‘Who’s most right wing? I am!’: Suella Braverman’s shameless leadership bid

Washington DC is a long way to go to launch a bid for the leadership of the British Conservative Party. Perhaps, like Keir Starmer, who has just been to The Hague, Montreal and Paris, Suella Braverman thinks that being photographed abroad makes her look prime ministerial.

So the home secretary is delivering a speech to the American Enterprise Institute that might as well be entitled, “Why I Will Be the Right-wing Candidate Next Time.” I don’t know what dull title she actually gave it, but that is what she meant. She came sixth in the leadership election last year, but hopes to do better if the party should find itself looking for a new leader after election defeat.

She plainly subscribes to the conventional wisdom that whichever of the final two candidates whose names are put to the party members is seen as more right wing, will win. It didn’t apply to David Cameron vs David Davis in 2005, and it should not have applied in the last two contests. There was nothing about Boris Johnson, apart from Brexit, that was more “right-wing” than Jeremy Hunt; and Rishi Sunak was the more authentic Conservative against his former Lib Dem, former Remainer, borrow-to-splurge opponent.

But perception matters, and, given that Liz Truss has blown up the tax-cutting route to being seen as right wing, Braverman’s vivid anti-immigration position may be the next best thing.

As a campaigning device, her Washington speech was a triumph before it was even delivered. She won a clean sweep on Tuesday morning of the front pages of the three most partisan Tory newspapers, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, with her message that the UN refugee convention must be reformed.

Never mind that it is such a “right-wing” argument that it has been made by Tony Blair and his home secretaries Jack Straw and David Blunkett. They pointed out, quite rightly, that the convention was written before the era of mass travel, and that it is interpreted by domestic courts in ways that its drafters can never have intended.

They were mainly complaining for the sake of it, because they found it annoying, not because they expected to change it; but they were also playing political games with the issue, not wanting to be outflanked by the Conservatives. As leader of the opposition, Michael Howard fought the 2005 election on a promise to “withdraw from the 1951 Geneva Convention”, and to take a “fixed number of refugees” each year.

Cameron dropped the policy as part of his lurch to the centre, but it has lurked on the edges of politics, along with the idea of repudiating the European Convention on Human Rights. Braverman has that policy in her leadership platform, too, having said it during the leadership campaign, while abiding by collective cabinet responsibility in government.

She knows that neither policy is likely ever to amount to much. Rewriting the UN refugee convention would require all UN member states to agree. Nor is Britain likely to withdraw: it would be opposed by the House of Lords unless the proposal was in a winning manifesto, something from which Howard and Cameron shied away. She says in her speech that the convention is “absurd and unsustainable”; it may be absurd, yet it has been sustained for decades.

It could be that the discovery of the small boats route across the Channel will change things eventually. The rise in cross-Mediterranean migration has certainly changed the tenor of the debate in the EU. But as Britain’s adherence to both the refugee and the human rights convention is going to continue for the foreseeable future, what is Braverman’s plan – beyond empty rhetoric to secure pre-publicity for a leadership contest?

She has done nothing to stop the small boats. The only thing that might have reduced the numbers a little was Sunak’s deal with Emmanuel Macron to put a few more gendarmes on French beaches. Braverman is staking most of her political capital on a favourable decision from the Supreme Court on the Rwanda scheme in November or December.

But what then, if putting a few dozen people on planes to Rwanda fails to deter the small boats? Then I assume she will resign, saying she wanted to do more – but the prime minister wouldn’t let her. As I said in May, when there was a forgettable fuss about her asking civil servants to arrange a private speed awareness course after she was caught speeding, she survived to resign another day.

She will have to resign before the election to avoid being blamed for the failure to stop the boats, but in the meantime, she is misusing a great office of state to collect badges for her leadership campaign as if they were clubcard points.

If Sunak loses the election, and if the Tory party falls for a right-wing fairy story for a second time, it will deserve whatever it has coming to it.