Suella Braverman is understood to have quit as UK home secretary after Liz Truss purged her diary and canceled a planned visit amid desperate attempts to save her prime ministership, s he told the Guardian.
There is speculation that Grant Shapps, the former Transport Secretary who strongly backed Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership race, will replace Braverman in another sudden Truss government shake-up.
The prime minister, who was due to visit a defense technology company on Wednesday afternoon and make a television clip, spoke to Braverman at a meeting in the House of Commons, sources said.
No. 10 denied that Braverman had been fired, but did not respond to requests for clarification on the nature of his departure.
It would be another massive blow to the prime minister’s authority after she was forced to fire Kwasi Kwarteng and scrap her economic strategy to avoid a market crash.
Sources said the move was at the behest of the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who has taken control of the government’s economic response after Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, but who they said was now “pulling the strings threads”.
Braverman was an outspoken critic of Truss’ U-turn on the top rate of tax, suggesting he thought the Prime Minister had suffered a “coup d’état” earlier this month. Some Tory MPs on the party’s libertarian right have been dismayed by the prime minister’s subsequent moves to abandon other tax cuts.
Braverman’s departure comes after the Ministry of the Interior approved an important law: the Law of public order. An ally who spoke to her earlier this week said she had been “upbeat”.
Replacing Braverman with Shapps, less than a week after sacking Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor in Hunt’s place, would be another sign Truss was trying to appeal to a wider part of the Tory party and replace perceived ideologues with more experienced ministers .
The home secretary, who was given the job when Truss entered No 10 at the start of September, was seen as a palatable choice by party members for the role, given her strong views on immigration, law and order and culture war issues.
However, the former attorney general has been at the center of several controversies immediately since taking office, including speaking out against a proposed trade deal with India over his concerns that it would increase immigration to the United Kingdom.
Braverman has also pledged to reduce net migration to the UK to tens of thousands a year, a previously promised and largely unachievable target.
On Tuesday, the Home Secretary used a debate on environmental protests to blame a “coalition of chaos” including opposition parties and the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for supporting groups like Just Stop Oil.
There was also speculation that the Prime Minister had pulled out of a trip ahead of tonight’s Commons vote on fracking, which Tory whips have claimed is a confidence issue, amid fears she could lose.
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Braverman has also sought to limit the number of international student visas, a lucrative source of income for UK universities, while No 10 quickly tackled his suggestion that cannabis could become a class drug A.
The former barrister won the safe seat of Fareham in Hampshire in 2015 and won her first premiership role as Brexit minister under Theresa May in 2018, ditching May’s proposed exit deal.
In 2020, Boris Johnson brought her into the Cabinet as Attorney General, in which she became the first UK Prime Minister to take formal maternity leave.
There was speculation that there could be a mini-shuffle, with chief whip Wendy Morton moving out and being replaced by Liam Fox.