The Suella Letter Which Must Surely Spell Doom For The Feeble Sunak.

Take a look at the full, breath-taking letter.

(I do rejoice in Allison's wonderful response after the letter itself.)

Dear Prime Minister,

Thank you for your phone call yesterday morning in which you asked me to leave Government. While disappointing, this is for the best.

It has been my privilege to serve as Home Secretary and deliver on what the British people have sent us to Westminster to do. I want to thank all of those civil servants, police, Border Force officers and security professionals with whom I have worked and whose dedication to public safety is exemplary.

I am proud of what we achieved together: delivering on our manifesto pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers and enacting new laws such as the Public Order Act 2023 and the National Security Act 2023. I also led a programme on reform: on anti-social behaviour, police dismissals and standards, reasonable lines of enquiry, grooming gangs, knife crime, non-crime hate incidents and rape and serious sexual offences. And I am proud of the strategic changes that I was delivering to Prevent, Contest, serious organised crime and fraud. I am sure that this work will continue with the new ministerial team.

As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as Home Secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of Party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities. Those were, among other things:

1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;

2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, i.e. exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;

3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;

4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.

This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you. It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister.

For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.

You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.

These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.

Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.

I was clear from day one that if you did not wish to leave the ECHR, the way to securely and swiftly deliver our Rwanda partnership would be to block off the ECHR, the HRA and any other obligations which inhibit our ability to remove those with no right to be in the UK. Our deal expressly referenced ‘notwithstanding clauses’ to that effect.

Your rejection of this path was not merely a betrayal of our agreement, but a betrayal of your promise to the nation that you would do “whatever it takes” to stop the boats.

At every stage of litigation I cautioned you and your team against assuming we would win. I repeatedly urged you to take legislative measures that would better secure us against the possibility of defeat. You ignored these arguments. You opted instead for wishful thinking as a comfort blanket to avoid having to make hard choices. This irresponsibility has wasted time and left the country in an impossible position.

If we lose in the Supreme Court, an outcome that I have consistently argued we must be prepared for, you will have wasted a year and an Act of Parliament, only to arrive back at square one. Worse than this, your magical thinking — believing that you can will your way through this without upsetting polite opinion — has meant you have failed to prepare any sort of credible ‘Plan B’. I wrote to you on multiple occasions setting out what a credible Plan B would entail, and making clear that unless you pursue these proposals, in the event of defeat, there is no hope of flights this side of an election. I received no reply from you.

I can only surmise that this is because you have no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people.

If, on the other hand, we win in the Supreme Court, because of the compromises that you insisted on in the Illegal Migration Act, the Government will struggle to deliver our Rwanda partnership in the way that the public expects. The Act is far from secure against legal challenge. People will not be removed as swiftly as I originally proposed. The average claimant will be entitled to months of process, challenge, and appeal. Your insistence that Rule 39 indications are binding in international law – against the views of leading lawyers, as set out in the House of Lords will leave us vulnerable to being thwarted yet again by the Strasbourg Court.

Another cause for disappointment – and the context for my recent article in The Times – has been your failure to rise to the challenge posed by the increasingly vicious antisemitism and extremism displayed on our streets since Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of 7th October.

I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion. Britain is at a turning point in our history and faces a threat of radicalisation and extremism in a way not seen for 20 years. I regret to say that your response has been uncertain, weak, and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs. Rather than fully acknowledge the severity of this threat, your team disagreed with me for weeks that the law needed changing.

As on so many other issues, you sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself. In doing so, you have increased the very real risk these marches present to everyone else.

In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.

Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.

I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.

I will, of course, continue to support the Government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.

Sincerely,

Suella Braverman.

Allison Pearson is correct in her DT response. I also desperately hope it might be the ringing knell for the overdue death of Lib Dem Toryism.

Braverman’s letter was written in fire – none of us can doubt what a snake Sunak is.

In sacking a woman who dared stand up to shrill Leftists and dangerous Islamists, the PM has forever destroyed his reputation.

