Suella Braverman has defected to Reform. The former Conservative Home Secretary was unveiled as the party’s eighth MP at an “Veterans For Reform” launch event this morning in London.
“I feel like I’ve come home,” said Braverman when she took to the stage, applauded by Reform figures and a crowd of former servicemen and servicewomen.
She is the latest former Conservative cabinet minister to join Nigel Farage’s ranks. Last week, Robert Jenrick, the former Housing Secretary, and Nadhim Zahawi, the former Chancellor, both announced that they had left the Tories for Reform.
Westminster has been waiting for this moment for some time. Only last week, Braverman was one of the only remaining Tories who was praised by Robert Jenrick when he defected to Reform and launched a scathing attack of the governing record of his former party.
“Today I announce that I’m resigning the Conservative whip,” said Braverman, “and my party membership, my party membership of 30 years. It’s gone. It’s over today. And because I believe a better future is possible for us, I am joining Reform UK. And I will sit as the member of parliament for Fareham and Waterlooville, representing this great party Reform UK with immediate effect.”
She said “I haven’t taken this decision lightly” and that she would explain her reasons later in the day.
“It is because of love that I’m standing here today,” she said, “I too share that love of our country. I inherited it from my parents. They came to this country with nothing in the 1960s.” She repeated the claim of other Reform politicians that: “Britain is indeed broken, she is suffering, she is not well.”
Braverman was Home Secretary under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. She presided over some of the highest levels of net migration in British history before being sacked by Sunak after publishing a comment piece in The Times about “hate marches” that was not authorised by No 10.
In an acidic parting letter to Sunak she laid out a litany of perceived failures by the then Prime Minister, telling him “you have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver”. Braverman became a standard-bearer of the right of the Conservative party. Today she repeated that critique from outside the party, saying “the Conservative party utterly failed to do the right thing for the British people”.
Like Jenrick, she is a former Tory minister whose record has been attacked by Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy. When the Afghan data leak story broke in July of last year, Yusuf said: “The government covered it up. Who was in government? Home Secretary: Suella Braverman. Immigration minister: Robert Jenrick.”
Of her record in government, she said: “I tried, I tried my best. I tried privately, politely, nicely. I can be nice. They ignored me.”
[Further reading: If not Burnham, who could defeat Starmer?]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentIt’s strange given the Reform Party’s stance on immigration, that they seem intent on an open door policy to migration from the Conservative party.
One of Trump’s famous lines jumps to mind as apt.
“When Mexico (The Tories) sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them.”