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SUELLA BRAVERMAN HAS become the latest member of Britain’s Conservative Party to defect to Reform UK.
The former UK home secretary was unveiled as the latest member of the party at a rally in London, telling those gathered that she has resigned her Tory Party membership of 30 years.
It comes on the heels of the high-profile defection from the Conservatives of Robert Jenrick and brings the number of sitting MPs in Nigel Farage’s party to eight – five of whom are former Tories.
There had been suggestions that Braverman was likely to defect to the party for the last number of months.
Today, she told the crowd that she would represent her constituency of Fareham and Waterlooville as a Reform UK MP with immediate effect, adding that Farage was the only man in UK politics who has been “courageously consistent”.
She said that her stance while a minister of calling for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights led to her being “sacked” and “punished” for “telling the truth”.
Braverman called the Conservatives’ current promise to leave the ECHR “a lie”.
“I’m calling time. I’m calling time on Tory betrayal. I’m calling time on Tory lies. I’m calling time on a party that keeps making promises with zero intention of keeping them.”
She also told the crowd: “I feel like I’ve come home.”
She said Britain is “broken” and is standing at a crossroads. “We can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender. Or we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength. I believe that a better Britain is possible.”
A spokesperson for the Tories said Braverman’s defection to Reform UK was always a matter of “when, not if”.
“She says she feels that she has ‘come home’, which will come as a surprise to the people who chose not to elect a Reform MP in her constituency in 2024,” the spokesperson said.
“Suella stood for leader of the Conservatives in 2022 and came sixth, behind Kemi and Tom Tugendhat. In 2024 she could not even muster enough supporters to get on the ballot. She has now decided to try her luck with Nigel Farage, who said last year he didn’t want her in Reform. They really are doing our ‘spring cleaning’!”
Braverman was elected as a Conservative MP in 2015. A staunch Brexiteer, she served in the Department for Exiting the European Union in 2018 before resigning over then-prime minister Theresa May’s draft Brexit deal.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Braverman was appointed UK attorney general and later became British home secretary under Liz Truss in 2022.
She resigned from the role a month later after a “mistake” surrounding sending an official document from her personal email, telling Truss she was concerned about “the direction” of the government.
Braverman was re-appointed as home secretary just six days later by Rishi Sunak, after Truss’s resignation from office. She went on to become a senior figure on the right of the Tory party, gaining notoriety for her views on immigration, the EU and Gaza.
She was sacked as home secretary in November 2023 after she accused London’s Metropolitan Police of bias in the wake of far-right protests and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
She described the pro-Palestinian protests as “assertion of primacy by certain groups… of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”. It drew condemnation from politicians in the North, with Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald saying she needed to “cop on”.
Reaction to the defection, Labour Party chairwoman Anna Turley said Farage is “stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years”.
“Suella Braverman helped botch Brexit and got sacked as home secretary – her defection shows Farage is willing to accept the very worst of the Conservative Party and exposes his complete lack of judgment,” she said.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper was also critical, saying: “Farage has recruited yet another Conservative minister with selective amnesia – one who complains about broken Britain while conveniently forgetting they helped break it.
“Suella Braverman was so bad she was forced to resign from Liz Truss’ cabinet and got sacked by Rishi Sunak.”
Former Tories Nadhim Zahawi, Lee Anderson, Nadine Dorries, Andrea Jenkyns and Jonathan Gullis have all joined Reform in the last couple of years.
With reporting from Press Association
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