Why did Rishi Sunak reappoint Suella Braverman? Her decision to back him rather than Boris Johnson was probably the most decisive endorsement of the recent campaign – this might well have been done with the understanding that she’d be Home Secretary.
If so, it would have been an understandable trade. She had been a Johnson uber-loyalist and if even she was not backing his return, her support for Sunak was the biggest symbol of the game being up for Boris Johnson. Her reappointment drove her critics wild and she has become the new lightning rod. Her performance in the Commons yesterday showed her doubling down. If people want to depose her, she said yesterday, then: ‘Let them try’.
Braverman’s critics say she is ungovernable, a verbal flame-thrower. Her supporters say this is precisely what’s needed: language and an attitude that matches public concern over the small boats crisis.
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