Suella Braverman fries the Blob’s kidneys like no one else. Some have only to hear her name for their foreheads to start hooting like the German casemate klaxons in The Guns Of Navarone. EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
The reaction is convulsive, their certitude absolute: anything Mrs Braverman says or does must be wicked and must be repelled.
The more they kick up a palaver, naturally, the more airtime Mrs Braverman receives, even while enemies accuse her of turbocharging rancour. Dispassionate observers, caught up in all this, may understandably feel a little baffled.
The Commons day opened with an urgent question about police operational independence regarding the Remembrance weekend’s Palestinian-solidarity protests. Mrs Braverman feels the police should ban these ‘hate marches’ (as she calls them). In an overnight newspaper article she suggested the Met had a reputation for going soft on leftie protesters. Labour MPs felt Mrs Braverman was interfering with police autonomy.
Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, was her normal serene self; that is to say, she stamped her feet, bulged her eyeballs and spoke with the staccato outrage of a teenager who has just heard that bubble gum is rising in price.
Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, was her normal serene self; that is to say, she stamped her feet, bulged her eyeballs and spoke with the staccato outrage of a teenager
Suella Braverman was guilty of ‘the crudest and most partisan undermining of respect for the police’, bellowed Ms Cooper
Yvette’s eyes could have been two pub pickled onions. Shades of Marty Feldman. White-coated medical advisers in the press gallery made silent annotations on their clipboards and concluded Ms Cooper should be examined for raging Suella-phobia and encouraged to take a rest-cure at a sanitorium at Interlaken.
Mrs Braverman was guilty of ‘the crudest and most partisan undermining of respect for the police’, bellowed Ms Cooper, jumping about like a nudist on hot sand. ‘She is deliberately inflaming community tensions in the most dangerous of ways. It is highly irresponsible and dangerous.’
As she detailed her reservations, Ms Cooper shook her pixie hairdo so hard with indignation, it was a surprise she didn’t suffer a nasty case of whiplash. Punk rockers pogo-dancing at a Sex Pistols concert in the 1970s seldom joggled their heads that much. The ‘British tradition of policing’ was for officers to follow the law and the evidence, ‘whatever politicians think’, added Yvette, biting the air in front of her nose. Mrs Braverman was ‘picking fights with the police to get headlines’. And for that matter, where was she?
Why was she not in the Commons chamber to answer this urgent question herself? Ms Cooper clearly suspected Mrs Braverman of dodging scrutiny.
‘It might have been wise to ask that privately,’ replied Chris Philp, the policing minister who had been sent along to represent the Government. ‘She is with a close family member who is having a hospital operation this morning.’ Oops. But whereas such a reply would normally lead to some awkward toecap-gazing, this time it met with thrown-to-one-side gazes that smacked of scepticism. Many in the House thought Mrs Braverman’s hospital tale was an invention.
Mr Philp is a blurty performer. His hands shook, his elbows twitched. Asked if Downing Street had issued its blessing to Mrs Braverman’s newspaper article, he replied: ‘I do not have any visibility on that at all.’ This possibly meant ‘no, but don’t get me into trouble’. Sir Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) noted the paucity of Conservative MPs in the chamber to champion Mrs Braverman’s case. When it comes to delicate judgements of support, Sir Chris, the great Y-fronts model, is sans pareil.
Another Labour frontbencher, Lucy Powell, later called Mrs Braverman ‘unhinged’. Speaker Hoyle asked for more moderate language. Parliamentarians are not allowed to doubt one another’s sanity, presumably on the grounds that if they started they would never stop. Ms Powell withdrew the slander.
Ian Paisley (DUP, North Antrim) was unpersuaded by Labour’s attacks. He recalled that Ms Cooper and others happily tore into the police’s operational independence at the time of the Sarah Everard murder and indeed urged ministers to ‘be more brutal on the police at that point’.
He discerned a certain amount of ‘hand-wringing hypocrisy and pant-wetting’. Mrs Braverman was ‘right to say it as she sees it’.