The following letter was published in The New Statesman on 1 September, with one or two editorial cuts.
Suella Braverman, the only person ever to go back to the same ministerial office a few days after being sacked from it, was bound to be not “an asset to the Prime Minister, but a liability” (Politics, 25 August). A colleague said she had “committed multiple breaches of the ministerial code.” They have never been investigated. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee with its Tory majority said the leaking of restricted material which she admitted should have been punished by a “significant sanction.”
These were criticisms of a former attorney general, the government’s legal adviser who is under a special duty to help uphold the rule of law. With such a record it is unsurprising that she is attracted by the idea of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, which one of her distinguished predecessors, David Maxwell Fyfe, drafted. She says our immigration system is “rigged against the British people.” Tories are supposed to amend and improve the institutions under which we are governed, not to undermine them.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords
