Suella Braverman has played a blinder. Unlikely as it seems, she’s the new Enoch Powell

When the home secretary uttered the word ‘invasion’ in the House of Commons, she saved her political career

Whether she realised it or not (and it’s perfectly possible that she had no idea what she was doing) when Suella Braverman uttered the word “invasion” in the House of Commons she saved her political career. She played a blinder. I noticed she looked down at her notes as she was igniting the bombshell, as if activating a pre-meditated defensive line, but that may be fanciful.

It worked for her, though. She outraged the opposition, a substantial portion of her own party, some of her fellow ministers and of course decent people everywhere. Disaster? No. It has made her less – rather than more – liable to be sacked by Sunak.

She has cemented her reputation as the hard woman of the hard right, uniquely willing to speak the language of the voters; and to be speaking up for those deeply fearful of the arrival of so many asylum seekers by these irregular routes.

Braverman, despite everything, is now basically unsackable – whether we like it or not. It’s bad for a civilised society, and bad for desperate refugees looking for safety, but from that purely selfish point of view, she did very nicely out of her defiant, inflammatory, reckless afternoon performance in parliament. It would take incontrovertible evidence, probably from a Home Office whistleblower, that she explicitly lied to the Commons for her to be crowbarred out of her job.

Imagine if Sunak – who you can’t imagine using the word “invasion” – decided to ask her to leave and, say, put Robert Jenrick or even some other hard right figure in her place? Sunak, in the earliest, most crucial stage of his premiership, would have made his implacable enemies on the right even more suspicious.

Don’t forget that, pitiful as it was, some 18 MPs voted for Braverman in the leadership contest before last. On the backbenches, during her ordeal, she enjoyed some robust support from the likes of Sir John Redwood, Sir Edward Leigh and Lee Anderson; as well as the silent backing of her old email pen friend, Sir John Hayes. She also has some of her old comrades in the European Research Group who have her back.

They’re far from typical but the prime minister and chancellor Jeremy Hunt will need their support with the programme of “eye watering” tax hikes and cuts that form the base of their project to restore the public finances. What these dinosaurs think matters much more than Yvette Cooper or Ed Davey. There are enough of them in today’s fractious, undisciplined Tory party to strangle the Sunak administration at birth.

As their unofficial leader, I imagine Braverman would be only too happy to oblige, as we witnessed when she ran the ERG and caused trouble for Theresa May. She would be just as powerful, if not more, as the leader of an unofficial backbench bloc as she is as home secretary. She’d be running a party within a party larger than the Lib Dems. Sunak doesn’t want or need to living in fear.

More to the point would be the reaction of the Tory membership to the removal of Braverman. They matter more than ever, and they are very unhappy. They resent the fact that they never had a vote on Sunak becoming leader this time, having rejected him before. He’s not widely loved by them, after his “backstabbing” of Boris. They’re an unforgiving bunch.

These Tory members are the people, lest we forget, who foisted Liz Truss on unwilling MPs and an unenthusiastic nation with fantasy economics. They would still take Boris Johnson back in an instant, and Braverman is already their conference darling.

They, or at least a very substantial body of them, agree with her that far too many people in Britain are on “Benefit Street”; they also believe that the country is being invaded; that there’s been a conspiracy of silence about immigration – and they share her dream of seeing a picture of a plane load of refugees taking off en route to Rwanda.

They trust her to move heaven and earth to deliver that Christmas present to them, and generally to look after their interests. They would not be overly upset to find out that she’d stopped migrants being relocated in hotels in “Tory areas”, as is the rumour.

Braverman is a modern-day Enoch Powell. This might be strange and ironic, seeing as Powell was campaigning against the (entirely legal) settlement in the UK of Asians expelled from Kenya and Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s, such as her own family.

Yet Braverman is born in Britain and is as much entitled to be a modern day Powell as anyone else, and her reception on the right of her own party confirms this. So does the fact that she’s Nigel Farage’s favourite Tory. Lose her, and Sunak loses his main defence on his right flank to the likes of Reform and abstention.

Like Braverman, Powell was an awkward colleague for successive leaders, and eventually, after some increasingly outspoken remarks and the “inflammatory” “Rivers of Blood” speech, with its “invasive” overtones, the-then leader, Edward Heath, threw Powell out of the shadow cabinet. (That was in 1968, by the way, around the time that Braverman’s family came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius).

After that point, Powell become a hero of the Tory grassroots, and an even bigger nuisance for Heath at party conferences, in parliament and in the media. Funnily enough, it was Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, as it then was, where Powell caused the most serious difficulties for Heath and the party leadership, just like Braverman is now over the ECHR and visa policy.

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Half a century ago, Powell and his small band of xenophobic rebel “anti-marketeers” were the equivalent of Braverman and the ERG today. Powell used Europe and migration to run a perpetual unacknowldged leadership campaign. So is Braverman. There is a slightly unhinged quality to them both. The parallels are surprisingly strong.

From what I have seen, so is Braverman – and will continue to be a powerful figure in that same way as Powell was in the party, and for the same reason: that she is an extremist, not in spite of that fact.

Postscript: eventually, Powell left the Conservatives in 1974 on the issue of Europe and advised people to vote Labour in the general election because they were promising a European referendum.

Heath lost. Powell thus wreaked his revenge on Heath for sacking him six years earlier by helping push Ted out of Downing Street, never to return. I wouldn’t put that sort of trick past Braverman. She’s just as dangerous.