Disappointed love lies at the heart of Reform UK’s appeal. From Nigel Farage downwards, its leading lights started out in politics as Conservatives, and discovered to their horror that the Conservative Party does not uphold conservative principles.
Rather than devote themselves to the thankless task of campaigning from within to get the party to recognise the error of its ways, they decided to march off into the wilderness and set up a pure new body to which they could feel exhilarated to belong, and from which in the first fine careless rapture they expected great things.
Before Farage, we saw the implacable intellect of Enoch Powell, demonstrating to the complete satisfaction of himself and his followers that the nation is committing suicide and Edward Heath must be destroyed.
Half a century before Powell, Edward Carson shook his fist at the treacherous British Establishment:
“why is all this attack made upon Ulster? What has Ulster done? I will tell you what Ulster has done. She has stuck too well to you, and you believe that because she is loyal you can kick her as you like.”
Today we have Suella Braverman, who feels so betrayed that in January this year she decided she must leave the Conservative Party and join Reform UK.
Her apologia is not well written: as she herself remarks, “I do not profess to be Shakespeare.” Her account reads at times like a Craig Brown parody: “Was I in fact too nice?”
But she does illustrate the disastrous dividedness of the Right, which could yet see it excluded from power for a generation.
Here she is on her time as Home Secretary during the brief, unhappy prime ministership of Liz Truss, when Braverman wished “to honour our manifesto commitment to cut net migration”, but Truss was desperate to appease the Office for Budget Responsibility:
“She couldn’t afford to upset the OBR and wanted me to publicly signal support for more immigration…couldn’t I just help out…So I was the problem now. My bitter feeling was – she’s guilting me into a massive compromise because she’s fucked up with the OBR.”
Braverman holds Rishi Sunak in contempt – “the spreadsheet whisperer, the immaculate technocrat, the Goldman-Sachs-prime-cut-suit-wearing avatar of Conservative managerialism” – but after a far from clear conversation with him about the need, in her opinion, to leave the European Convention on Human Rights in order to stop the boats, she backs him to succeed Truss, and is rewarded with reappointment as Home Secretary.
She duly urges him to leave the ECHR, but finds: “It was all a charade. He was a coward masquerading as a hero…was lying all along.”
In the House of Commons, MPs are not allowed to accuse each other of lying, because debate then becomes impossible, having been supplanted by character assassination.
Braverman’s relations with other Conservatives are no better. Repeated swipes are taken at Kemi Badenoch. Braverman even manages to fall out with her friend Steve Baker.
And what contempt she feels for “the cohort of centrist Conservative MPs (Wets) elected from 2010 onwards (and so selected by Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove). There were hundreds of them, all of whom appeared as perfect substitutes: Helen Whateley, Lucy Fraser, Nicky Morgan, Amber Rudd, Harriet Baldwin, Tom Tugendhat, James Cartlidge, Mel Stride… Their politics was the Boden catalogue made flesh…utterly detached from the raw struggle of modern Britain…The Conservative Party is effectively two parties in one.”
To which one may reply that it always has been. The party has known ever since the disaster of 1846 that whatever else it does, it must not split. This is the tradition of behaviour to which populists like Farage, and would-be populists like Braverman, close their eyes and shut their ears.
Their self-indulgent pursuit of cheap shots on GB News may yet end up handing victory at the next general election to so unlikely a figure as Andy Burnham.
Braverman was formed in a hard school. In the first part of her book she describes the chances of betterment which her forbears who went from India to Mauritius and East Africa were able to grasp thanks to the British Empire:
“They made choices, sometimes under pressure, took risks, endured hardship, and built futures where none had been guaranteed. In immense and enduring ways, they were beneficiaries of opportunities provided to them by the British.”
Her parents arrived in Britain with nothing, met each other here, bought a pebble-dashed house in Wembley and sent Suella to a fee-paying school, from which she won a place at Cambridge to read law, from which, after additional studies in France, and passing the New York bar exam, she became a successful London barrister.
She was not one of the cool kids: she refused to take drugs, and at an early age canvassed for her mother, who became a Conservative councillor, and a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
The story is a Thatcherite one: a hard struggle in which by natural ability and almost superhuman exertion a young woman obtains an elite education and far exceeds her parents’ achievements.
And now she finds herself sucking up to Farage. What an anticlimax. Braverman, Danny Kruger and the rest may persuade themselves they are acting from high principle, but as Disraeli is supposed to have said, “Damn your principles! Stick to your party.”
I cannot resist mentioning another book I have just come across: Who’s Afear’d? The Dorsets’ Triumph at Kohima by Christopher Jary and William Franklin.
This tells the story of the desperate fight in April and May 1944 against the hitherto all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army as it tried to break from Burma into India. Bill Slim, the greatest British general of the Second World War, realised that Japanese fanaticism in the offensive could be used against them: that because the enemy troops would never give up, they could be destroyed on a defensive anvil.
But what a fearsome battle unfolded at Kohima. The struggle was for a tennis court. It was fought at close range in terrible conditions. This book describes what the 2nd Battalion, the Dorsetshire Regiment, did, and how at last the deadlock was broken by getting a tank of the Royal Armoured Corps onto the tennis court.
One of the essential conditions for success was the support of the local Naga people, which sprang from their respect and affection for Charles Pawsey, a British official who before the war had dedicated himself to their welfare. His bungalow stood below the tennis court.
Braverman writes with understandable pride that “Mauritius had become an island in uniform” during the Second World War: “Britain did not stand alone. She enjoyed the company and support of an empire.”
This is perfectly true, but not much remembered. In 1978 Shiva Naipaul, himself born in Trinidad in the West Indies, brought out a brilliant book, North of South, about his travels in East Africa.
The British press omitted from its African coverage the Indian diaspora which had prospered under British rule and was persecuted and driven out once the British had left. Fleet Street’s account of the continent was confined to the struggle between whites and blacks.
Naipaul describes with dark comedy the tragic plight of the Indian diaspora. Many members of it including Braverman’s parents fled after independence to Britain. How little is understood of the loyalty they feel to the British tradition of freedom.
When covering Commonwealth affairs, the British press has an irresistible desire to focus on the reparations story. Comprehension is attained at the cost of over-simplification. The news desk doesn’t want much from Antigua, and what it gets had better be the same as everyone else is publishing.
Braverman feels an irresistible desire to have the necessary argument. She is a shining example of adversarial politics in action.
Of her patriotism, her love of Britain, the land of her birth, there can be no doubt, but it is a confused and in some ways disappointed love. Her contention that she is British but cannot because of her ethnicity be English stirs up arguments which she herself admits are deeply unsatisfactory: “am I who I say I am, or am I who people tell me I must be?”
In her anger with her Conservative colleagues she has unfortunately forgotten, as Farage and Kruger have forgotten, that adversarial politics works best in a two-party system, and not in a war to the death within conservatism.