Suella Braverman on imposter syndrome, 'breaking up' with the Tories and why she’ll never go back

0:00500 orders a month was manageable. 5 ,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days.

0:38Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse, the Spectator's politics show. I'm Tim Shipman, the political editor of The Spectator, and today I am joined by Suella Braverman, ex-Tory reform heavy hitter, spokesman on education, and now author of this book, Patriot. I'll be honest with you, it surprised me a great deal. It's one of the best written political memoirs I've read in many a moon, and it is full of really quite punchy views and an interesting personal story as well. So, Suella, welcome. Thank you, Tim. The thing that strikes me reading all the early part of this book is that you've been sort of searching from your younger days and then through the medium of your political career for a kind of sense of belonging.

1:21You start the book with this thing where you're talking about where are you from? And when people are asking you that, They want to know about your sort of racial background. There's this strength of striving constantly to find your place in the world, to find your place at school, at university, and then, you know, in your career as well, with some setbacks along the way. Lots of politicians seem to have this. Do you recognise this in other politicians? Do you feel that's what got you into politics? Well, that's kind of like, I feel like I'm in therapy. That's about nine questions. Perhaps we should bring in a couch instead of it.

1:55and not very comfortable chair. What a deep question. And I think you're right to highlight on this sense of a bit of a feeling of being a misfit. I use that word, actually. At school, I felt a bit disorientated for a while, not really knowing what was happening or where I was, and a bit out of sorts, I think. And I have felt that to a degree, actually, throughout my career. I felt it at the beginning of my legal career as well. Again, I felt it was a very subjective feeling of being maybe an imposter, imposter syndrome or feeling out of place culturally. You know, I was surrounded by these erudite, eloquent, witty barristers who were so persuasive.

2:41I mean, that's what we do as barristers. And in my early days, I felt unworthy of the role and my place. I don't, on merit, fairly and squarely. But I don't think that was, that is not to describe the profession in that way. It's not elitist. It's actually one of the most meritocratic professions that is out there. You are judged on how well you work, how good you are for your client, what your outcomes are in court. And if you're good, you'll get more cases, regardless of what school you went to, what colour your skin is. And I sense you don't necessarily think the same is true in politics, because in my experience, politics is full of people with imposter syndrome and people who ought to have imposter syndrome, but don't.

3:21And it feels a bit like you felt sometimes that you were running up against that latter group, particularly in your days in the Conservative Party. Yes. And actually in the Conservative Party, that's the first time I felt most kind of class conscious, actually, where there were, I think I say it about David Cameron, it's three, no fault of his own, but we're from the same country, but from different worlds. When I first met him, He had this extreme level of confidence. He seemed to have a knowing ability about where he was going. And everything seemed, the world of politics seemed to have been very easy for him to navigate.

3:58And he was just on a kind of one way, uninterrupted ticket to the top. And a lot of people in the Conservative Party are like that. They are raised for high office, actually, by their parents and by their communities. And so I did feel very conscious of that in the early days. But I didn't hold that against David Cameron. No, but since I've, I mean, I got to know you when you took over the ERG, essentially. As long as I've known you, you've always had this kind of inner core of kind of steely determination. Where does that come from then? I mean, I look at some of your sort of family background that you write about very eloquently in this difficult relationship with your father.

4:35Him and your mother, you know, having a lot of arguments and that sort of thing. Him not always being terribly supportive. a lot of politicians seem to have they lose a parent or they have a difficult background that they either want to escape or to prove something because when you get into parliament you say your dad was there and was sort of very supportive but I sense a little bit that what went before that might have been what spurred you to get there in the first place is there is there some truth in that definitely I think that I was really driven by wanting to prove the doubters wrong and in part that included my dad actually because we did fall out and again in the book i'm not quite sure whether it was just the natural friction that arises between a teenage girl and her dad or whether it was because of the kind of life-changing experience that he went through and our family went through of him losing his job yeah he he became unemployed during the recession in the early 90s from previously being the breadwinner and quite a kind of reliable uh kind of house proud man who was very able and proud of his job to becoming someone who didn't have anywhere to go in the mornings and no one valuing him and feeling quite broken.

