Are Suella Braverman’s days as home secretary numbered?

The Home Office, we are told, is at war with itself. An article in the Sunday Times yesterday painted a picture akin to “a Reservoir Dogs-style standoff with weapons drawn” (political journalists have a limited range of cultural references). One of the camps centres around Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister seen as close to No 10. A second pillar of the circular firing squad comprises of the department’s civil servants, from permanent secretary Sir Matthew Rycroft down. And the third is inevitably Suella Braverman, the divisive, abrasive, incompetent and unsackable home secretary to whom Rishi Sunak today gave his vote of confidence.

Braverman is, one of the Conservatives’ few remaining centrist MPs tells the i, “shit”. Other MPs hail her as the next leader of the party (seasoned Tory-watchers will note these two things are not mutually incompatible). But with a reshuffle on the horizon and Sunak looking to get his final team in place ahead of the election, no-one realistically expects her to be moved.

The Home Office is an inevitably dysfunctional department. Inherently unwieldy, it oversees crime and policing, immigration and borders and elements of national security. Other countries divide the responsibilities between less cumbersome bodies. John Reid, the former Labour home secretary, famously described it as “not fit for purpose”. In recent years only Theresa May has survived it to go on to greater things, albeit briefly.

But few of Braverman’s successors have proved so ineffectual in the role. Take the past couple of weeks alone. A planned “small boats week” – the government having bravely chosen to devote an entire week to drawing attention to a policy area in which it is demonstrably failing – descended into farce. Braverman’s aides briefed she was considering sending asylum seekers to Ascension Island, a volcanic island 1,000 miles off the coast of Africa with a population of 806 and no hospital (“It’s a completely mad policy and it isn’t happening,” a government source counter-briefed).

Then, to cap it off, the Bibby Stockholm, a barge hired to much fanfare to accommodate asylum seekers, was found to have legionella bacteria in the showers, the department so desperate to get the migrants on board that it didn’t wait for the results of a test for legionnaires’ disease. It had to be evacuated.

And yet, despite a single palpable policy achievement to her name, Braverman remains wildly popular with the party grassroots. The most recent Conservative Home poll of the grassroots, a reliable bellwether, gives her an approval rating of +32.2, comfortably ahead of Sunak himself. Tory pundits talk her up as a future leader. Her speech to May’s National Conservatism conference, a highly partisan affair which strode violently off-brief, was the most overtly premature bid for the leadership since Michael Portillo installed 40 phone lines in 1995. Paddy Power offers odds on Braverman as low as 17/2.

She has the ears of the right wing press. The Express titles, for whom she is just ‘Suella’, treat her every utterance like the Sermon on the Mount. Favourable coverage elsewhere isn’t hindered by the fact her enthusiastic special adviser Jake Ryan is a former journalist for the Mail On Sunday and Sun.

She is, in short, a problem for Sunak, both in terms of delivering on his key policies and challenging his authority. But she is a challenge of his own making. Sunak did not have to appoint Braverman, who was sacked from the same role by Liz Truss for leaking sensitive government information to a friend. But he calculated that having her on board was important in retaining the support of the rump European Research Group MPs who – wrongly (Sunak is considerably to the right of Boris Johnson) – believe him to be some sort of closet pinko. Braverman bought him cover.

As long as Suella Braverman remains at the helm, the Home Office is likely to remain a centre of chaos. But that’s the Faustian pact Sunak signed up to. Vote of confidence or not, he seems to have concluded that he serves at her pleasure, not the other way round.