Suella Braverman is the sullen face of a Tory party devouring itself

Governing has given way to politicking since Boris Johnson

Home Secretary Suella Braverman whistled and they came: England’s finest, on Armistice Day, endowed with the spirit of patriotism, love of country, not a poppy in sight, always willing to have a go at the law.  Respectfully. Lest we forget what the day is about.

And why wouldn’t they? Braverman accused the Metropolitan Police of treating far-Right protestors harshly while showing undue leniency to those who march in support of the Palestinians. I’d call that an open invitation to Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League for a few bevvies and a fun day out.

Londoners may call the officers that patrol their streets many things. The Met is a problematic organisation at the best of times. It’s in the middle of a clean-up following repeated scandals and failures. It does a hard job in impossible circumstances. But a bunch of left-wingers is not one of them.

Words have consequences. Not in the same league as Donald Trump’s rallying cry to his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 I grant you. But the impulse for Braverman’s flame-thrower rhetoric comes from the same place: a politician using words to divide the electorate in pursuit of their personal ambition and damn the consequences.

Braverman is as oblivious to nuance as she is blunt in her approach to complex problems. She is a meat cleaver when what is needed is a scalpel.

Her piece in the Times confused traditional marches in Northern Ireland with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.  She fails to understand that the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is not a binary issue. It’s not death to Israel or death to Hamas.

But Braverman doesn’t do shades of grey. She called this weekend’s march a ‘hate march’. Protestors were ‘a mob’ and ‘Islamists’. Some of those who took to the streets may well represent the extremists who wish to see Israel driven into the sea.

But others, the overwhelming majority (families with children, single women, pensioners) just want a fair deal for Palestinians.  It’s not a position everyone supports. Some of the chanting is contentious, to some deeply offensive. But being offended is a price we pay for living in a democracy.

A Home Secretary’s job – her principal job – is to uphold public order and national security not to drive a wedge between rival groups for personal gain.

To be clear this is not about which side of the Israel-Palestine debate you’re on. Or whether you’re somewhere in the middle – as most people who follow the issue are. It’s about the responsibility of an elected government to hold the ring and ensure that all voices are heard as calmly as possible.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, will probably have to fire her. Or move her in a reshuffle. But that will be of little consequence, displacement activity by a government and a damaged party that continues to devour itself after nearly 14 years in office.

What is of far greater consequence is the relentless persistence of this administration to suborn the organs of the state for political gain. Kicking the tyres of a security operation is fine. That’s what elected politicians are for. Threatening the independence of the police is not fine.

It’s dangerous and it undermines the one fundamental principle that sets a democracy apart from a dictatorship: the separation of powers, the basic idea that none of us is omniscient and therefore none of us should be omnipotent.

The civil service, the army, the police are arms of the state. They answer to elected politicians who in turn answer to the voters. They need to be supported in doing their job. If they don’t do it well then they can be replaced. But a Home Secretary who accuses the police of prejudice simply undermines the public’s confidence in that force.

The dark thread that runs through successive administrations since 2019 when Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister by the Tory membership, is a desire to bend the rules and the law to achieve a political end.

It’s a long and depressing list: proroguing Parliament; making it harder for vulnerable people to vote; restricting judicial reviews; attacking the judiciary. Law-making, says the judicial think-tank Justice “has become less transparent, less accountable, less inclusive and less democratic.”

There’s a reason for this. The rot started with Johnson. He was incompetent. He was a liar. He was arrogant. Number 10 was plainly dysfunctional under his leadership. The hair-raising accounts at the Covid inquiry from his own appointees suggests a man who, in the absence of a plan for the country, was determined to steamroller his way to success. That culture still runs deep.

If you’re a Tory through and through and you bemoan the loss of the party’s stature as one of the west’s great organising political entities I recommend leafing through Rory Stewart’s “Politics on the Edge,’ a brisk and illuminating canter around Britain’s rotten political culture.

Stewart is the quintessential High Tory: Eton, Balliol, ex-soldier, ex-minister, erudite, clever, worldly. During the leadership election (which Johnson won) to replace Theresa May he was asked by one MP why he thought he was a Tory.

“I said I believed in love of country, respect for tradition, prudence at home, restraint abroad” he replied. In truth Stewart, when in office, was anything but prudent or restrained. He was constantly pushing, trying to make things work much to the annoyance of the don’t-rock-the-boat brigade in the party.

His best work during his time in office was done as prisons minister, a political graveyard. He favoured reason over rage, rehabilitation over revenge. Stewart abhors binary solutions. He is scathing about the last 15 years.

Most of all he criticises his party’s lack of seriousness and it’s failure to tackle the really big issues: the collapse of the ‘liberal’ global order, the consequences of the 2008 financial collapse, public despair and the polarisation of Britain after Brexit.

His most damning observations however are about how government – keeping the nation safe and keeping it going - has been compromised by politicking: indifferent to inconvenient truths, indifferent to detail and as a result incapable of “responding deftly or thoughtfully to the problems of the modern age”.

This is the story – and the fate – of the British Conservative party for the foreseeable future unless it can recover its meaning.