Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's sacking of Suella has created division says Henry Hill

Many on the right are angry at the departure of someone they saw as speaking up for their views; some on the party’s left are relieved at the departure of someone they viewed as a toxic, divisive figure.

But whether you agree with her line on the Gaza demonstrations and whether she should have remained in the Cabinet are, or at least ought to be, different questions, because Braverman was increasingly putting Sunak in an impossible position.

No prime minister can put up indefinitely with a secretary of state freelancing to the extent the outgoing Home Secretary was.
Her recent article in the Times, where she refused to make changes requested by Downing Street, was surely the last straw.

But only a week or so before that, her fellow ministers were having to hit the airwaves to repudiate her comments about rough sleeping.
As a result, a fortnight in which Labour’s divisions over Palestine could have been the main story instead saw Tory rows front and centre, over and over again.

That isn’t a sustainable way to conduct government, especially when you’re 20 points behind in the polls; had Sunak not acted, it would have seriously undermined his authority.

The more serious question for Braverman’s supporters is to what extent her departure is actually a setback for their brand of politics – and that question isn’t as open-and-shut as it might appear.

For all the tough rhetoric, her record at the Home Office has not been an impressive one.

That is not by any means all her fault: it is a huge, deeply dysfunctional department, responsible for a number of extremely dangerous policy areas, with a tiny ministerial team – practically an institutional recipe for failure. I wrote a paper last year suggesting it be broken up.

But even with that sympathetic starting point, her high-profile interventions have been unhelpful, seeming sometimes deliberately designed to cause maximum outrage rather than do the difficult work of persuading people to back important reforms to policing, immigration, or human rights law.

All that has mattered so little only because the Government, despite a majority (and 13 years in office in one way or another) isn’t actually trying to make any big structural changes in those areas; it can’t lose battles it doesn’t fight.
Should they want to deliver actual change, however, supporters of Braverman’s ends will have to do better than Braverman’s means.