5:46And he himself had his morale broken by unemployment. There's a great line in this book about two different sorts of poverty. Just share that because I think it's absolutely spot on. Yeah. I mean, there's a kind of poverty that breeds a level of shame. And I think that my, you know, and I don't plead. I mean, what you say is people who've been in poverty for basically since the day they're born that develop often develops a kind of hardness and an ability to kind of battle through but if you've been successful and then lose that which is what sounds like what happened to us and my dad yeah i think um the shame can be very very disempowering and debilitating and i really saw that with my dad so he kind of his morale was broken his spirit was kind of broken by unemployment not having anywhere to go having no earnings or income, being dependent on his wife for the first time, not being able to provide for his family.

6:39That really attacks a man's sense of masculinity, actually. It put strain on my parents' marriage. A huge burden was placed suddenly on my mum. And she, you know, I describe a moment in the book, I kind of see the weariness etched into her face from, you know, she used to have very lovely soft hands and would sing and, you know, be very light. And suddenly, almost overnight, she became a very world-weary woman, battling against the systems and battling against the bills and struggling to pay the mortgage every month, fighting. Is this where it comes from? You got it from your mum? Because it feels to me like you're a politician that's been battling against the system and the bills, not those sort of bills, but legislation you didn't like throughout the Conservative government.

7:28But your worldview, I think, is formed quite early. And a lot of it comes, I think, from your background. You know, you've obviously got migrant relations in your background, but there's this strong sense of Britishness that comes through and the values. You're, I think, a Buddhist yourself, but you talk about Christianity being one of the sort of foundation stones of Britain. You talk in this book about the empire not being all bad. Everyone's now telling everyone that it's an unremitting evil. Just talk a little bit about that because it feels to me like you feel that migrant communities are missing something if they don't embrace that, but also a little bit like it's sort of, if you come here, it's a bit impolite if you don't at least understand some of that stuff and kind of embrace it to a degree.

8:13Well, that's definitely the kind of attitude that my parents instilled in me. They came here with a real sense of gratitude and indebtedness, dare I say. You know, my mum came here as an 18-year-old girl recruited by the NHS and she, you know, her future in Mauritius looked very laid out for her by her very traditional father. She was destined for an arranged marriage and, you know, having children and a kind of island life. And she found that too claustrophobic and she wanted to study a bit more and do something else with her life. And a way out of that kind of sense of oppression was to take that offer of work from the NHS and start her life in the UK.

8:56My dad was kicked out of Kenya, effectively, upon Kenyan independence. And the Asian community found themselves isolated, without opportunity, and his family dispersed. And he was given a lifeline, really, of British citizenship to come to the UK. And they came here, therefore, with, you know, they felt lucky that they had got a way out, particularly my dad. I mean, the violence, I talk about some of the violence with the Mau Mau in Kenya, which was unthinkable. And again, people say, oh, 1960s London must have been hostile and racist and skinheads and, you know, awful things. And when I put that to my dad, he says, well, it certainly wasn't worse than what I encountered or saw in Nairobi in the 1960s with the Mau Mau and beheadings and violence and horrific things.

9:50So, you know, I think it's all relative. Yes, there was a level of hostility. We're not going to deny that. Times have really evolved. And, you know, many people in Britain will have not seen a non-white face in person. and they wouldn't be used to numbers of people coming into the country. But what I think was very different then compared to now is that there was a very strong sense of unity. The numbers were much smaller and people coming in really did kind of throw themselves into integrating and being part of British life and not questioning it, not trying to undermine it, definitely not trying to harm it.

10:26That was kind of unthinkable then. But now we've got very high numbers of people coming into the country. The notion of British citizenship has been wholly devalued. And people come here in many cases wanting to take, just take, and in some cases wanting to actually do us harm.

11:01and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com, code podcast. Taxes and fees apply.

11:20Just let me ask you about citizenship, because one of the things that mildly surprised me was that you seem to accept in this, the view of some of those ethno-nationalists that you're not English, but you are British. and there's a sort of difference there because some people further to the right than you are sort of saying, well, Rishi Sunak couldn't possibly be English because he's brown. They might take the same view about you. I don't know. In a sense, you seem to be sort of saying there's a point there, but it's the British values that kind of are what we should focus on and bring people together.

11:49Yeah. It's never been controversial for me to describe myself as a British Asian and categorically not English. I never questioned that until recently and Rishi Sunak himself says he thinks he self-identifies as English. I take, I guess, a more conservative approach to identity, ethnicity and citizenship. And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, yeah, someone can be born in England, they can speak English, they can support the England football team, and yet they may not be ethnically English. I think it's OK to say, yes, there is a defined specific group of English people who have been here for centuries.