ALLISON PEARSON14 November 2023 • 8:54pm

Mr Sunak dismissed his former home secretary in a Cabinet reshuffle on Monday CREDIT: James Manning/REUTERS

Flipping heck, talk about being stabbed in the front. Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak must count as one of the most devastating epistolary verdicts ever pronounced on a Prime Minister by a sacked member of his Cabinet. Hell hath no fury like a woman used as leverage to get a man into Number 10 who then sees all the promises he made her ignored. It reads like she typed it in fire.

Conservative Party members had their suspicions that Rishi Sunak was a disingenuous, untrustworthy opportunist who lacked Conservative instincts. That’s why they called him “snake” and chose Liz Truss instead. Well, if there was ever any doubt about the man there sure as hell isn’t now.

Braverman has not merely penned a bitter rant, as some Sunak defenders are bound to claim. This is a nailed-down, factual account of how Suella agreed to serve as Sunak’s home secretary in October 2022 “despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister”. Ouch.

In other words, Rishi really needed the darling of the Right to get him over the line into Number 10, but she would only give him her crucial support if he agreed to a number of conditions. They included reducing legal migration by increasing salary thresholds on work visas (something that should have happened anyway after we were promised an Australian, points-based system) and reforming the international students route.

To make sure that Sunak followed through on his pledge to “stop the boats”  Braverman asked for a “notwithstanding clause” to be put into the legislation which would exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Human Rights Act and “other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue”. She didn’t want to leave the snake any wiggle room. There was also a commitment to issue guidance to schools that protected biological sex and safeguarded single sex spaces. Guidance that we have repeatedly been promised since the spring of this year; the PM must have splinters in his posterior from all that fence sitting.

Anyway, there is no way Suella was going to let him duck out of their arrangement. She says she wrote “numerous” letters to him on the key subjects, demanded meetings with the PM and his team and worked out ways he could deliver his promises. “Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.” You have to love that deliciously wounding “your distinctive style of  government” – in other words: evasive, backside-covering and bloody useless.

The truly damaging thing for the Prime Minister is not Braverman’s sense that she has been used by a duplicitous man nor her personal disappointment. It’s that Sunak was also reneging on promises made to the British people in the 2019 election manifesto and during the 2016 EU referendum.

One of the most devastating charges, as far as the public is concerned, is that the PM had no intention of “doing whatever it takes to stop the boats”. Warned by Braverman that they would need to come up with a Plan B if the Supreme Court were to reject the Rwanda plan (ironically, we will know the verdict on Wednesday), she says the PM “opted instead for wishful thinking as a comfort blanket to avoid having to make hard choices”.

Those of us who have long suspected that many in our Tory Government simply don’t have the stomach to fight the bien pensant elite and deliver what the people voted for can now see it confirmed in black and white. Braverman accuses Sunak of irresponsibility, magical thinking – “believing that you can will your way through this without upsetting polite opinion”.

The sting in the (snake’s) tail is that, even if the Supreme Court does give the go-ahead to Rwanda on Wednesday, Braverman says Sunak agreed so many compromises in the Illegal Migration Act that the deportations will face endless delays and legal challenges, propelling us back into a frustrating waiting game.  Another con.

The final page of the letter is one of the most damning things I have ever read. It casts Fishy Rishi in the most appalling light as he fails to rise to the challenge of dealing with the “increasingly vicious anti-Semitism and extremism displayed on our streets since Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of 7 Oct”. As I read, I found myself sharing Suella’s mounting anger and screaming frustration.

“I have become hoarse,” she says, “urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism and intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion.”

What a woeful picture she paints of a weak, vacillating man who is unable to show leadership, to confront the very real problem of extremism and radicalisation, an existential threat to the British way of life. “You sought to put off tough decisions to minimise political risk to yourself,” she says, and then, with one final twist of the knife, “in doing so you have increased the very real risk these marches present to everyone else.”

