Rishi Sunak’s challenge to steady his governing Conservative Party after damaging local election results was laid bare Monday when Home Secretary Suella Braverman staked her claim to succeed him as party leader.
(Bloomberg) — Rishi Sunak’s challenge to steady his governing Conservative Party after damaging local election results was laid bare Monday when Home Secretary Suella Braverman staked her claim to succeed him as party leader.
Braverman — a darling of the Tory right — warned against high levels of immigration, railed against “experts and elites,” and branded identity politics as “illiberal,” saying Conservatism “has no truck with political correctness.” Her prize was a standing ovation at the end of a 40-minute speech at NatCon UK, a conference organized by the Washington-based Edmund Burke Foundation.
The speech, which Braverman laced with her back story as a second-generation immigrant, highlighted the maneuvering within the ruling party as senior Conservatives eye who might succeed Sunak if he loses a general election that’s widely expected next year. The Tories shed more than 1,000 seats in local votes this month and after trailed the opposition Labour Party by a double-digit margin in national surveys for months.
“The local elections have emboldened pretenders to the Conservative crown,” Salma Shah, a former adviser to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid said in an interview. “The home secretary is making a blatant attempt at positioning her credentials.”
Sunak has faced a steady drip of criticism in recent weeks, especially from the party’s right. There’s been disquiet on housing policy and the high burden of taxation, and last week, he drew opprobrium from Brexit-backing Tories when he ditched a promise to scrap all laws dating from the UK’s membership of the European Union by the end of the year.
That led former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg to compare him to the Borgias, a renaissance Italian family that became a byword for immorality. While Rees-Mogg also acknowledged that the party would be “toast” if it ditched another leader after cycling through five since 2016, some Conservatives seem to be vying to shape the party in the future.
‘Stop This Decline’
Over the weekend, former Home Secretary Priti Patel blamed “bad decisions” and Tory “infighting” for the poor election results and said her party had to “stop this decline.” Without naming Sunak, she lamented that his ascent to power without a vote of the party grassroots had undermined trust.
If that weren’t enough, Sunak’s immediate predecessor, Liz Truss, is visiting Taiwan later this week to deliver a speech that’s likely to clash with the prime minister’s more nuanced China policy.
On Monday, Braverman hit many hot-button issues as she sought to appeal to the Tory grassroots, including an attack on the “radical left” and a jibe at Labour Party leader Keir Starmer for his stance on trans people. She drew loud applause while mocking his comment this year that 99.9% of women “don’t have a penis,” with a joke that she couldn’t rule Starmer out from running to be his party’s first female leader.
Given that her role includes responsibility for immigration policy, her comments on that topic were particularly revealing. The government, she said, needed to deliver an economy that was “less dependent on low-skilled foreign labor,” as outlined in its election-winning manifesto from 2019.
She warned that high immigration levels threaten the “national character,” even though Britain has depended for decades on waves of immigration to fill jobs in health care, hospitality and agriculture. Braverman, whose own parents are of Indian origin and emigrated to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s, drew criticism last month for trying to justify a new police initiative by blaming “British Pakistani men” for preying on “young white English girls.”
Sunak spokesman Max Blain said the prime minister’s office had been aware of the home secretary’s speech and that she represents the government’s views.
The prime minister may be “simply too weak” to stand up to Braverman, said Jennifer Cassidy, a lecturer in diplomatic studies at the University of Oxford. It could also be that “he shares these ideals and values, or third, he knows culture wars and divisive rhetoric is the key to electoral success,” she said.
But Housing Secretary Michael Gove tried to downplay divisions. “It’s a sign of our party and our broader movement that is helpful, that you can have debate,” he said at the same conference on Tuesday.
Braverman’s speech was received warmly by the conservative audience. Under current rules, in any party leadership contest, she’d have to convince enough Tory MPs to back her before a vote of the party’s wider membership. Rivals would likely include fellow cabinet members Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly.
“If Rishi Sunak is going to get to the next election, he will have to discipline a party with an ambitious cabinet, nervous backbench and ideologues,” Shah said. “None of his numerous predecessors have managed it.”
–With assistance from Lucy White and Ellen Milligan.
(Updates with Gove comment in 13th paragraph)
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