Suella Braverman’s sacking could see her embrace her villain arc
Sacked, at last.
It says a lot that chances are, you know who I mean without me even having to say her name.
Nicknamed ‘Cruella’ for the divisive, hostile and downright dangerous rhetoric she spouts, Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been removed from office by Rishi Sunak.
Braverman’s firing is the culmination of a string of comments of late, each one more shockingly malicious and controversial than the last – and that’s coming from someone who once said it was her ‘dream’ to see asylum seekers flown to Rwanda.
In the last six weeks alone, Braverman has said that rough sleeping is a lifestyle choice, that being gay and fearing persecution shouldn’t qualify you for asylum, and that hundreds of thousands of people on the streets calling for a ceasefire are ‘hate marchers’.
She also, bizarrely, suggested that the police play favourites, going soft with so-called Islamist groups while disproportionately cracking down on the far-right, a theory thoroughly debunked by the grim events at the Cenotaph on Saturday.
And yet, while I’m glad to see the back of Braverman given her grim record, I do fear for the future now that she will be ‘unleashed’ on the back benches.
It’s no mean feat to establish yourself as the most reckless and extreme Home Secretary among a recent lineup that contains the likes of Priti Patel, who falsely claimed 70% of those coming to the UK on small boats were economic migrants.
Or Sajid Javid, who spearheaded a bill that can quietly remove the British citizenship of anyone without notice, and of course the architect of the hostile environment herself: Theresa May.
But Braverman seems to have managed to take the top, or rather bottom spot, with her blatant and ceaseless attempts to demonise people and, deliberately or otherwise, emboldening the far-right.
This is precisely the reason why today is not a reason to celebrate.
Am I glad she’s gone? Yes. Am I convinced this is the end of her political career?
Not in the slightest.
As our politics drifts increasingly and worryingly to the right, politicians seem to me to be desperate to make a name for themselves by engaging in a race to the bottom, treading on minority groups on the way down.
Suella Braverman is not an anomaly.
More from Platform
Platform is the home of Metro.co.uk's first-person and opinion pieces, devoted to giving a platform to underheard and underrepresented voices in the media.
Find some of our best reads of the week below:
A Gazan doctor details what life is like for him now and how he's forced to operate on patients without anesthesia.
Jax is mum to Ollie, a little boy with cystic fibrosis. After having hope that Ollie would get access to a potentially life-altering drug, Jax reacts to NICE's latest guidance that would prevent her son from receiving it.
Lawyer Kacey Keeton tells the story of her client Rocky, who has been behind bars for 30 years and faces the death penalty for the murder of his neighbour. It's a crime he says he didn't commit.
And finally, mum Terri-Ann shares the heartbreaking words of her 7-year-old son that inspire her to stay sober.
She is a symptom of a political and social environment that spews the kind of hate she has become synonymous with.
That hate won’t leave with her sacking, and nor will she simply vanish into obscurity.
Firing Suella Braverman has given her what she desperately craves: a cause, a flag for her supporters to rally round, a noble hard-luck story.
She is now a martyr in the eyes of her supporters, one of whom, Andrea Jenkyns, said Braverman was ‘sacked for speaking the truth’ and accused Rishi Sunak of ‘caving in to the left.’
That means the former Home Secretary can now firmly establish herself as the last standing bastion of bravery amidst a sea of people she previously described as the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.’
And her ex-boss Sunak is hardly a member of the wokerati himself – he already embodies a troublingly rightwing brand of politics – but the prospect of Braverman establishing herself as a victim of his apparent progressiveness or cowardice to speak the truth is frankly nothing short of horrifying.
This now makes her a mascot of everything the extreme right holds dear – she is hysteria and panic about immigration and multiculturalism in human form.
We don’t need to look far back to see exactly who Braverman seemed to be pitching her comments to.
In her criticism of the police’s decision to allow Saturday’s pro-Palestine march, she stands accused of platforming the far-right thugs who disrupted memorials and attacked police.
Perhaps the most terrifying prospect of all is that what we have seen of Suella Braverman thus far has been the sanitised, restrained version – a minister with responsibilities and teams of advisers to let her know when her hate was tipping a little too far, even for her fan base.
What we face now is Suella Braverman unleashed. Uncontained.
On a mission to establish herself as the cure for what certain sections of the country demand – and that is even more dog whistle, divisive politics, even more stoking of the far right and an acceleration of the seeds of discord she has planted in the heart of our society.
If the recent vitriol we have seen from her has been problematic then what we are about to see is going to be even worse.
Her sacking might be welcome, but it’s certainly not a reason to get too optimistic.
The poison of modern British politics created Suella Braverman – and her firing isn’t going to make that better.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
MORE : My name is David Cameron – I received his hate mail
MORE : Victim of Waterloo hate attack tells how racist thugs were ‘driven by hate’
MORE : How David Cameron could channel a grim-faced Tory from 100 years ago in new job