12:30There is a lineage, there's an ancestry, there's a connection. We've been here since the French invaded and took us out. Well, that's true, since the foreigners got in. And actually, why is it we've made it so that the English people seem to be the only group of people on the planet who cannot assert their specific and personal identity? And I find that quite strange. If I were to be born in Japan, looking as I am and composed as I am, I wouldn't be able to call myself Japanese. And I don't think that would be controversial, actually. But yet in England, the dogma of multiculturalism, that's where it comes from, and a liberal approach to culture has meant that people like Rishi want to take a very laissez-faire liberal approach to questions of ethnicity and identity.

13:15anything goes. Everybody's welcome. Come here. If you feel English, you're entitled to call yourself English. I think that's where we're going wrong. We've eroded the sense of Englishness and that's had a really bad effect on what we define as Britishness, such that it has been devalued. And I don't think it's wrong to say we should assert the English people, the Welsh, the Scots, and a unifying vision of civic patriotism in the name of British. And this is where we get to your brief now on schools and all that sort of thing. You clearly think they ought to be doing things differently and asserting the sort of Christian heritage, respect for the flag, that sort of thing.

13:56And that's what's needed to sort of bring that together. Just tell us quickly what you would do if you were education. I think that out of my own experience, I say, I think in the book, the place I really fell in love with Britain was in my school, in the classroom, when my wonderful teachers taught me the richness and beauty of the English language through our great literary icons, or when I was taught beautiful war poetry or the heroism of World War II in history. that's where my heart stopped and I saw Britain for all its greatness and that has been a lifelong seed that those teachers planted in me the hymns that we would sing on a weekly basis are etched on my heart the Christian festivals it wasn't a Christian school but we would always mark harvest festival every year and we'd always celebrate and mark Christmas and Easter and I think we're losing that in a lot of our schools.

14:48And that's why these days, I'm more worried about a very militant left wing politicised teaching labour force, which is actually indoctrinating many of our young people into feeling ashamed of British history, feeling that our great historic writers are too white. For example, I need to be more diverse on the curriculum. Teaching our children that open borders is the only acceptable viewpoint to accept and anything else is racist. Teaching them the British Empire was evil and, you know, feeding them a curriculum that is wholly unpatriotic. So no wonder we have a large proportion of our young people feeling that our country is a racist, evil country and who would actively refuse to fight for our country if we were under attack.

15:40I think that is profoundly worrying and it's starting in our schools. And that's why in reform, you know, some of the things we've talked about, the Conservatives have dismissed it as silly, but I actually think it's really important. Every flag, every school should wave the national flag. Well, symbols can be important, can't they? Symbols are hugely important. There are probably more schools waving the Palestinian flag these days than waving the national flag, the Union Jack. In law, our schools should actually be of a largely Christian character. And yet many schools don't apply that or don't abide by that obligation.

16:15They opt out and there's no enforcement of it. It's in law. Why is it actually enforced? And so waving the national flag, singing the national anthem, showing our children what patriotism looks like. It's what the Americans do. It's kind of the one thing, you know, they're a huge melting pot of a nation. But, you know, you salute the flag, you thank the veterans. And, you know, you go to any sports match and that's pretty common. And they do it in schools as well. Exactly. And they have a stronger sense of patriotism. America, I was in India a few years ago. And again, in their schools, they're waving the flag.

16:46On their highways, it's festooned with flags. Not on national festivals, just because they love their flag. And they're loud and proud about it. And we need a bit more of that in this country. Now, what kind of, it seems to me, radicalised you as a politician? Because I remember talking to Robert Jenrick, who's at university with you. And he said, oh, she was quite pro-EU at university. and then along comes the referendum and you basically, I think that's the moment where you kind of became the politician you are today. Just tell us a little bit about why you had that transformation, what it was, but also what on earth do you make of Andy Burnham just reopening all this now?

17:22Yeah, well, listen, he's exposed himself to be yet another disingenuous, cynical politician who will make promises and say what he needs to say to get elected, but the minute he's in office will... Because he told the people of Makerfield, oh, I don't want to reopen all of that. Exactly. When he was seeking their votes in, I think, 70 % leave seat of Makerfield, he was very careful to say, no, I respect the result of the referendum. We're not going there. A few months into the job, feet under the table, his true colours are revealed and he's now exposed as the Remainer that he always was, the person who never supported Brexit and would like to actually take us back in.

