Sunak cannot afford to pay the Braverman ‘moron premium’ much longer

It was appropriate enough that Suella Braverman was fighting for her political life on Monday. It was Halloween and she had already returned from the dead. The zombie home secretary only had to spend six days in her own grave before, in his infinite wisdom, Rishi Sunak dragged her out again.He really does seem to think that things are going to be different now. More serious, more professional, more accountable. But, you know, there are still very desperate people chucking letters in bottles over the edge of a compound in Kent where there’s been outbreaks of diphtheria and scabies. And he still, entirely self evidently, thinks these people’s little lives are of significantly less important than the successful management of the Conservative Party – and more specifically, his inalienable right to lead it.Clearly, he thought bringing Braverman back to the home office was necessary to ensure his seeing off Boris Johnson. And it worked. But it’s not working out so well anymore, is it?George W Bush posited in his memoir, with some plausibility, that if he really had known all along that there were no WMD in Iraq, would he really have decided to completely destroy his reputation, knowing that no WMD would be found?His critics suggest what really happened is that he didn’t have the strategic brainpower to look that far ahead. Sunak finds himself in the same position; the victim of his own naivety in thinking that an entirely ridiculous decision to bring back a home secretary six days after her resignation is something that can be worried about later.This week, as the Bank of England jacked up the base rate by 0.75 per cent, home owners are still having to pay what has been described as a ‘moron premium’ on their mortgages (the moron in question being Kwasi Kwarteng).Rishi Sunak has made it over the finish line in first place, but he is paying the moron premium too: the moron being Suella Braverman.It is, in some ways, to Braverman’s credit that her new failings in office are already so great that no one is even talking anymore about the entirely unrelated other failing over which she was forced to resign barely a fortnight ago. No one seems to care that much anymore about her having endangered national security by accidentally forwarding classified documents to a complete stranger, then emailing them again, asking them to ‘pls delete and ignore.’ She has already surpassed herself.People are now more concerned at the utter failure of her asylum policy, which has resulted in 4,000 people being held for weeks at a processing centre designed for 1,600 people to be kept there for no more than a few hours.The trouble with the asylum debate, in general, is that extreme voices dominate, and in a more extreme way than on most other debates. Some refuse to countenance the notion that anybody arriving in Kent on a dinghy could possibly be doing anything in any way untoward. Others think they should be all be sent back, or ideally drowned.The knotty area in the middle is where politics is meant to happen, but we have, yet again, a home secretary incapable of engaging with the complexity required, and who has been selected solely to pacify the rabid extremes of the Tory party, despite the fact that the party’s own polling shows her to be the least popular person among Tory members in the entire government(*).(*apart from Sir Gavin Williamson obviously, but he skews the statistics so badly there is little point including him. His numbers on hopelessness and loathing are so extreme they should be asterisked in the record books, like those East German swimmers in the 1970s.)All she can do is what she did on Thursday, which is fly 19 miles from Dover to Manston in a Chinook helicopter, be photographed pointing at the problem and then go home again.We are all used to egregious political photo shoots, but Braverman breaks new records. It was Margaret Thatcher, many years ago, who worked out that if you wanted to get your message across on the television news, you also had to provide interesting pictures for the news channels to use. Hence the hard hat, hi viz era was born. Where Braverman has broken new ground is that she has done the dressing up bit, but not the message bit. She has done the cosplay but not provided any accompanying words. No journalist was permitted to point a camera in her direction. No questions were asked.To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking hereIf anyone wanted to have a clue what was going on, all they could do was call up the Home Office and be told that the home secretary had gone up in a military helicopter because she wanted to survey the Channel, to see the small boats in action. But she had also chosen to do it on a day of extremely bad weather, so there were none there to be seen.No one is expecting Suella Braverman to do anything meaningful to solve anything. It is all very obviously beyond her. You are, as a point of fact, dealing with someone who was sacked after six weeks for a) breaching the rules by secretly forwarding emails to people not entitled to see them; but also b) being so toweringly thick as to not manage to pull off this rather straightforward subterfuge (and to send said emails to the wrong people).Having hopeless but loyal people in important positions – and not caring a toss for the consequences – is the Johnson way. If Sunak actually wants things to be different, rather than saying things will be different, he cannot afford to keep paying the Braverman premium for much longer. Nor can the thousands of people in tents on the Kent Tarmac – but on this evidence, nobody actually cares about them.