A Prime Minister who doesn’t put the security of the public and the nation first does not deserve to be Prime Miniser. That is what Suella Braverman’s letter is really saying, and it is profoundly shocking. It lays bare, in the most electrifying way, the power struggle between two senior politicians and the vast deceptions practised on a trusting population; something we rarely glimpse because the rules of the boys’ club forbid this degree of raw, intimate disclosure.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but Braverman’s is piping hot, a vindaloo of vituperation for the British Indian whom she sees as having betrayed not just herself, but Conservative voters. I must say I found it entirely convincing. The letter casts a whole new light on the turbulent events of recent weeks. With the sacking of Suella Braverman, the Chapocracy is firmly in control again. The four great offices of state are occupied by privately-educated men, two of whom have no electoral mandate (a whopping rejection over Brexit in the case of David Cameron). Now, I have no objection to boarding school boys (I live with a lovely exemplar of that breed), but the chummy distribution of plum posts does grate.

Meanwhile, the bully boys continue their pattern of chucking women with strong views and Conservative principles  – Priti, Liz and now Suella – overboard.  One Tory donor emailed me in disgust about “a pervasive misogyny” in the party’s higher echelons. Like me, the woman donor was “incandescent” about Sunak sacking Suella.

My, how delighted Rishi must have been to be shot of that wretched woman nagging him to keep his promises. But it was a huge mistake. The shrill Leftist progressives and the Islamists who pose a threat to our way of life now know they can bulldoze a weak Tory PM into dumping the only minister who dared to call out their ideology for the poisonous hatred that it is.

And, no, however much they briefed against her, Suella Braverman was not to blame for “inciting a mob of far-Right hooligans”. Far from causing the weekend’s clashes, she warned this would be the outcome if the Metropolitan Police and their dripping wet Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, continued to appease the pro-Palestine marchers. Failure to ban the deeply disrespectful protest on Armistice Day triggered a few hundred young white, working-class men to travel to London. If their capital and its monuments were not being defended by the police, then they would have to defend it themselves.

I would never condone violence, but the fact is millions of us look on with mounting dismay as London becomes the backdrop for hostile sentiments that were summed up by one large banner on Saturday. It read: “You’re Either On the White Side of History (illustrations of a Union Jack, US and Israeli flags) or the Right Side of History (Palestinian and Iranian flags).” Bear in mind, the British taxpayer was footing the bill for the policing of those anti-Western banner-wavers who got away with blatant racism. It’s called a “hate crime”, but only if you vote the wrong way.

No wonder Suella Braverman was at the end of her tether with the PM. A week before, she tweeted: “The sick, inflammatory and, in some cases, clearly criminal chants, placards and paraphernalia openly on display mark a new low. Anti-Semitism and other forms of racism together wth the valorising of terrorism on such a scale is deeply toubling. This can’t go on. Week by week, the streets of London are being polluted by hate, violence and anti-Semitism. Members of the public are being mobbed and intimidated. Jewish people in particular feel threatened. Further action is necessary.”

Every word she wrote was true, of course, but nothing was done. Now we know why: Sunak was frit to offend anyone. Compare and contrast with Germany where Nancy Faeser, the interior minister, this week implemented a formal ban on any groups or demonstrations that show support for Hamas “a terrorist organisation whose aim is to destroy the state of Israel”. Danke.

After the entirely predictable fracas on Armistice Day, Sunak said: “I condemn the violent, wholly unacceptable scenes we have seen from the EDL and associated groups and Hamas sympathisers attending the National March for Palestine … That is true for EDL thugs attacking police officers and trespassing on the Cenotaph, and it is true for those singing anti-Semitic chants and brandishing pro-Hamas signs and clothing… All criminality must be met with the full and swift force of the law.”

It was wrong of the PM to draw an equivalence between the rather pathetic group of white working-class lads I saw on Saturday and the vast army of anti-Semitic protesters calling for a “ceasefire” that would mean Israelis putting down their arms while Hamas murdered them. If you believed the media reports, you would think that “far-Right yobs” had invaded the Cenotaph. They did not. I was about 300 yards away and, apart from a few beer cans being thrown after the two-minute silence, things were respectful and dignified. What I did witness was police officers “kettling” the white demonstrators on the approach to Westminster Bridge in a provocative manner. Had they tried the same strong-arm tactics with the pro-Palestine marchers – although they wouldn’t have dared, of course – there would have been a much more violent backlash. 

