Suella Braverman: Is the home secretary digging her own political grave? | Politics News

If the Home Office is the graveyard for ministers, has Suella Braverman been digging her own hole?

The ugly scenes that played out on the streets of London this weekend certainly haven’t made the home secretary any safer in her job.

Asked the now fabled question of whether she would still be in post in seven days’ time, the best her cabinet colleague the defence secretary could muster was that “a week is a long time in politics“.

Politics latest: Braverman makes first public remark since Armistice Day violence

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For her political opponents, the violence from far-right groups on Armistice Day can be directly blamed on Ms Braverman‘s comments.

Here, there may be a convenient blending of causation and correlation.

Some far-right demonstrators have been present around the Cenotaph during pro-Palestinian marches for the last few weekends.

Even without the home secretary’s intervention, it’s hard to see how another larger demonstration on Armistice Day wouldn’t have brought out these groups in even greater numbers.

That said, her remarks can’t have cooled tempers.

Just look at the words of a senior Met officer last night, who said one of the factors that had increased community tension was “a week of intense debate about protest and policing”.

Supporters of the home secretary say inflammatory placards and offensive chants on the Gaza protest prove this was a “hate march” that should have been banned from the start.

They also point to the lack of immediate action by the police as evidence of the force “playing favourites”, as Ms Braverman claimed in her now notorious article in The Times.

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On this, the Met has already said the violence in Westminster drew resources away from the main protest, and they expect to make more arrests in the days ahead.

But the accusation of bias also fails to appreciate the operational complexity faced by a force trying to keep the peace while hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets.

A thorny balancing act

Storming into a huge crowd who are acting in a generally acceptable way and bundling people into vans for holding up unacceptable posters would solve the hate-speech problem – but potentially create a bigger public disorder one.

For Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, the broadly peaceful nature of the march yesterday – in terms of violence anyway – will no doubt vindicate his approach, as well as the decision to allow the event to go ahead in the first place.

It’s this thorny balancing act between various harms that the government’s adviser on political violence is getting at when he says the law as it stands is more concerned with public disorder, while not factoring in the effect marches like this have on the Jewish community in the form of rising antisemitism.

A legal shift in this threshold could make it more likely that marches like the one this weekend are banned by the police on the grounds of the secondary impacts they have on vulnerable communities.

If Ms Braverman had chosen to make that point, rather than just impugning the impartiality of the police, she may not be on the cusp of potentially being sacked from one of the most senior posts in government.

Adam Boulton: Met Police chief has firmer grasp on liberal democracy than Braverman

But in setting out her stall as she did, the home secretary has complicated her relationship with the country’s largest police force and set up a political battle with the prime minister.

There again, if the Home Office is where political careers go to die, Ms Braverman may be looking not at her current political life, but the next one instead.