18:02It's nothing but disgraceful, frankly. It shows how much contempt he holds the British people with. It's undemocratic. And it would be a disaster for our country. Well, every single one of the options that he's outlined would involve freedom of movement and throwing the border open. And I think migration was the thing that got you there, ultimately, wasn't it? Yes. A sort of sovereignty over migration. Yes. So I came into Parliament in 2015, David Cameron, kind of agnostic, just the general mainstream view on the EU, not really questioning it, having grown up in it. I'd been a lawyer, so I was used to applying EU law.

18:38I'd had a misgiving about the EU legal system because of my work on immigration. But generally, I thought, well, that's the way it is. It's never going to change. I didn't come into Parliament as a Eurosceptic. I came in, as I say, largely nonplussed about it. And the referendum and the first great betrayal, really, of the Conservative government, David Cameron's renegotiation radicalised me, I guess, if you could put it that way. And the fact that he sold it to be fundamental reform, when it was all the time, very different to that. It was a tweak, really. The veto, the emergency break was conditional on the other countries agreeing.

19:19It would only have stopped benefits for inward migrants. It would have had no effect whatsoever. And yet he wanted to hype it up as you know the best of both worlds. I mean even here he hyped it for about 48 hours once he denounced it after that. Right, right. That's not working, we'll go to Project Fear on the money instead. Yes exactly and yeah I'm honest in the book I kind of initially was pretty blasé about it. I thought well listen I'm here, I'm part of David Cameron's cohort, he's the Prime Minister, he's done very well in the recent election, yeah I trust him, I'm just going to support him and didn't think further about it.

19:51Then I started looking into it and it was the local people in Fairham. And listening to them and literally being out argued by very straightforward, sincerely held beliefs about the UK's place in the world, sovereignty and control of our borders was irresistible. And a lot of those old paleo sceptics looked at you and thought, oh, this is quite interesting and useful. And they took you under their wing and got you involved. And when Steve Baker went into government, you took over the ERG. I think you once said you were groomed by the ERG. That conjures up lots of disturbing images, doesn't it?

20:32But I guess, you know, it was really... So I voted leave and I felt, my goodness, this is the most, the biggest kind of, you know, I'm here as a goody two shoes. I'm not a rebel. I'm not here to cause trouble. and I found myself rebelling within my first year. That was not the plan. And knowing that it would probably have adverse consequences for my career and my promotion prospects, which every Tory MP cares about. And I was suddenly rebelling. And then I thought, OK, well, I've rebelled. And then surprisingly, Vote Leave won. And I thought, OK, right, you know, it's going to get done. I can switch off from this issue of Brexit, which is causing me a lot of conflict.

21:11And then Then the summer of 2016, Theresa May became prime minister and started very quickly making a dog's ear of it. And I suddenly, by the autumn of 2016, woke up again and I thought, oh, my goodness, I've assumed the prime ministers of this country are competent enough to deliver and do what they say. If only you'd been a journalist. Right, exactly. I should have had more chats with you back then. And suddenly in the autumn of 2016, it looked like we were rerunning the referendum again. Like, we still had to stay in the customs union. It looked like Theresa May didn't know what she was doing.

21:44And I was genuinely scared. And that's when I sought out Steve Baker and found kindred spirits, wise voices, veterans of the Eurosceptic cause. And really, you know, I learned from them. They did take me under their weight. Once you've kind of rebelled once against the leadership, it can become a habit. But I sense that was sort of... So that's what radicalised you. is also what made you fall out of love with the people in charge. And then, I mean, we could go through, you eventually find your way into government, first at the Brexit department, then under different prime ministers as Home Secretary and dealing with, you know, Attorney General as well.

22:20But the second half of this book is really the story of how you desperately tried to get the Conservative Party and its leadership to see sense on a whole range of issues. A lot of which, Kimmy Baden-Ock would kind of say now, they've come around on though you recount in here that that wasn't always where kemi bade not positioned herself but where do you want to start i mean you were you were an early sort of opponent of wokery and the trans issue then as attorney general i think you had this issue with the statues that feels like a big moment for you one of your achievements you know one of your main achievements in government but just tell us what it's like trying to deal with a kind of i mean i I think a lot of the Conservative MPs or ministers that I was speaking to at the time would have agreed with you on this stuff.

