Suella Braverman: “I want the Conservative party to unite and go forward as one”
8 min read
While DexEU colleagues David Davis and Steve Baker resigned over the Prime Minister’s Brexit vision, Suella Braverman decided to stay put. The eurosceptic MP believes the party should unite around the “pragmatic” Chequers proposals. But how has the former ERG chair become so at odds with her fellow Brexiteers on the issue? She talks to Emilio Casalicchio
When David Davis and Steve Baker quit the Brexit department in protest at the Chequers deal Theresa May hammered out with her Cabinet in July, fellow minister Suella Braverman was expected to jump with them. Reports even emerged that she had resigned along with her colleagues, but as the dust settled, it became clear she had decided to stick it out.
Whether the stories were the result of fevered speculation or whether No10 had in fact pulled the junior DExEU minister back from the edge remains a mystery. Braverman is tight lipped on the issue – saying simply that Chequers is a “pragmatic proposal”.
But the question remains as to how a passionate Brexit supporter – one who for a short period chaired the fevered European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative MPs – is able to sign up to the Chequers plan. “For me, on the big issues of Brexit the boxes are ticked,” she tells me in her compact office on Whitehall. “It’s detailed, it covers goods, it covers services, it covers security... and it’s wide ranging. It sets out our blueprint for what our economic partnership looks like. I can work with that and it moves the negotiations forward.”
The view is a far cry from that of her former ERG colleagues, who have waged a furious anti-Chequers campaign since May presented the deal. Now led by Jacob Rees-Mogg – the most courteous enforcer in Westminster – the group insists the blueprint leaves the UK under the yoke of the EU and must therefore be dead in the water. But Braverman will not be drawn on the ERG’s demands. “We are all in the same boat,” she says. “We are all Conservative Members of Parliament. We are all supporters of Brexit. We are all passionate about our prospects outside of the EU and I share that excitement with them.”
She refuses to say whether the current ERG approach of pitting itself hard against the Prime Minister, and even making threats on her leadership, is constructive. “We are in a democracy and we’ve got a vibrant climate for discussion and debate and of course people are going to have ideas and different ways and varying proposals,” she says. “I think that’s just a sign of our healthy democracy.”
Asked whether the ERG outriders should lay down their swords and back the Chequers plan as she has done, Braverman drops a big hint that they should: “I want the Conservative party to unite and go forward as one. And I know that we are stronger as a party when we are united and I know that makes our nation stronger as well.”
Braverman was appointed ERG chair in May 2017, when the organisation was rallied behind May’s Brexit vision laid out at Lancaster House, as part of moves to soften their image.
“It’s important to understand that the ERG wanted her to be chair at that time because we were working so closely with the government and we didn’t want to look threatening,” ERG steering group chair Bernard Jenkin tells The House.
“She was much more cautious than Steve Baker – she doesn’t quite have the boldness that Steve has.”
He adds: “She was a relatively new and inexperienced member among a lot of what one might call big beasts, and I think she got a lot of respect from a lot of people because of her emollience, intelligence, acuity and ability to deal with people.”
Braverman admits she was not necessarily a Brexiteer before she was elected to parliament in 2015 – although she says her 10-year career as a barrister gave her “a sense” that she did not like Britain answering to a foreign court. She wants the big picture gains from Brexit – ending free movement, ending ECJ jurisdiction, striking new trade deals and the like – but the minutiae of the customs mechanisms or the Northern Irish backstop appear not to rile her in the same way as some of the more hardline Brexiteers. It has been claimed that ERG members blame her for failing to sufficiently tackle the plans for a Northern Ireland backstop that were brought forward by the government last December.
Braverman was appointed a minister at DExEU in January. Most pro-Brexit Tories who spoke to The House were sympathetic of her position on Chequers and felt it was better to have more believers in the Brexit department. “It’s always a dilemma for people – whether to stay in government trying to influence it from the inside or come out like Boris and David Davis and Steve Baker did,” says Grassroots Out founder Peter Bone. Fellow veteran Eurosceptic Bill Cash says: “She’s a good lawyer, she understands all these things. As with Dominic Raab, or anybody else who stays in the government in relation to Brexit, they have to obviously accept the argument on the Chequers deal and that’s the position. It’s their choice not mine.” Newbie MP Ben Bradley, who resigned as a Tory vice-chair over the Chequers plan, tells us: “Part of me feels better to have her in there as she shares my view, ultimately.”
But others are less forgiving. One ERG member says: “It’s incredibly disappointing that she didn’t follow through. All we can gather is that she obviously thinks her position is more important to her than defying the leadership.” They add: “It does seem as if she’s selling out, that’s what it looks like from the outside. She seems a shadow of her former self in parliament now – she’s not as talkative, not as bubbly, she has her head down a lot more, so she’s either feeling guilty about her decision or the pressure in the department is getting too much.”
Jenkin takes a pragmatic view. “Every Brexiteer in the government gives credibility to a policy that has no support,” he says. “But on the other hand, if that policy is to change, there needs to be people in the government to help change it.”
He adds: “I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t quit over the Chequers deal. There are other Brexiteers who stayed in the government. She’s a very new minister, she’s very early in her career – it’s an entirely rational decision on her part. I can see from her point of view that other people were making compromises, so should she.”
Braverman certainly is in the early stages of a career trajectory that has been in fast upward motion. She says the past three years – in which she has gone from new MP to minister in the most important department of the day – have been “the most exciting of my life”.
But her backstory foreshadowed a likely political rise. She served as president of the Cambridge University Conservative Association while she was reading Law at Queen’s College, and she later went on to do a masters in European and French Law in Paris – where her Conservatism was reinforced by the power of the big state and the trade unions in France.
She became the Tory MP for Fareham in 2015 after an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Keith Vaz in Leicester East in 2005. Throughout the period she worked as a barrister; an ideal training ground to be poring over the intricacies of post-Brexit legislation in the grand corridors of the Cabinet Office. “I don’t think my dad, given his life story, would have ever believed it was possible that a child like his would have been serving Her Majesty’s Government,” she says, proudly.
Her political outlook was shaped by the experience of her parents. Her father arrived in the UK in the 60s fleeing “oppressive and draconian” laws in Kenya, while her mother came from Mauritius and became a nurse and Tory councillor. Braverman says it was their love of Britain and its values that reinforced her zeal for Brexit. “They have such a warm, hopeful, big, optimistic view of what our nation is and what we can achieve within the world,” she explains. “I know that we can even be a bigger player on the world stage – we are not a middle-ranking, average country – we punch above our weight.”
Her Conservatism was reinforced after her father lost his job as a timber broker when she was 11-years-old and struggled to find other work. “I really saw how it took our family to breaking point, how it really changed my father as a man,” she says. “It was an epiphany moment in my life when I realised you can’t assume things are going to always work out. You’ve got to prepare. You’ve got to take responsibility for how you react to difficulty. It is within your gift to change outcomes and to change the course of [your] experiences.”
She adds: “We can choose to point the finger at others and be victims or we can choose to try and change situations and make the most of them.”
The maxim is the code by which Braverman has approached the Chequers deal: better to be inside trying to shape the situation than outside angrily pointing the finger with the rest of the ERG. But whether or not her former allies on the Tory backbenchers rail against her embrace of pragmatism, Braverman shares their hope of a brighter future outside the EU. “I’m an unapologetic optimist about Brexit,” she says. “And I’m sure that our best days lie ahead because of it.”
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