whip was charged with assessing the power of Braverman to cause problems in the event of her sacking. According to The Mail, only six MPs were prepared to defend her to the hilt. We shall soon see whether the Chief Whip Simon Hart got his maths right or not – but a lot would seem to depend on his having done so. Sunak has taken the view that the prospect of better government without Braverman is sufficiently appetising to risk a noisy revolt.

    When we say a politician is gambling, we don’t usually say it in admiration: what we usually mean is that they had no good options but at least managed to make this series of things happen. In this case, we will have – as night follows day – a series of letters going into the 1922 Committee, and it is only a question of how many. When the only certain outcome of a gamble is an upping in the process designed to bring about your own removal, it might be argued you’re not in a great place.

    Secondly, it is all too late to change what Americans call ‘the electoral math’. Very often, politicians today seek to rearrange the furniture and even do some light dusting on the proverbial sinking ship. Sometimes, feeling particularly brazen, they might fire a sous-chef, or switch around the boatswain. But its impact has to be minimal when the course of the ship is misguided, and the ship itself defective.

    The photograph of Cameron shaking hands with Sunak yesterday was interesting. Whatever one thinks about Cameron, he held the job Sunak is currently doing for six years, and if one takes away the way in which it ended, it was a time of competent party management. His longevity in that role seems to come out of a different geological era compared to what we’ve had since. He undeniably brings stature just from this fact alone. Next to Sunak, he looks like he has come to visit the current occupant from a race of giants.

    One wouldn’t wish to say, however, given Libya and Brexit, that the Cameron years marked some heyday in British foreign policy. I seem to recall, when growing up, that teachers would make you go back and do again the parts of your homework you didn’t get right the first time, and this appointment smacks a little of the desire to make good what was done poorly initially. This opportunity for revisiting is good for Lord Cameron, but arguably not so good for us if the earlier set of calamities was so considerable.

    But how good will all this be really for Cameron? Even the rosiest of estimates makes it unlikely that he will be Foreign Secretary for more than a year, and it’s more than likely that having run the country for six years, he will now enjoy a period of six months as Foreign Secretary. It can likely never amount to more than a curious footnote to his career.

    But while there are elements of foolhardiness in Sunak’s reshuffle – as there are in all gambles – it wasn’t entirely unpleasant to see him making it. There is still the sense that Sunak could be a good prime minister if a few more things were to go right, and if he were to grow in stature within the job. The country isn’t in love with Labour; the Lib Dems still hardly exist; and the SNP is increasingly a basket case.

    What would actually change the situation? There probably never has been a prime minister in such dire need of a new speechwriter. Theresa May wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a good orator but she at least came up with ‘just about managing’ and ‘citizen of nowhere’.

    Boris Johnson could always rely on words to connect with people, and when people talk of his charisma, I think they really mean that he could be quite funny. Leaving Truss aside as too short a premiership to discuss here, Sunak has been in position for a year without uttering a memorable syllable and it is this which has meant that he hasn’t entered the public imagination in any shape or form.

    Only if this reshuffle were to be accompanied by a new voice could it be the basis on which to build towards a respectable showing in 2024. Sunak has never really told us a story about his premiership; he has to do that now, regardless of who’s sitting round the Cabinet table.

     

  • Suella Braverman and the art of ministerial sacking

    Christopher Jackson

    To sack or not to sack. That is the question for Rishi Sunak this week and the newspapers are presenting it as a difficult decision. I’m not so sure it is, for reasons I will explain, but there are few who would want to be in his shoes.

    But then that’s also the case in relation to the financial, electoral and geopolitical state of things: essentially all aspects of his job. Given its obvious undesirability, one sometimes wonders why top-tier politicians fight so hard for the premiership: it’s like watching seagulls tussling for mouldy bread.

    Sackings can often be pivotal for prime ministers. They are tests of strength and only a problem if you’re weak in the House of Commons. Braverman has some following in the Commons but she is hardly Michael Heseltine; it must also be said that it is useful to keep one’s Home Secretary if you can, since one tends to lose them anyway. It’s probably the only job in government less enjoyable than being prime minister since it involves handling immigration and crime. Sunak therefore probably approaches this problem thinking it would be better on the face of it if Braverman were to remain either in position, or in the Cabinet more broadly.

