Suella Braverman penned an excoriating letter to the PM accusing him of ‘betrayal’ after being sacked in the reshuffle.
DAILY MAIL
Dear Prime Minister,
Thank you for your phone call yesterday morning in which you asked me to leave Government. While disappointing, this is for the best.
It has been my privilege to serve as Home Secretary and deliver on what the British people have sent us to Westminster to do. I want to thank all of those civil servants, police, Border Force officers and security professionals with whom I have worked and whose dedication to public safety is exemplary.
I am proud of what we achieved together: delivering on our manifesto pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers and enacting new laws such as the Public Order Act 2023 and the National Security Act 2023. I also led a programme on reform: on anti-social behaviour, police dismissals and standards, reasonable lines of enquiry, grooming gangs, knife crime, non-crime hate incidents and rape and serious sexual offences. And I am proud of the strategic changes that I was delivering to Prevent, Contest, serious organised crime and fraud. I am sure that this work will continue with the new ministerial team.
As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as Home Secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of Party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities. Those were, among other things:
1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;
2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, i.e. exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;
3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;
4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.
This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you. It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister.
For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.
These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.
I was clear from day one that if you did not wish to leave the ECHR, the way to securely and swiftly deliver our Rwanda partnership would be to block off the ECHR, the HRA and any other obligations which inhibit our ability to remove those with no right to be in the UK. Our deal expressly referenced ‘notwithstanding clauses’ to that effect.
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