Despairing Conservative MPs have accused Suella Braverman of undermining Rishi Sunak’s authority and making a bid for the future leadership of the party with a partisan speech railing against experts and elites.
The home secretary delivered a highly personal blueprint for a political philosophy to take on the “radical left” in what was interpreted as a pitch to be the right’s next candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in London.
Senior Tory MPs privately condemned her making an overture to become the party’s leader should the Conservatives lose the next election. One said: “Rishi needs to make it clear to her that she is either a team player or a backbencher.”
In an attempt to reclaim the right wing of his party, Sunak will on Tuesday urge European leaders to crack down on immigration through tighter policing of its borders, after his surprise meeting with Ukraine’s president was overshadowed by Braverman’s rhetoric.
Tory MPs have grown increasingly uneasy after a damning set of local election results and with ministers braced for a record increase in immigration figures next week, which threatens to undermine their pledge to cut arrivals.
Sunak has also faced criticism from the pro-Brexit right of his party since it was announced that just 600 of the 4,000 EU laws he pledged to revoke by the end of the year would be scrapped.
Conservative MPs were invited for drinks with the prime minister to mark the coronation in the Downing Street garden on Monday night. Sunak was expected to try to calm nerves there and draw a line under any potential mutiny.
However, MPs suggested Sunak should warn Braverman to stick to her role as home secretary and get to grips with problems in the immigration system, rather than giving her permission to undermine his leadership.
One minister said: “She’s not waiting for the election, but is pitching for prime minister now. And she’s not the only one. Being in the cabinet is no longer a collective endeavour but a position to pitch for the next job. It would be better if she and others focused on the jobs they actually had. You would think being home secretary was some side hustle.”
Another MP described her speech as “outrageous”, saying: “It was rather rich that she was highlighting the problems with our immigration system when she’s been in charge of it for the past nine months. It was all about her ambitions, not about improving things.”
A third MP said the majority of Tory colleagues were “rolling their eyes” at Braverman’s “unhelpful” appearance at the conference when she should be concentrating on tackling migration.
“She’s doing it because she wants an audience … but it’s going to take a lot more than this one speech to make her party leader. It makes me despair. She should be concentrating on the immigration figures and our strategy for dealing with them,” they added.
In her speech to the conference, organised by the rightwing populist US thinktank the Edmund Burke Foundation, Braverman commented on the need for the UK to cut back on legal migration and train domestic workers for jobs such as fruit picking.
But she began with a description of her father’s arrival from Kenya in 1968, and her mother’s move from Mauritius to train as a nurse. She said her politics, like that of her parents, was “a politics of optimism, pride, national unity, aspiration and realism”.
She said: “The left’s is a politics of pessimism, guilt, national division, resentment and utopianism. The left on the other hand sees the purpose of politics as to eradicate the existence of inequality, even if that comes at the expense of individual liberty and human flourishing.”
Braverman argued that conservatism “has no truck with political correctness”, in a section of the speech that squarely addressed culture war issues. In one of a series of attacks on Keir Starmer, she said: “Given his definition of a woman, we can’t rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister.”
She said the left was “ashamed of our history” and could “only sell its vision for the future by making people feel terrible about our past”, adding: “Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born.”
In apparent criticism of academics and other advisers in “ivory towers”, Braverman said Conservatives should be “sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts and elites who think they know best what is in the public’s interest”.
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, told his MPs the Tories had responded to their election drubbing with “a series of mad hatter’s tea parties” which were “carnivals of conspiracy and blame”. The NatCon event came two days after Boris Johnson revivalists gathered in Bournemouth in another challenge to Sunak’s authority.
The prime minister will on Tuesday meet other leaders at the Council of Europe in Iceland for talks about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but will use the opportunity to urge them to tighten the continent’s borders.
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“Every single point on each route used by people traffickers to smuggle people across our continent represents another community struggling to deal with the human cost of this barbaric enterprise,” he will say.
“It is very clear that our current international system is not working, and our communities and the world’s most vulnerable people are paying the price.
“We need to do more to cooperate across borders and across jurisdictions to end illegal migration and stop the boats. I am clear that as an active European nation with a proud history helping those in need, the UK will be at the heart of this.”
The Home Office has reportedly been given data showing a further rise in migration, with the Telegraph reporting as many as 1.1 million foreign workers and students could arrive in 2024.
Downing Street played down suggestions of a rift between Sunak and his home secretary, confirming it had approved the text of her speech and that Braverman was speaking on behalf of the government.
The prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “We want to see employers make long-term investments in the UK domestic workforce instead of relying on overseas labour as part of building a high-wage and high-skilled economy and we are supporting those industries in doing that.”
The 2019 Tory manifesto promised that “overall numbers will come down” on immigration. But next week’s figures are expected to show that more than 800,000 people arrived in the UK last year.
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, are understood to have successfully watered down an immigration crackdown on foreign students after arguing that it could damage the university sector as well as the economy more broadly.
Braverman, however, is expected to announce that one-year master’s students will be banned from bringing family members with them to the UK as part of attempts to reduce net migration.
One government source suggested that family visas had been “overused and a bit abused” by some universities to attract foreign master’s students, and that Hunt and Keegan were “happy with the landing zone” on the family ban.
The number of family members of students arriving in the UK has risen more than tenfold in four years, from 12,806 in 2018 to 135,788 in the year to December.
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