New recruit to Reform UK Suella Braverman gave her insider’s perspective of the death of the Conservative Party on Monday evening, stating “it is impossible to defend the party’s record in office, or even to believe in its policy for the future”.
Former Home Secretary (interior minister) Suella Braverman defected from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on Monday morning, and joined party leader Farage on Monday evening for an extra press conference to address her departure from the Tories. Stating she felt it was a defection that was some ten years in the making — since she rebelled against then-Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016 to vote in favour of Brexit — Mrs Braverman described how she’d been “abused” by the Tories and punished for trying to change the direction of the party internally.
“I was vilified and called Islamophobic by my own Conservative Party colleagues” for speaking about grooming gangs and “saying multiculturalism had failed”, Braverman said, who spoke of “my rather lonely attempts to cut immigration, leave the ECHR, tackle Islamism, and boot out failing police chiefs”.
She remarked from the headquarters of the Reform party on Monday:
As Home Secretary I told the Prime Minister that we needed to ban the hate marches, that the Met Commissioner was failing the Jewish community, and that two-tier policing was damaging public confidence. I warned him that someone was going to be killed. It was blocked and I was ignored, then I was sacked for telling the truth.
What happened two years later? Members of the Jewish community murdered on the streets of Britain. The Conservative Party should be disgusted with itself, frankly. They were murdered because of out-of-control antisemitism and complacent policing. At the time not one of my Conservative ministerial colleagues backed me up when it mattered. Now they all rush to pontificate about two-tier policing and out-of-control extremism.
…it is impossible to defend the party’s record in office, or even to believe in its policy for the future. The people, the instincts, and the factions are all the same. But now is time to recognise a deeper truth about what is happening in the Conservative Party… the right has lost the battle for the Conservative Party… but the one-nation wets have won the Conservative Party.
The Centrists control it, they populate it, and they are welcome to it. The truth is that in recent years I have found myself in a social democrat left-leaning party made up of Conservatives In Name Only, ‘CINO’. So I have come to the irresistible conclusion that the Conservative Party is not a conservative party. It is very good at performative conservatism, but we all know the truth… when they’re making the big decisions for the nation, the Conservatives will cave.
A recurring theme of the press conference was the Party’s now repeated allegations that Braverman has mental health problems, trotted out again this week when she announced her defection. Although the line was rowed back hours later, the damage was done, with figures from across the political spectrum slamming the Conservatives for the insinuation. Mr Farage called the behaviour “the last thrashings of a dying political party”.