How do you get to be Suella Braverman?

Suella Braverman leaving her home in London on Monday morning. She has been sacked as Britain’s Home Secretary. Reuters

Ms Braverman with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly at the Remembrance Sunday service in London. She had caused a furious backlash with a series of controversial comments. AP

Ms Braverman during a visit to Alexandroupolis on the Greek border with Turkey to see surveillance facilities and learn how Greek security forces monitor the land border. PA

Ms Braverman at the Shoah Wall in November in Ostarrichi Park in Vienna that carries the names of 65,000 Jews from Austria who died in the Holocaust. PA

Ms Braverman attends a county lines raid with officers from West Midlands Police in Coventry in October. PA

Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Ms Braverman at a policing roundtable summit at 10 Downing Street in October. AFP

Ms Braverman during the Conservative Party Conference in October in Manchester. Getty Images

Mr Sunak and Ms Braverman join police for a walkabout in Chelmsford High Street in March. Getty Images

Ms Braverman at a building site on the outskirts of Kigali during her visit to Rwanda in March to see houses being constructed that could eventually house deported migrants from the UK. PA

Ms Braverman outside No 10 Downing Street in October 2022 after being appointed Britain's home secretary by Mr Sunak. Reuters

Ms Braverman, second right, watches Mr Sunak during his first Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in 2022. AFP

Ms Braverman at the scene in Oxfordshire in 2022 where an Albanian woman believed to be responsible for helping transport migrants to the UK in small boats was arrested. PA

Ms Braverman applauds as Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers her keynote address on the final day of the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham in 2022. AFP

Ms Braverman during the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham in 2022. Getty Images

Ms Braverman at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham in 2022. Getty Images

King Charles III greets Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, Suella Braverman and interim Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Dame Lynne Owens when meeting emergency service workers in London in 2022. Getty Images

Ms Braverman arriving in Downing Street for the first Cabinet meeting with new Prime Minister Liz Truss in September 2022. PA

Attorney General for England and Wales and then Conservative Party leadership candidate Ms Braverman at the Conservative Way Forward relaunch event in London in July 2022. Getty Images

Ms Braverman, in pink, listens as former prime minister Boris Johnson addresses his Cabinet in Downing Street in June 2022. Reuters

Ms Braverman arrives at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London for the first time since the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Getty Images

The simplest questions are often the best, although surprisingly they may be the most difficult to answer. One question, in various versions, doing the rounds at Westminster is this: “How do you get to be Suella Braverman?”

Ms Braverman was – until she was dismissed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – British Home Secretary. That meant, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister himself, she was promoted – or over-promoted – to be one of top four most powerful political figures in the UK, in charge of policing and law and order in England.

Her sacking – astonishingly twice from the same senior job in a little more than a year – was much deserved. She described pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “hate marches”. Police say that 300,000 people marched in support of Palestine last weekend. March organisers claim 800,000.

The idea that hundreds of thousands of British people are fuelled by hatred seems, at best, bizarre and, at worst, inflammatory. And it inflamed.

But the real hatred came from a far-right, violent and angry mob of anti-Palestinian protesters who attacked police and were out for trouble. There were more than a hundred arrests from among this brainless rabble.

Ms Braverman had suggested that police are biased against right-wing protesters and favour left-wingers. I have interviewed senior police chief officers for years and have failed to find any obvious far-left-wing sympathisers.

In Britain (unlike, say, France) police are operationally independent. They are under political scrutiny but not direct political control. The Home Secretary has oversight, but chief constables use their independent judgement, and can – for example – ban marches considered likely to be violent.

It’s a hugely difficult job. Police put themselves in harm’s way. They take risks and deal with people I would never wish to meet.

There have also been well-publicised cases of police getting things wrong.

For example, after the kidnapping and murder of a young woman, Sarah Everard, by a serving police officer in 2021, London’s Metropolitan Police tracked down the killer but broke up a protest vigil in a heavy-handed way.

Yet it is extraordinary – perhaps unprecedented – for a serving Home Secretary to attack the independence and leadership of the UK’s most important police force in the way Ms Braverman has done.

Even now that she has lost her job, it’s still worth considering why the British political system promoted someone with boundless ambition yet limited talent for solving real problems.

Her key political talent was for stealing newspaper headlines. She claimed homeless people made a “lifestyle choice”. She said that rough sleepers – who live in wretched conditions – should have their tents removed.

Her most controversial flagship policy is to send undocumented migrants to Rwanda. On Wednesday, an English court will decide whether this supposed “solution” is legal, or the flagship sinks. But whether the Rwanda policy works or not on immigration, it has worked already for Ms Braverman.

It has turned her into front page news, the darling of the Conservative far right, tipped as a possible successor when – if – Mr Sunak loses next year’s general election. But there’s a catch.

Most British people are not hard-right Conservatives – those once called the “Nasty Party” by former Conservative prime minister Theresa May. Ms Braverman is merely the latest incarnation of the decades-long internal Conservative civil war between moderates, some of whom were purged over Brexit, and right-wing ideologues.

For Ms Braverman, damaging the reputation of the police is merely collateral damage to her unbounded ambitions. But as a police chief once told me when I criticised failures in his force: “If the police didn’t exist, if we were not putting ourselves in harm’s way, then ordinary citizens like you would have to be the police force. Whatever our flaws, we need the public’s support.”

The alternative to professional policing could only be, he said, as in Hollywood westerns – a posse of citizens.

The word “posse” is Latin, and the full phrase is “posse comitatus”. It’s an old English and American tradition. It means (roughly) “the power of the county” in which historically in England (and the US), a local sheriff or other official could command ordinary citizens to join up in an armed group to arrest evil doers.

The undermining of professional British police officers doing their job under very difficult circumstances is, frankly, daft as well as despicable. A Home Secretary who does not understand that simple truth is unfit for office.

What is most interesting about the events of the past few days is that Mr Sunak has now brought in former prime minister David Cameron as part of a wider reshuffle of ministers.

Mr Cameron is seen as a safe pair of hands while Ms Braverman was seen as precisely the opposite. But it should be remembered that it was Mr Cameron himself who unwisely ordered the 2016 Brexit referendum that allowed all the forces of right-wing English nationalist ideology and troublemaking to assert themselves within the Conservative party.

Getting rid of Ms Braverman may solve one part of the problem, but the divisions in the Conservative party are deep and resistant to change.