Did Suella Braverman and Her Party Break Britain?: Starmer Is Finishing It Off
On Monday, Suella Braverman stood before a Reform UK rally and declared what she spent years denying while in government: “Britain is indeed broken.” The former Home Secretary’s defection to Nigel Farage’s insurgent party caps one of the more remarkable acts of political shamelessness in recent memory. Having served at the heart of Conservative governance for the better part of a decade, Braverman now presents herself as the cure for a disease she helped spread.
The timing is exquisite. Braverman resigned from the Conservative Party after thirty years, joining Robert Jenrick and becoming the eighth sitting MP to cross to Reform. Her justification? That immigration is out of control, public services are collapsing, and young people are fleeing the country. All true. All happening while her party held power.
Start with Brexit—the revolution Braverman championed. As chair of the European Research Group, she resigned from Theresa May’s government in protest at a withdrawal agreement she deemed insufficiently pure. She helped architect the policy framework that was supposed to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. The result? Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023—not under Labour, not under free movement, but under a post-Brexit Conservative government that Braverman served. The gap between rhetoric and reality became a chasm.
Braverman’s own tenure as Home Secretary was marked by inflammatory language about “invasions” and “hurricanes” of migrants, yet actual policy liberalisations—expanding care worker visas, creating the graduate route, uncapping skilled worker numbers—drove record arrivals on her watch. She spoke of immigration threatening Britain’s “national character” while presiding over the largest inflows in British history. Nigel Farage himself said she was “utterly useless” at stopping Channel crossings. Now he welcomes her into his party because she admits her government “got it wrong.” That’s quite the endorsement: join us—we think you failed, but at least you’re willing to blame others.
The NHS inheritance is equally stark. Between 2010 and 2019, health spending grew by roughly 2% annually in real terms—substantially below the long-term average of nearly 4%. The result: a £13.8 billion maintenance backlog by 2024, up from £6 billion just five years earlier. Waiting lists that were manageable became monstrous. Emergency departments that once processed patients in four hours now regularly see waits measured in days. Staff shortages left Britain with fewer doctors and nurses per capita than most comparable countries. The Conservative manifesto promise to cut 5,500 NHS managers would have made things worse, not better.
The economic picture is similarly grim. The Centre for Cities calculated that the average Briton is roughly £10,200 poorer than they would have been had the economy grown at pre-2010 rates. Levelling up, that grand promise to reduce regional inequality, delivered just 10% of its promised funding while health inequality deepened. Healthy life expectancy actually fell between 2011-13 and 2020-22—by over nine months for men and fourteen months for women. As one observer noted, nothing captured the final months of Conservative rule quite like the daily headlines about sewage overflowing into Britain’s rivers. Managed decline made literal.
Now Braverman tells us she was “sacked and punished for telling the truth.” The revisionism is breathtaking. This is a politician who resigned from Liz Truss’s cabinet for breaching the ministerial code—sending Cabinet documents via personal email—only to be reinstated by Rishi Sunak six days later. She was then sacked again by Sunak in November 2023 after calling homelessness a “lifestyle choice” and accusing police of being too lenient with “hate marchers.” Her critics blamed her rhetoric for inflaming tensions when far-right protesters clashed with police and tried to confront pro-Palestinian demonstrators. These were not suppressed truths. They were broadcast from the Home Office while her party did nothing to address the underlying failures.
The ideological journey has been equally tortured. In January 2025, Braverman attended Donald Trump’s inauguration wearing a MAGA cap. Later that month, delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, she mused about whether Britain could become “the first Islamist nation with nuclear weapons”—a statement she acknowledged was unrealistic but floated anyway. In February 2025, she published an article declaring that despite being born and educated in England, she could never be “truly English” because national identity “must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity—not just residence or fluency.”
Consider the contradictions embedded in that claim. Braverman is the daughter of immigrants from Mauritius and Kenya who came to Britain in the 1960s. She has described herself as a “child of the British Empire” and defended that empire as “a force for good.” Her parents arrived, she says, “with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did.” Yet she now argues that their daughter cannot claim English identity because she lacks the requisite bloodline. This is not conservatism. It is an identity politics of despair dressed as philosophy—and it comes from someone seeking leadership of a movement that claims to oppose identity politics.
The Conservative response to her departure—that it was “always a matter of when, not if”—reveals the hollowness on both sides. They knew she was never loyal to them. She knew they were never capable of delivering what she claimed to want. The marriage was always one of mutual convenience, and now both partners are pretending they were the aggrieved party. The Tory statement even noted that Farage “originally said he didn’t want her in his party.” Both sides are engaging in mutual opportunism, principles be damned.
Labour’s Anna Turley offered the most cutting assessment: Farage is “stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years.” The Liberal Democrats’ Daisy Cooper put it more bluntly: Braverman suffers from “selective amnesia—one who complains about broken Britain while conveniently forgetting they helped break it.”
This gets to the heart of the matter. Braverman and her fellow defectors are not offering Britain an alternative to Conservative failure. They are offering the same personnel with louder rhetoric. Jenrick served as Immigration Minister. Braverman was Home Secretary and Attorney General. If they couldn’t deliver their vision with the power they held, why should anyone believe they’ll deliver it with Farage? The revolution they promise is simply their own rehabilitation.
The uncomfortable truth is that Britain’s problems are structural and long-gestating. They required serious investment, strategic patience, and political courage over decades. Instead, Britain got Brexit chaos, five prime ministers in eight years, a 49-day government that crashed the economy, and a governing party more interested in internal warfare than national governance. The Conservatives’ 2024 election result—their worst in nearly 200 years—was not an accident. It was a verdict.
Does this mean the Conservative Party alone broke Britain? Not entirely. Labour’s pre-2010 governments made their own mistakes. The global financial crisis was not made in Westminster. COVID-19 devastated health systems worldwide. But the Conservatives had fourteen years to address underlying weaknesses. Instead, they exacerbated them while promising transformation. YouGov polling found that half the public believes the Conservatives still don’t understand why they lost. Among Reform voters, that figure rises to 53%. Even 28% of people who voted Conservative aren’t convinced the party grasps the scale of its failure.
Braverman’s defection reveals something important about the current political moment. The right is fragmenting not because it lacks power but because it lacks answers. Reform UK’s promise to “fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength” is magnificent as rhetoric but empty as policy. Their diagnosis—that Britain is broken—is accurate. Their prescription—that Suella Braverman and her ilk can fix it—is laughable.
Britain does need renewal. It needs investment in healthcare, housing, and infrastructure. It needs an honest conversation about trade-offs in immigration policy. It needs political leaders who level with the public about what government can and cannot achieve. What it does not need is the same politicians who presided over decline now presenting themselves as revolutionary change-makers.
Braverman told the Reform rally, “I feel like I’ve come home.” Perhaps she has. A party built on grievance has found a politician built on the same. But Britain’s problems will not be solved by people whose primary talent is identifying scapegoats. The country needs builders, not arsonists rebranding as firefighters.
Britain may indeed be broken. But if so, the breakage has Braverman’s fingerprints all over it. Her journey from Cabinet minister to Reform UK defector is not a story of principled awakening. It is a story of opportunism seeking new vehicles. The costume has changed. The performance continues.