    Sackings are also a question of timing. When in 1940, Churchill got rid of Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary and replaced him with Sir Anthony Eden, it came on the back of six months of expert internal manoeuvres. The famous May 1940 Cabinet showdown about whether to fight on against the Nazis – Halifax had wanted to sue for peace – had already shown Churchill to be in control, and uniquely capable of wielding power. The eventual sacking of Halfiax, just before Christmas and after Halifax’s ally Neville Chamberlain’s death, was the coup de grace.

    If Sunak were to sack Braverman now, it would exhibit no such mastery of timing, but give the impression of a prime minister responding to events moving out of his control on too many fronts. Braverman by necessity is at the core of the government agenda on immigration and crime, and more or less by accident is now also a touchpaper on the Israel-Palestine question.
    I’m not sure Sunak is strong enough to remove Braverman without it weakening his position still further: he lacks a General Election mandate of his own and faces dire opinion polls. In 1940, Churchill was plainly in the ascendant; Sunak isn’t.

    Cohesion at the top matters. We cannot know at this proximity to events what has and hasn’t been said around the Cabinet table, but it goes to show that a sacking should only take place if you can be sure of Cabinet and parliamentary unity afterwards. Early in Margaret Thatcher’s administration during the ‘clash of the wets’ in1981-2, Thatcher had Geoffrey Howe present the case for spending and tax cuts but was confronted in Cabinet by those ministers from high-spending departments who wished to increase their own expenditure.

    These ministers, known to history as the ‘wets’ (and they are very much history), argued that Howe’s proposals didn’t show “a sufficiently imaginative and practicable response to the acute social and political problems now confronting the government”. This is the waffly parlance of the soon-to-be-defeated. Thatcher noted their disagreement and in time, sacked the lot of them.

    Here we can see Thatcher’s peculiar genius for leadership at work: it is inconceivable that she would have undertaken such a culling without an important policy at stake. Sunak, by contrast, doesn’t disagree with Braverman in any meaningful sense about the reaction of the police to the marches. Both would likely prefer the marches not to have gone ahead, both accept that there is a right to march provided there is no incitement to violence (which in all too many cases there has been), and they want the police to do their jobs (and would each give the police a decidedly mixed review on their recent performance).

    Where they disagree is in linguistic tone and also the procedure leading up to the publication of Braverman’s original article. While Braverman has arguably shown some disrespect to Number 10 in ignoring edits they may have had about the original article, it isn’t clear that the matter is sufficiently serious to meet the Thatcher threshold. A dismissal would therefore seem petty to those who admire Braverman – and wouldn’t have the upside of demonstrating particularly forceful leadership by Sunak.

    Sunak is usually good at stepping back from media-driven speculation and considering the facts of a situation. One of his main strengths is that he doesn’t panic. His tendency to seek further information before he makes a big decision, also makes it seem likely that he will wish to see how the cards fall on Wednesday, when the Rwanda ruling, the release of inflation figures, and a debate in the Commons on the SNP’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, are all taking place.

    Temperamentally, one would expect Sunak to wait for Wednesday than to risk all by going for the jugular on Tuesday and firing her beforehand. If the government wins the ruling the following day – he has essentially a 50-50 chance of doing so – it might look odd to those outside the Westminster bubble for him to have fired his Home Secretary the previous day.

    The former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has said that prime ministers tend to win this sort of confrontation. He is a politician-turned-newspaperman who is egging Sunak on to fire Braverman, and it is not for us to say that he is craving drama for the sake of it. It’s true that prime ministers are often in a stronger position than they realise in these matters – until one day they aren’t. Howe, removed by Thatcher eventually, was the one to wield the knife when she did eventually resign. But she achieved an enormous amount before that point because she always knew where she was going.

    Sunak is temperamentally more similar to Tony Blair who brought Peter Mandelson back into the Cabinet after sacking him. He also to some extent resembles David Cameron, who preferred not to rock the boat, and rarely got into unnecessary spats with ministers. Well-dressed, well-mannered, I sense that order is important to Sunak. With the electoral position somewhat perilous, it might be that he has far more to lose than to gain by removing his Home Secretary.

    And if he does? It’s impossible to know what chain of events that may spark, the extent of support for Braverman and the flimsiness of Sunak’s own position. But it would herald a change in Sunak’s approach to government and be somewhat out of character for him to do so. This is the unique pressure of high office, and this is the week where we will see how this particular occupant handles it.

     

    Update: this article was published at 7.03am, about an hour before Braverman was sacked.