The Conservative party “utterly failed to do the right thing for the British people”, lied to the public, and has governed without courage, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said as she announced her defection to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on Monday.
Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage again grew his stable of Parliamentarians on Monday as he announced the defection of former Home Secretary (interior minister) Suella Braverman on stage at a rally for military veterans in London. Met with an enthusiastic cheer as she entered the hall, Braverman said: “when a country has given you everything, like it has done me, you owe it loyalty. And loyalty demands honesty. And honesty compels me to say this: Britain is indeed broken, she is suffering, she is not well… I believe a better Britain is possible, and because I believe that is possible today I resign the Conservative whip”.
Braverman said “Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People don’t feel safe” and stated that Nigel Farage had the courage to lead Britain to a national renewal.
Once a high-flying Conservative government minister responsible for one of the great offices of state, Braverman was sacked from the Home Office by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023. As reported at the time, the influential Migration Watch think tank decried the sacking at the time given Braverman’s “clear understanding of the consequences of mass immigration. Her courage and determination to say what a majority of the public think will be a serious loss to the country”. As noted then, Braverman was sacked from high office days after accusing the police of giving preferential treatment to left-wing protesters, an element of two-tier Britain that Mr Farage has long decried.
Braverman said of the former Conservative government: “you see when it mattered, when we had the majority, when we had the power, indeed when we had the duty, the Conservative Party utterly failed to do the right thing for the British people”. She told the rally that her attempts to improve things from the inside had been confounded by her fellow Conservative ministers, and the Prime Minister sacked her when she attempted to speak out.
Braverman, who is part of the UK’s community of Indian-heritage migrant families who travelled with the then-British Empire to Britain via Africa in the 20th century and whose husband is a long-time supporter of Farage’s Reform, said the fundamentals of the Tories had not changed despite their rhetoric shifting. On the Conservatives now promising to take the United Kingdom out of the European Court of Human Rights — a key Reform Party pledge — she said:
… it’s a lie. It’s a lie! Half of Conservative MPs are dead against it, another group don’t even understand it, and a mere handful sincerely believe its the right thing to do. So I’m calling time on Tory betrayal, I’m calling time on Tory lies, I’m calling time on a party that keeps making promises with zero intention of keeping them. I tried my best, I tried privately, politely… they ignored me, then I tried loudly and forcefully, and then they sacked me for telling the truth.
As reported in 2023, Braverman’s time in office coincided with record-high levels of mass migration to the United Kingdom, a policy area she was responsible for as Home Secretary. Her comments today make clear her position that she was blocked from acting according to her conscience while in government.
The defection announcement came during the launch of new campaign group Veterans for Reform. During this rally spokesmen for the party decried the treatment of former troops by the UK government, which they said goes beyond neglect into actual abuse. It was stated that the party would end the now-emerging norm of British troops being hounded through the courts for battles fought decades ago while the politicians and generals who put them there never see the inside of a court room, and would put ex-soldiers at the top of housing priority lists to end veteran homelessness.
Mr Farage said of the now years-long campaign of persecution against veterans in courts of law:
…the prosecutions continue. Not just of people that did their job in very, very tense, difficult and dangerous circumstances in Northern Ireland up to half a century ago, but now they’re going for our special forces. Now they’re after the SAS, for virtually any action that took place in Afghanistan or Iraq.
The results of this are catastrophic. I have met face-to-face some of the men who are facing this misery. I have spoken to former commanders of both the SBS and the SAS and they tell me the result on recruitment is literally catastrophic. Our armed forces are something we should be immensely proud of, something the rest of the world looks up to.
The prosecutions would stop, Mr Farage said, adding that under a Reform government “for those who have been found guilty under very dubious codes of the Human Rights Act, we will grant a Royal pardon of mercy on their name”. Decrying the “outrageous” situation where illegal migrants are treated with more urgency by the government to get housing and services than military veterans, Mr Farage said: “it is time to start putting our own people, and our own veterans community first first first.”
The arrival of Mrs Braverman to Reform is the third defection to the party by a sitting Member of Parliament this month. The arrival of Robert Jenrick earlier in January may signal something of a tipping point for the Conservatives in their now years-long bifurcation into the two camps it long contained, between sovereigntist dries and liberal-globalist wets. Political analysis by the BBC conceded on Monday afternoon that “Another big beast defection shows momentum is with Reform… [Braverman’s] switch emphasises the momentum Reform are showing in draining the Conservative Party.”
Jenrick came a close second to lead the party and was something of a standard-bearer in the Conservatives for its right-wing. But the size of that right-wing — and therefore the number of remaining Tory MPs there are left to defect — is limited, given the party has spent 20 years purging its own ranks and its major electoral defeat last cut it down to size.
That Reform is absorbing the remains of the Tory right has triggered some controversy among observers who note that in some cases the defections are of politicians who were in power at the height of the Boriswave of migrant arrivals. Mr Farage has moved to address these concerns, stating that those who he accepts into Reform have shown contrition and who, in any case, bring valuable experience of the inner workings of government to the party ready for it to take power.
The official Conservative response to Mrs Braverman’s departure verged on bitter. The initial statement on the defection spoke of Braverman’s “mental health” but this was later withdrawn, the jibe blamed on a “draft version” of the statement having been published “in error”.
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