‘Let Rishi be Rishi’, is the new Tory catchphrase. So far, that seems to be code for ‘let Britain be rubbish’ – and Suella Braverman is circling
Buy shares in gun turrets, because Suella Braverman has made landfall in Washington to offer her esteemed take on the 1951 UN refugee convention. As a former practitioner in the field of … hang on, let me get my magnifying glass … planning law, the home secretary will regard herself as vastly superior to any of the legal minds who collaborated on the multilateral postwar treaty – as well as far better suited to rocking a “Suella 4 Leader” T-shirt at any future pledge drive/torchlit pitchfork procession. In the strict interests of appropriate venues, the United States has never actually ratified the convention – but that’s not important, because the home secretary obviously thinks one of its soft-wingnut thinktanks will serve as a cool backdrop. Think of her trip as the international equivalent of one of those primary school visits that a campaigning politician uses to announce a new weapons contract or crackdown on sex offenders. It’s top-flight politics: this is just how we do it.
Back at home, meanwhile, things feel less full of promise for Suella’s beleaguered line manager. The prime minister’s handlers seem to have alighted on a plan that some summarise as “let Rishi be Rishi” – a strategy that assumes Rishi Sunak has a personality other than “billionaire dweeb with a govern-like-no-one’s-watching decal on his kitchen wall”. Nonetheless, breaking the glass on this timeworn phrase formulation does perhaps indicate we have reached a particular stage of the game. As with “let Truss be Truss”, “let Boris be Boris” and even “let Gordon be Gordon”, this exhortation tends to come late in the political day. It always feels like a nice way of saying that the individual in question is terminally inadequate, but that all options for disguising this have now been exhausted.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
