Suella Braverman departs as UK home secretary

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Suella Braverman is understood to have departed as UK home secretary after Liz Truss cleared her diary and called off a planned visit amid desperate attempts to save her premiership, the Guardian has been told.

There is speculation that Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary who strongly backed Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race, will replace Braverman in another sudden revamp of Truss’s government.

The prime minister, who had been due to visit a defence technology company on Wednesday afternoon and do a TV clip, spoke to Braverman at a meeting in the House of Commons, sources said.

No 10 denied that Braverman had been sacked but did not respond to requests for clarification about the nature of her departure.

It would be another massive blow to the prime minister’s authority after she was forced to sack Kwasi Kwarteng and rip up her economic strategy to avoid a markets meltdown.

Sources claimed the move was at the behest of the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who has taken over control of the government’s economic response following Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, but who they claimed was now “pulling the strings”.

Braverman was an outspoken critic of Truss’s U-turn on the top rate of tax, suggesting she thought the prime minister had fallen victim to a “coup” earlier this month. Some Tory MPs on the libertarian right of the party have been left dismayed by the prime minister’s subsequent moves to ditch other tax cuts.

Braverman’s departure comes after the Home Office passed a major piece of legislation – the Public Order Act. An ally who spoke to her earlier this week said she had been “upbeat”.

Replacing Braverman with Shapps, less than a week after sacking Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor in place of Hunt, would be another sign of Truss trying to both appeal to a broader section of the Conservative party, and replacing perceived ideologues with more experienced ministers.

The home secretary, who was given the job when Truss entered No 10 in early September, was seen as a backbench and party member-pleasing choice for the role, given her robust views on immigration, law and order and culture war issues.

However, the former attorney general has been at the centre of several immediate controversies since taking over, including speaking out against a proposed trade deal with India due to her worries about it increasing immigration to the UK.

Braverman has also pledged to reduce net migration to the UK to tens of thousands a year, a target promised before and generally found to be impossible to achieve.

On Tuesday, the home secretary used a debate on environmental protests to blame a “coalition of chaos” including opposition parties and the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for supporting groups such as Just Stop Oil.

There was also speculation that the prime minister had pulled out of a trip ahead of a Commons vote tonight on fracking, which Tory whips have claimed is a confidence issue, amid fears she could lose.

Braverman has also sought to limit the number of international student visas, a lucrative income source for UK universities, while No 10 swiftly hosed down her suggestion than cannabis could be made a class A drug.

The former lawyer won the safe Hampshire seat of Fareham in 2015 and gained her first frontbench role as a Brexit minister under Theresa May in 2018, resigning over May’s proposed departure deal.

In 2020, Boris Johnson brought her into the cabinet as attorney general, in which role she became the first UK minister to take formal maternity leave.