23:10But they had a kind of approach that was, well, we might upset people if we say so. And then there's a sort of fundamental lack of, I mean, I think you call various of your colleagues cowardly in this book. Sunak, certainly one of them. And it feels again like you were that outsider who was desperately sort of crying into the wilderness and very frustrated that you couldn't get people to see sense. And even if they could see sense, not getting them to do anything about it. What did you learn about the sort of genius of politicians, but also getting stuff done in Whitehall and how easy that is?

23:43Well, what I learned was that you need political cohesion in a party for things to get done. And, you know, it's very easy for lots of people to say, oh, it was civil servants stopping you from doing things. Actually, in many cases, definitely on, say, legal migration, my fight to cut visas, the civil servants were nothing but helpful. I mean, the Home Office civil servants can often, if they've been there a while, they're pretty disillusioned by everything as well, aren't they? And they'd actually quite like to get stuck into some of this stuff. I've heard that from other people who've worked in that.

24:12Absolutely. And civil servants were saying to me, you know, on legal migration and visas, we've never had this power. We've, you know, we've been working up this new points-based system. We'd love to use it properly. So they were very keen. It was actually the dysfunction in the Conservative Party. And what becomes clear, I hope, from the book, and definitely my time in the Conservative Party, is that it's two families. It's two families trying to coexist. And you've got basically the social liberals and the Remainers and the Wets, the One Nation, the Bowdoin Tories, I think I call them. Yeah, that's a good phrase, that.

24:43Yeah, and they're very bien-pansant. And they're very well-intentioned, but they are pretty detached from the regular struggles of the majority of hard-working Brits. Yeah, their dad wasn't on the dole, essentially. Right, exactly. And they haven't got an asylum hotel. around the corner from where they live. And so, you know, and then their main political philosophy is to be nice. And that has its roots in Cameron's agenda. He wanted to detoxify the Concertal Party. He wanted to get away from this nasty party tagline. And, you know, in came kind of tokenism, in came nicer politics like hugging hoodies and the huskies.

25:23And the natural progression of that was wokery in the Conservative Party and virtue signalling and a liberal approach to migration. We mustn't look racist. We mustn't tackle grooming gangs because that's going to make us look Islamophobic. We mustn't tackle the illegal migration problem because we don't want to be too harsh on these things. We don't want to cut immigration because we don't want to upset the universities or upset migrant communities, whatever it is. Theresa May, she rolled back stop and search powers because she believed the myth that the police mustn't look racist and we mustn't upset the black community.

25:59All of that has had devastating effects on the country right now. And so there's that group in the party, that big family. And on the other side, slightly smaller family and very small right now, are the kind of Eurosceptic, ERG, kind of more kind of old-fashioned Tories. And I'd put myself in that group as well. And I guess what held them together for a while was sort of Thatcherite economics, I suppose, and a bit of strong defence and security and that kind of thing. That's the sort of glue that puts those two groups together. But papered over a lot of cracks, I think you sort of say in here, you had to talk about the economy because that was the one thing that kept those two gangs together.

26:44Yeah. And one of the consequences of Cameroonism is a focus on the economy. Let's just, you know, avoid all the cultural stuff. Let's focus on the economy. And you're right, that becomes the kind of idea that everyone coalesces around. But there are people who cross-dress from both factions. So you'll get Remainers who then are tough on defence and they use their defence credentials to make them sound like they're quite robust and sound, for example. But actually, when it comes to critical issues like immigration or transgenderism, they're weak. And so I'd put Tom Tugendhat and Penny Gordon in that camp.

27:21I wondered if his name was about to pop out of your mouth. Yes, he's one of my Bowdoin Tories who was implacably opposed to leaving the ECHR, for example, but has had some kind of Damascene conversion now. So there's these two warring, I'd say warring families, tribes in the Conservative Party. And what I learned was that they are largely irreconcilable on the big issues like migration. I was trying to fight the other side, and they're in large numbers. Michael Gove was part of that tribe, I've got to say, and they were largely obstructive to any policy agenda coming from the other side. Those two families still exist in the Conservative Party, and that is why it cannot be trusted.

28:04I'm trying to get rid of all these wets, but quite a lot of them are still there. Most of the shadow cabinet are wets. So Tom Tugendhal just promoted to a senior position in her team. Helen Whateley, Victoria Atkins, Mel Stride until recently, Andrew Bowie, Damien Hines. I mean, most of the shadow cabinet would be from the Bowdoin Tory clique. What she seems to be trying to say, in fairness to her, is I'm trying to do what Boris Johnson did when, you know, the one functioning bit of Tory government, when he pushed Brexit through with a very clear line and people who didn't like it were kicked out.

