Rishi Sunak’s first crisis: Turmoil engulfing his Home Secretary

Suella Braverman, who repeatedly violated security rules, is also accused of disregarding advice about dealing with an overcrowded centre for asylum-seekers

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has been in office less than a week, but he is already embroiled in a crisis over his home secretary, Suella Braverman, who repeatedly violated security rules and is also accused of disregarding legal advice about how to deal with an overcrowded centre for asylum-seekers.

Braverman admitted Monday that she improperly sent government documents to her private email address on six occasions. That came on top of a previous security breach that forced her resignation from the same post under Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss. Braverman apologised again for the violations but insisted they did not endanger national security.

At the same time, she is under intense pressure over the conditions at a processing facility for asylum-seekers in Kent, in southeast England, where there are reports of violence and outbreaks of infectious diseases. Opposition lawmakers accused Braverman of ignoring legal advice that it was unlawful to detain people too long in the facility, known as Manston, rather than finding them hotel rooms or other suitable accommodations.

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Immigration experts said the Manston center had become dangerously overcrowded, with 4,000 people occupying the facility, which has a capacity of 1,600, some for longer than four weeks. The criticism was not limited to the opposition: Conservative lawmaker Roger Gale told Sky News he had visited the facility last week and that conditions at the facility were “wholly unacceptable.”

Still, Braverman was defiant in a late-afternoon appearance in Parliament. “What I have refused to do is to prematurely release thousands of people into local communities without having anywhere for them to stay,” she said, adding that the system was broken and “out of control.” She described the arrival of asylum-seekers, who cross the English Channel on small boats, as an “invasion.”

Taken together, these disputes have prompted calls for Braverman’s resignation — yet again — and cast a shadow over Sunak’s efforts to create a government of “integrity, professionalism and accountability” after the scandal-scarred tenure of Boris Johnson and the chaotic economic policies that brought down Truss after less than two months.

Despite his reputation as a competent chancellor of the Exchequer, his post under Johnson, Sunak’s first week in power has been consumed by questions about why he reappointed Braverman less than a week after she was forced to quit. It was not clear whether he had ignored government advice in doing so.

“I’m sure Rishi Sunak will have known a lot about Suella Braverman,” said Jill Rutter, a former civil servant who is a senior research fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe, a think tank in London. “But how long can you have a home secretary about whom there are so many questions of judgment and behavior?”

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An immigration hard-liner who is a favorite of the Conservative Party’s right wing, Braverman, 42, has been a lightning rod in two successive governments. After running her own short-lived campaign for party leader after Johnson’s ouster, she supported Truss and was rewarded with the post of home secretary, overseeing national security and immigration.

But Braverman and Truss quickly clashed over immigration, with Braverman pushing to cut the number of new arrivals. She is an enthusiastic backer of the widely criticised policy of flying asylum-seekers to Rwanda, saying it would be her “dream” to watch the planes take off.

Truss, though also a supporter of the Rwanda flights, held a more moderate view of broader immigration policy, in part because Britain needs more foreign workers to drive economic growth. When Braverman was forced out less than two weeks ago — ostensibly for transmitting an official document on her personal email — she sent Truss a stinging letter of resignation, accusing her of betraying promises to cut down on migration numbers.

In a letter to the home affairs committee of Parliament on Monday, Braverman said she had sent official documents to her personal email six times so she could reference them while taking part in video calls. None of the documents, she said, “concerned national security, intelligence agency or cybersecurity matters.”

That did not mollify opposition lawmakers, who said there were inconsistencies between her resignation letter and the new disclosures.

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“The home secretary has now admitted she sent government documents to her personal phone six times in 43 days,” said Yvette Cooper, who speaks for the opposition Labour Party on home affairs issues. “That’s once in every week she was in the post.”

Braverman’s role in the Kent processing center is less clear, though potentially more problematic. There, she is accused of brushing aside internal legal guidance that the government could not hold asylum-seekers for more than 24 hours before they are moved to longer-term detention facilities or hotels. Critics claim she blocked the booking of hotel rooms, which Braverman denied.

The overcrowding at the Manston center, a former military airfield, reflects a backlog in the processing of asylum-seekers.

Braverman has promised to crack down on the perilous cross-channel traffic, which has soared in recent months, leading some to question her motives in not finding better housing for these people.

Others say the system is hopelessly ill equipped to deal with the flow. “The immigration system has not responded to the uptick of applicants,” said Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. “Once you allow a backlog to build up, it’s very hard to dig yourself out of the hole.”

Though the numbers remain relatively small by international standards, the arrivals are an embarrassing and highly visible symbol of Britain’s inability to police its borders, one of the main promises of the Brexit campaigners during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. On Sunday, a man threw firebombs at a migration processing center in the port town of Dover.

Kevin Saunders, a former chief immigration officer for Britain’s Border Force, told the BBC he would like to see migrants housed on a cruise ship off the coast, and local lawmakers have expressed alarm. “The small boats crisis is out of control,” Natalie Elphicke, a Conservative lawmaker for Dover, told TalkTV. “The Manston facility is in a bad state, but it’s the symptom not the cause.”

The decision to reappoint Braverman as home secretary so soon after she was forced out of the Cabinet surprised many and sparked speculation that Sunak felt beholden to her because she supported his bid to succeed Truss. That was a significant intervention because Braverman is popular on the right of the party, where there was less support for Sunak.

For some, Sunak’s troubles illustrated the challenges of moving from chancellor — a powerful but manageable job — to prime minister, with its avalanche of competing demands.

His signaling that he would skip the United Nations Climate Change Summit that begins Sunday in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, drew a backlash from critics, who said it showed signs of a weaker commitment to curbing climate change.

Truss advised King Charles III not to travel to the conference either, while Sunak demoted Britain’s key climate negotiator, Alok Sharma, by depriving him of a Cabinet seat. Sharma said he was “disappointed” about Sunak’s intended absence. Perhaps worse for Downing Street was the prospect that Johnson might fill the vacuum by attending.

On Monday, Downing Street hinted that Sunak might travel to Egypt, after all, if sufficient progress has been made in preparations for a government fiscal announcement, scheduled for Nov. 17.

“In the Treasury, as chancellor, you can sort of do one thing at a time,” said Rutter, the former civil servant. “In No. 10, you have to juggle several things at once.”