A braver man than me

It remains to be seen whether the puny Rishi Sunak will find the bottle to sack his Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, if she is found to have broken the Ministerial Code in her alleged attempts to get her civil servants and aides to help her avoid embarrassment over her recent speeding fine. 

She admits exceeding the speed limit and has now paid the fine and accepted three points on her driving licence. But the potentially damaging allegation is that she asked Home Office civil servants to find a way for her to avoid both by taking a speed awareness course instead, but doing so alone, without members of the general public. It's not clear what her problem was (other than her obvious utter contempt for the electorate) but such a request, if proven, would constitute a breach of the Code and be a resigning or sacking matter. 

Speeding, whilst reprehensible, is hardly a hanging offence - even under Braverman's cruel and illiberal regime - after all, she would be in good company when even the Archbishop of Canterbury recently fell foul of speed limits. Given His Grace's excoriating comments in the House of Lords about the immorality of her immigration policies perhaps she was trying to avoid ending up on the same course with him?

Braverman has clearly been on manoeuvres recently, touting for the top office she craves. By accepting an invitation to speak at a three-day event organised by the right-wing US think-tank, the Edmund Burke Foundation, in Westminster she was obviously setting out her stall. The organisation declares its aim as “strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western countries”. She was joined on the podium by fellow Tory troublemakers, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove.

It is widely accepted that Sunak is no great fan of Braverman's, as witness his lukewarm response to questions about her 'mishap' following the G7 gathering, but was saddled with her by his predecessor, Liz Truss. He dared not sack her, despite her abject failure to solve the 'small boats' issue (actually a humananitarian tragedy) which he has made one of the five key pledges of his premiership, due to her being the darling of his restive backbench right-wingers, who never stop plotting. 

Conveniently for him, the latest immigration statistics, due out this week, are rumoured to be highly unfavourable and these, coming in top of an inquiry into her breaching of the Ministerial Code, could give him the pretext to sack her, or "accept her resignation".  

Inconveniently for him, Braverman unchained might prove a dangerous adversary - or even more dangerous than she is as a cabinet colleague. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a maxim no Prime Minister can afford to ignore. Braverman is useful to Sunak only insofar as her failures allow him to deflect the blame for the catastrophic performance of her department across a range of issues. There will come a time, however (and that time might just have arrived), when her ministerial performance is so shockingly inept that to keep her in her place will reflect worse on his strength as Leader than losing her.

In reality, of course, he has no strength anyway; he is merely the default setting, sustained in office by the (temporarily) diminished appetite for yet another damaging Leadership contest on the part of his Parliamentary Party and membership following a series of bitter internecine feuds. He is there under suffrance and the moment he outlives his usefulness as a stopgap he will be gone. That moment is at hand - and he knows it.

While he remains in place Sunak is the convenient whipping boy for his party but when the time comes (probably within the next eighteen months) that he loses (or fails to win convincingly) a General Election, his enemies will regroup and oust him in favour of someone more congenial. But we should be careful what we wish for - that person could be Braverman.

Worse, we could end up with Kemi Badenoch or (horror of horrors) Boris Johnson redux.

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