28:43She seems to be trying to say on stuff like, you know, net zero and migration now that that's the line in the sand and you have to sign up to all that. And it feels a bit like the centre of gravity has shifted, even some of those, quite a few of those One Nation types. You know, as you say, Tom Tugendhat's public position has changed on some of this stuff. But I think what you're saying is you don't think it's sort of real in a sense. Correct. Exactly. And we've seen this show before. So what this division of philosophy in the Conservative Party leads to is tough rhetoric, on the one hand, to placate one group, followed up by very weak policy delivery to placate the other side.

29:23And so you get this kind of shape-shifting constantly. So Rishi will promise, and that's what you see from David Cameron Wright to Kemi Bejanog. David Cameron promised fundamental reform. It was anything but. But take us through your relationship with Rishi, though, because he brought you back as Home Secretary when he replaced Liz Truss. There was obviously an understanding. And, you know, we've seen the document that was signed. And in the book, you recount that he basically said he would do anything to stop the boats and that you would be allowed to make meaningful cuts to legal migration. How did that pan out?

29:58Just talk us through your personal experience of trying to do that. Yes, absolutely. So I supported Rishi to be prime minister on the express promise that he made me that I would be allowed to institute the changes to cut legal migration. And we set it out. I set it out on a document and he agreed to it. And there was a witness in the room. And what became painfully apparent very soon after that, and when he became prime minister, thanks to my support, was that he had no intention of keeping that promise. And how did that become clear to you? Well, I would try and meet with him on the subject.

30:33I was not allowed to have a meeting with him, with officials on the plan to cut immigration. I would write to him, therefore, countless letters. I mean, I think I wrote about 10, 20 letters to him, setting out the plan and asking for his approval for it to go to right round so that other cabinet colleagues could comment and then the policy could get approved by the cabinet and get collective responsibility blocked, largely. I resorted to hanging around his office calling him he wouldn't pick up my phone my number I had to you know the most I could get from him was so well I'm too busy talk to Jeremy talk to the other cabinet ministers and if you can get them to agree then I'll listen to you so I tried that Jeremy wouldn't talk to me sounds like he was a sort of boyfriend ghosting you almost you know maybe I mean well listen I felt very frustrated you had your date where you agreed to move forward together and then Well, definitely he made a promise to me, but it wasn't really about the promise to me.

31:32It was about the promise to the British people. It was a manifesto promise. This was not controversial. And you tried to make speeches, I think, where you were essentially quoting the manifesto. Yes. And I was told, don't say that. This was not supposed to be a radical, controversial, unsupported idea. This was just delivering our manifesto promise. And yet I was met with so much resistance from everybody in that cabinet. It was as if I was trying to propose something horrific or something illegal or something criminal. No, it was just a manifesto commitment. Were they lying to you? Did they lose their nerve?

32:06What happened, do you think? I think that there was no sincerity behind the original manifesto commitment. I don't think Boris believed in it, really, when he was Prime Minister writing that manifesto. He's a liberal on my grave. I was going to ask where you think he sits in the two tribes because he's got strong elements. That's true. Boris contains multitudes, you would say. Possibly he straddles a divide. He does in some ways. I mean, he's the kind of tragedy of Boris. You kind of believe the ideal about Boris, but you are sorely disappointed by the reality. And so you think he's this kind of Churchillian, sound, patriotic kind of Brexiteer who will cut migration and kind of wave a flag and bring an end to all the net zero nonsense, you kind of think he'll be that kind of common sense prime minister.

32:53And then, actually, the results are very different. It's mass migration, it's net zero madness, it's wokery out of control. That's the thing with Boris. All on his watch. I think I wrote in my fourth book, you know, he's all of those things and less. Yeah, exactly. It's a disappointment. It's so... I felt very sad. I was a Boris supporter and I really wanted him to succeed and it was a real tragedy that he did. Which of these were the most sort of upsetting for you? Clearly, migration as a whole, But, you know, you had the policing of statues, you had the specifics on stopping the boats, you had grooming gangs.

33:24I sense you felt that was not just a political disaster, but a moral failure as well. Yeah, absolutely. I really want, I met those women. Yeah, I mean, I will give Rishi some credit. He did support this policy proposal and we went up to Rotherham together. And that was quite something for a prime minister to give his backing as an issue and to take it serious. He'd made the promise during his election campaign and I held him to it. But after that, when it came to actually rolling out the policies, he had lost interest. And then I was basically, you know, isolated and attacked by my own Conservative colleagues for being Islamophobic, simply for talking about the problem and identifying the facts about it.