Yet, within hours, the myth was written that the EDL and football holigans had caused all the trouble while the march by the coach-loads from Bradford and Batley had “passed off peacefully”. Unluckily for the police, people now have cameras on their phones which gave the lie to the official version. Numerous videos showed aggressive, frightening behaviour by Muslim protestors – including a poppy-wearing couple being threatened at Victoria Station (where poor Michael Gove was pursued by a mob) and one young woman shouting: “Death to all Jews!” In a particulary disgraceful episode, pro-Palestine thugs assaulted white people in Trafalgar Square while riot police stood by and watched. This was the Met’s response: “Having reviewed this footage, it’s clear the reaction of the officers was not what we would hope to see. We are making further enquiries to understand what happened.” Don’t bother; we know exactly why they didn’t intervene.

The police were quite clearly “playing favourites” with protesters, as Suella Braverman wrote in her controversial article for The Times. Our former home secretary was spot on when she claimed the Met employed a “double standard” by taking a softer approach towards “pro-Palestinian mobs” than Right-wing and nationalist protesters. I saw it with my own eyes and it was really disturbing. Islamist groups, organised in several cases by Hamas supporters, are allowed public “assertions of primacy” because they heavily outnumber the coppers who are instructed to “take steps to avoid community tension”.  More like: “Do nothing while offences are being committed and rely on photos to try to arrest the miscreants later on.”

The political class knows that they are sitting on a powder keg caused by mass immigration and a failure of multiculturalism that Braverman outlined in a recent speech in Washington DC. While white working-class lads undoubtedly caused a fair bit of aggro, and some deserved to be arrested, the rush to pin the blame on them was a handy way of distracting the public gaze from hundreds of thousands of people who live in this country but profess their allegiance to a genocidal death cult in the Middle East while terrifying British Jews.

Suella Braverman was prepared to speak these unpalatable truths. A proud Brexiteer, her patriotism and desire to protect Britain was never diluted by the nervous liberal platitudes murmured by the cowardly custards around her. Talking to people of all backgrounds at the Cenotaph, I found widespread support for Suella and her robust brand of Conservatism. It was what people voted for in huge numbers in 2019. What on Earth would they be voting for today after the sacking of a sirloin-steak home secretary and a skimmed-milk Cabinet reshuffle of Centrist Dads allegedly designed to shore up support among disenchanted voters in the Tory shires?

Braverman has, in effect, declared war on the Prime Minister. The Chapocracy will be coming up with lines to defuse her grenades; she’s an emotional woman, you know, highly ambitious and bitter. Well, I stand with Suella. By sacking her, and ignoring the policies on which they were elected, the Conservative Government has declared war on its voters, the few of them that remain.

On Tuesday, the New Conservatives group of around 20 MPs said: “The Conservative Party now looks like it is deliberately walking away from the coalition of voters who brought us into power with a large majority in 2019.”

After Suella Braverman’s incendiary letter, we know that’s the truth, don’t we?  What complacency, what arrogance to bank our votes and pretend to be “stopping the boats”, delivering a full Brexit, reducing immigration and guidng against pernicious gender nonsense in schools when you are not minded to do anything of the sort.

Richard Holden, the new party chairman, was on the radio on Tuesday and insisted: “The Conservative Party is a broad church.”  No, I’m afraid not, Mr Holden. The Conservative Party is a church in which the choir has been sectioned off because true believers were singing too lustily from the wrong hymn sheet and the choir mistress has been sacked becaue the vicar thought she had too much faith and was showing him up.

Rishi Sunak’s reputation will never recover from these revelations, and nor does it deserve to. I am furious with him and I won’t be alone. He should leave for the US as soon as possible; he’s been using and abusing the electorate just as he used Suella Braverman. Already plummeting in popularity, the Prime Minister’s nickname is Sunk – well, he is now. DT.