Suella Braverman and the Tory credibility gap

Editorial: The home secretary wants the police to investigate every crime, no matter how small. But does anybody really believe that will happen?

Rishi Sunak may be wary of making an enemy popular on the hard right of his party, but he too has plenty of options available to him (PA)

One popular policy that the government might be wise to implement with immediate effect would be the abolition of ministerial media appearances on public holidays. Tiresome at the best of times, they are especially unwelcome at times of rest, recuperation and quiet reflection.

Traditionally a brief but precious respite from workday worries for many – gifting valuable family or “me time” on a long weekend or day trip to the seaside – there is no good reason for our bank holidays to be disturbed by Suella Braverman engaged on yet another mission to prove just how unconvincing a politician she can be: no reminders are necessary.

Unlike, say, an interview with Nadine Dorries or one of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s televised “moggologues”, the home secretary’s interventions are not just at times amusingly self-parodic but, holding the high office she does, deeply concerning.

She is not the first cabinet minister of any party, for example, to urge a vital public service to do more with less – but her latest demands on the police are unusually unrealistic.

Braverman, responding to understandable public concerns about safety in the community, wants every police force to investigate every crime, irrespective of its severity.

Lower-level offences – such as street drug dealing and shoplifting – need to be tackled, to be sure. The public can supply, sometimes, promising leads. The police should follow them up. Fine, except that the police are being given scant resources to deliver success on the scale Braverman is promising the public, with the obvious consequence that failure is guaranteed.

That this will redound to the detriment of Braverman herself seems not to deter her from her usual pursuit of immediate, if transient, political advantage.

A scrappy interview on Sky News – during which Braverman was reminded that all she has done in recent times is to try and recruit officers to replace all those sacked by her predecessors – was a typically unconvincing performance. Listening to Braverman a viewer might be forgiven for thinking that her party had been freshly elected, rather than 13 years in and in its “fag end” phase.

It was in 2010 when David Cameron and George Osborne launched their age of austerity in public services. Braverman prefers to ignore all that, even though the voters are feeling weary about Tory rule and that it’s time for a change. More immediately, the home secretary also has no answer to the wave of police personnel now quitting; and she generally exudes an air of confused, effortless incompetence garnished with a dollop of brutality. To put things bluntly, Braverman shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

The police chiefs are playing a shrewd game of appearing to be going along with the home secretary’s priorities, while allowing themselves useful wriggle room to make “reasonable” efforts. Presumably, through long and bitter experience, they know that such initiatives eventually fade away to nothing. They also know an election next year will probably sweep Braverman away before they will need to publish the relevant statistics in any case. In short, nothing much will happen.

Much the same goes for the rest of Braverman’s scattergun ideas. Tagging asylum seekers, for example, has a strong whiff of desperation rather than the smack of firm government about it. It is increasingly embarrassing that Braverman blames “lefty lawyers” and charities for her lack of impact. The problem, such as it is, isn’t lawyers but the law. And the government makes the law and still has a healthy majority in the Commons to do so.

Indeed, it has been passing plenty of laws affecting migration – to little avail. That is squarely Braverman’s fault. Her whingeing will be taken as further proof that she has nothing new or original to say about “stopping the boats”. As ever, Braverman declares she has a range of options available for her to “explore” and warns darkly that nothing is ruled out. We’ve heard that before and it doesn’t get any more believable with constant repetition.

There is more or less constant chatter about a cabinet reshuffle, and, in a rational world, Braverman would be moved to a less prominent and less demanding job. She’s proved a failure, and the prime minister knows it.

He has staked his premiership, partly, on a pledge to “stop the boats”, and his home secretary, while talking tough, hasn’t done much to help him fulfil the promise. It may already be too late and Rishi Sunak may be wary of making an enemy popular on the hard right of his party, but he too has plenty of options available to him in restructuring his administration.