34:08These are race-based crimes. You even fell out with Steve Baker on that stuff, I think. I fell out with Steve Baker over this and he wouldn't accept the facts. You know, I went on TV and I said, listen, the perpetrators of these grooming gangs are predominantly Pakistani Muslim men. Steve, you know, flatly objected to me using that language. And he said that I was, you know, besmirching unfairly a whole cohort of people. Obviously, I wasn't. Quite a few of whom live in his constituency. Well, exactly. There's this element. Well, not upsetting the Muslim voting bloc became more important than actually getting justice for the victims of grooming gangs.

34:47That is what has plagued the Labour Party and I'm afraid that's what stopped the Conservative Party from letting me deliver justice for many of the victims.

35:00Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sync your contacts into the address book, get detailed accounting insights, and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com, code podcast. Taxes and fees apply. Now normally if I was asking you about a defection I'd be saying, oh Suella Bravman, I put it to you You tried to become leader of the Conservative Party And you failed, so you flounced off Suella Bravman, what was the key moment That forced you to make this life-changing decision?

35:47But really the question is, listening to all this What took you so long? What took me so long? Just talk us through It feels like this whole process that we've been talking about This slight sense of feeling like an outsider of the sight sense of feeling dissed by the establishment, the sense that you're banging your head against a wall with a common sense approach to a lot of these issues. And yet it feels like you sort of feel at home finally. Is that right? Finally, as I said at my defection meeting, finally I've come home. And for the first time in many years, I have been inspired and becalmed and uplifted by the political cohesion within reform.

36:28We don't have these two warring tribes, the One Nationers and the ERG. It doesn't exist. There's not a long marchers and Tory defectors thing going on. No, I don't feel that. Because some people perceive that. Yeah, some people see that. But actually, you know, listen, when Zia goes online, I look forward to his tweets. Because when he goes for my former Tory colleagues and doesn't hold back, I cheer him on because they shouldn't be forgiven. They shouldn't be let off the hook. They can't just sweep under the carpet. They're institutional cowardice. They're intrinsic failure. And from David Cameron right through to Kemi Bajanot, it might be a different face, but it's the same family.

37:12And Kemi is also very good at making big promises, very good at the performance, often coached by the master himself, Michael Gove, but will fall into exactly the same trap. I think you'll find their relationship is as cosy as you imagine it to be. Okay, fair enough. Well, Michael Gove's right-hand man, Henry Newman, is also now Kemi's right-hand man. So make of that what you will. But this is a serious question, and I asked you this in a private arena. I'll ask you it again for the cameras. I think politics has moved on a lot of the questions where you were admittedly brave and slightly out on a limb in your old party.

37:51I think a lot of people in your old party would accept a lot of what you've said now. I think, you know, the tide has turned on wokery and on some of this kind of prostrating before the sort of the campaigning identitarian politics that we see on the left now. I think what some people, and there are some in reform who would say this, I know because I've spoken to them, and certainly most conservatives would say is that you know what I'm going to say, the word tone. And you just said, I love Zia, you know, you're very Zia coded, I would say, in a way that probably Rob Jenrick isn't zeacoded. They might agree on policy, but in terms of the approach to it, and you do have this situation now with reform where they're a little bit down on where they were kind of a year ago.

38:37You're in a sort of three-way tussle. The Tories haven't been killed off. We've now got a prime minister who's offering the most left-wing prospectus that we've seen probably since Wilson. and you need some of those sort of reform curious Tory voters and some of them are a bit more decorous than the language that I guess you and Zia have used. You hate the word divisive, you hate the sort of tonal, but there's something just a little bit too much about some of what we hear from reform. Does that not worry you at all? No, actually, in short. I mean, listen, I'm not one to shy away from tough language.

39:16No, you're absolutely not. Tough language. I like to say it how it is, even if it gets me into trouble. I think Nigel's been like that for much of his career. Well, he has a bit, but actually he's quite good at sort of being avuncular. He's been a bit grumpy recently, but he's normally been quite good at sort of saying quite tough things in quite a sort of charming way. Yes, he's got that neck. I do agree with that, yes. Whereas I would say that you and Zia are a bit more... Spiky. Bang. Direct, to the point. Yeah, but he said controversial things for which he's received immense backlash and he's not given up and he keeps coming back up and saying those things.

