There’s only one word for Suella Braverman’s speech – toxic

This was the week that Suella got serious.

The home secretary’s party conference address on Tuesday hardly showed a woman transformed. But even to a casual observer of her rise, it is more than apparent that Braverman has received some quite effective presentational coaching.

In the past, her speeches have been fiery to the point of volcanic, but her delivery has been dreadfully clumsy. There’s still something “rehearsed” about her demeanour, as when she spoke about her parents travelling across the globe and made vaguely expansive hand movements; but her gestures no longer seem random.

Her sentiments are as strident as ever, but the voice is more modulated. She leans forward to her audience, with a little intimacy, as she’s letting them in on how she’s discovered “our secret weapon” – Keir Starmer. She’s even learned how to do self-deprecating jokes, to lighten the mood, or at least as near as she can manage (“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but as home secretary, I do occasionally receive a modicum of criticism…”).

These days, Braverman voice is a little lower, and at conference we saw her speak a little more slowly. She doesn’t make much more sense, but she gives the solemn impression she is now a thinker. It doesn’t count as anything original, let alone intellectually cohesive, but she’s clearly imbibed the collected works of that professor-gone-rogue Matthew Goodwin, and passed on to her followers the usual bogus stuff about the the “privileged woke minority with their luxury beliefs who wield influence out of proportion to their numbers”.

So this week, Suella outshone Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch and became the conference darling – but of course not just because she made the effort to work on her presentation. She also succeeded because what she said was toxic – and they like toxic in today’s Conservative Party.

When Nigel Farage, once a Conservative activist himself, said he felt at home at the Manchester conference because it was reminiscent of a Ukip rally, he was right.

The Conservative Party has been “Faraged”, Ukipified, and that’s not a good thing. Instinctively, Braverman grasps this, and skilfully leverages it for her own purposes. Hence the inflammatory language.

It is dangerous. It is insidious. The undeclared Tory attitude on race – a word they prefer not to use – is that Britain is a highly successful “multi-ethnic” society, but that “multiculturalism” has failed. In other words, they have no objections to people’s skin colour (how could they?); however, they are uncomfortable with the notion of communities of different cultures living in harmony side by side.

Braverman is not a Powellite in the popular sense, but like Enoch Powell before her, she still seeks to stir up trouble and finds multiculturalism anathema. The corollary of that is… well, what is it?

We should push people to integrate into some monoculture, whatever that is? We should make them learn the language? Not wear their own religious symbols or traditional dress? What would the penalties be? What does Suella World actually look and feel like? She won’t say.

There is more than a hint of Islamophobia about Braverman. At a time when the country is faced with a rise of hate speech and extremism – not least in her own party – and an intensification of far-right violence, she talks of “the main security threat to the British public, Islamist extremism”. Maybe, but why no mention of the neo-Nazis we have to lock up? Why does she single out Sadiq Khan for special attention as being unable to fight crime? What is this claim that “we’re making sure that police are not inadvertently helping mobs to enforce non-existent blasphemy laws”?

Her much-quoted line about immigration becoming a “hurricane” wasn’t part of a rant, but rather vouchsafed as a warning, of something so terrible that you have to whisper it. It’s more scary that way. In doing so, she deftly drew up the migration drawbridge that her parents had crossed.

“Now one of the most powerful forces reshaping our world is unprecedented mass migration. The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming. Because today, the option of moving from a poorer country to a richer one is not just a dream for billions of people.”

“It’s an entirely realistic prospect.”

Except of course that it isn’t an entirely realistic prospect that billions of people are about to come to Europe, let alone Britain – but it is what her audience want to hear and to fear. They want to be frightened and to be assured that she too is terrified of this “hurricane” – a sudden, violent, unpredictable and devastating horror. They aren’t interested in the way immigration helped build Britain as an industrial power, nor how it boosts economic growth and prosperity now, nor how the absence of free movement of workers frommthe EU (legal, by the way) has crippled business and led to labour shortages, strikes and cost and price inflation.

For them – and for Suella – is isn’t about skills, points-based systems, student visas and casual work permits. It’s about it just being too high; a numbers game.

As she puts it, people care deeply about overall numbers. In poll after poll, the British public have been clear: immigration is already too high. And they know another thing. That the future could bring millions more migrants to these shores…uncontrolled and unmanageable, unless the government they elect next year acts decisively to stop that happening.

“We are the only Party that will take effective action.”

The flaw there of course is that Braverman places herself in the weird position of having to denounce the failures of this “only party that will take effective action” to have taken effective action over the past 13 years when it’s been in power.

Braverman talks not as if she was the Home Secretary who presides over this mess, but as a leader of the opposition campaigning to take over and clear it up. Maybe that’s because it’s her next job.