Suella Braverman: ‘Brexit isn’t a revolution – it’s a restoration’

During her leadership bid, Suella Braverman positioned herself as a Tory maverick – a firm believer in Brexit, a campaigner for low taxes, and a defender of controlled immigration. Once her campaign ended, she backed Liz Truss because, she said, she wanted to join a team that would change things. When Kwasi Kwarteng announced he would abolish the 45p rate of tax on highest salaries, she was delighted. And when Michael Gove and others rebelled against the plan, she accused them of orchestrating a ‘coup’.

We meet a few hours after her remarks, at a Spectator event at the Tory party conference in Birmingham. She’s a little late, given the kerfuffle caused by a home secretary talking about a coup. ‘That word has followed me everywhere,’ she says. Kemi Badenoch, her cabinet colleague, called her language ‘inflammatory’. Does Braverman regret speaking in such terms? ‘I don’t think I’ve gone too far,’ she says. She seldom does.

Braverman, 42, has always been impatient for change. Lots of Conservatives backed free schools; Braverman set one up. She was seen as too radical (and Brexity) to prosper in the Cameron and May years, but Boris Johnson made her attorney-general in his first big government reshuffle after the 2019 election. She tells me that the Brexit vote showed that the country has an unsated hunger for change.

‘The people cried freedom,’ she says. ‘They said no to a centralised, distant, out-of-touch, ill-fitting institution that lacked legitimacy and wasn’t democratic. And that is what sums up, for me, the chutzpah and the spirit of the British people. That is what keeps me so inspired about the Conservative party.’ But she sees Brexit as a demand for change that has yet to be implemented, starting with a fall in net migration – something Truss has not called for.