39:55And he's actually demonstrated what one man can do to shift the Overton window on Brexit, on immigration. So I think he's a very good example of someone who's been faithful and not toned it down in a way. I can see the point you make, but I think he's been very brave in what he's talked about in politics. I think at the next general election, and I say this in the book, you know, the choice will be very stark and it will be the most consequential of my lifetime. And we'll either have, you know, five more years of socialism in some combination or we can begin to turn it around. And people on the right will need to ask themselves a very simple question.

40:37which vehicle is the most viable one to stop Labour. And there are some people still who feel that tie and that bond to the Conservative Party. They might like Kemi and they hope that, you know, the Conservative Party has learnt the errors of its ways. It's an emotional, nostalgic, sentimental bond, I would say. And at the next election, there's no time for sentimentality. The Conservative Party cannot win. It's got 120 MPs. it needs to more than double that to be anywhere near number 10. It's dead in Wales. I mean, I don't want to be rude, but you've got eight, I think, at the moment. Yeah, but listen, we won the local election.

41:16That's a facetious point. And if there's a general election tomorrow. But no, the Conservative Party, you know, is on life support in Scotland. It cannot win the Red Wall back. Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk have all gone. You know, the Conservative Party strategy has to be to win back places like Kensington and Belgravia or Lib Dem facing home county seats. That's not a formula to win the election. But even if I agree with that, need to get behind reform. But the practicality is the Conservative Party hasn't been destroyed. There does seem to be a solid 20 % for it. So to answer the question that you're asking the voter to confront, in different parts of the country, it is very likely that they will say, what is the best vehicle?

41:59And in large parts of the country, the answer to that question will be reform. and you need to make it palatable for people to vote for you. And in other parts of the country, it might be that the answer is the Conservative Party. Now, they are hopeful of getting ahead of you. You're hopeful of getting decisively ahead of them in the next two or three years or six months or whenever we have until the general election. But in all likelihood, both of these parties will still exist. So how would you feel if you need Conservative MP votes to get Nigel Farage over the line? Or, in extremis, would you be prepared to prop up Kemi Baden-Ock in Downing Street?

42:35Because, bluntly, you're going to have to do one of those things, aren't you, unless you can get a majority? I think that the challenge for reform is to persuade those people on the right who are still emotional and nostalgic about the Conservative Party to get real. And if they want to stop Labour, which should be their objective, then reform is the only game in town. But if they don't buy that argument, Are you prepared to sit round a cabinet table with some of those people, even if you're the dominant force? I'm very clear. No deal for me. I can't. Even after the election? I can't countenance working with people I fundamentally distrust.

43:13If you've got 250 seats and they've got 100, you wouldn't go into government with them and you'd let Labour put together a rainbow coalition? I don't think the Conservatives can be trusted. I don't see them as a small C Conservative party. But this is an important question. Do you actually, you would actually sit it out at that point. You would rather see Burnham, the Lib Dems and the SNP in government because you think, presumably, that that would be a failed project and that you would win a majority the next time. That's the preferred course of action. Well, listen, my preferred course of action is Nigel in number 10.

43:46No, no, of course it is. That's what everybody says. And I understand that you think that's viable and it may well be. I mean, I do think it is. Yeah, of course it is. If your prospects pick back up and you get closer to 30%, of course it's possible. But what you are saying, I think, is you would rather watch Burnham put something, cobble something together and fail than go back into government with Conservatives. I can't accept working with the Conservatives. They have lied too many times. You know what it would be like? It would be like the Conservative Lib Dem coalition. It would be like we're working with the Lib Dems.

44:17And so many of the policies, like say leaving the East HR or using the Navy to stop the boats, imagine working with the Conservatives. Most of the Conservative MPs wouldn't agree with that. So that would have to be massively watered down, which would lead to inevitable failure on the policy. Why would reform risk that? Well, I think their argument would be that they're only going to select people who would agree with that now, in the same way that Boris only selected people who would support his practice now. Well, they say that, but Kemi's just allowed the selection of Sir Roger Gale, who is the king of Remain and the Conservative Party, pretty much loathes me and people like me, and is hell-bent against leaving the East HR.

44:56And I just saw that he was recently adopted and selected as a parliamentary candidate for his seat. So what Kemi says and what Kemi does are two different things, like all of the previous Conservative prime ministers. Suella Braverman, thank you very much for your time.

45:30Order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days.