Suella Braverman
Suella Braverman ‘tried to get out of final vote on small boats bill’
Exclusive: Home secretary’s aides repeatedly requested she be allowed to miss vote on major legislation despite three-line whip
Pippa Crerar Political editor
@PippaCrerar
Sun 21 May 2023 18.35 BST
Suella Braverman tried to get out of the final Commons vote on the government’s small boats bill despite Conservative MPs being instructed to attend, the Guardian has learned.
The home secretary’s aides sent multiple emails over the course of several days to the Tory whips’ office requesting that she be “slipped”, or permitted to miss, the third reading of
her department’s flagship legislation.
Sources said the chief whip, Simon Hart, eventually had to call Braverman directly to instruct her to attend the vote on the illegal migration bill, which had a three-line whip. They claimed that Braverman had wanted to visit a police station instead.
One Tory insider said: “The chief is at his wit’s end with Suella. She just thinks she can do what she wants. Her office was really hassling the whips’ admin team to allow her to miss the third reading vote for what appeared to be a picture opportunity.”
Rishi Sunak is facing
growing pressure over the government’s handling of migration, with the Office for National Statistics publishing data on Thursday which is expected to show that net legal migration has risen from 500,000 and hit an all-time high.
On his final day at the G7 summit of world leaders in Japan, Sunak said that he thought overall migration numbers were “too high” and insisted he was “committed to bringing them down”.
But he said that his main focus was on curbing the much smaller numbers of people arriving illegally in small boats across the Channel, which the illegal migration bill was designed to do.
Braverman’s attempt to miss the vote is likely to further anger Tory MPs who are already despairing over the home secretary’s apparent leadership pitch at the
controversial NatCon conference last week, as well as her inflammatory rhetoric around migration.
Braverman visited Northamptonshire to highlight the government’s police recruitment programme, and made it back in time for the vote. A source close to the home secretary said: “This is a load of drivel.” The Conservative whips’ office declined to comment.
Being slipped, or pairing, is a longstanding convention in the Commons where the whips of the government and an opposition party agree to allow MPs from one side to miss a vote because of personal reasons or official business.
Separately, the prime minister is under pressure to launch an investigation by his ethics adviser into whether Braverman broke the ministerial code by asking Home Office civil servants
for special treatment over a speeding fine.
Sunak also faces claims by former home secretary Priti Patel that he refused an official request for money to speed up asylum processing while he was chancellor, casting doubts on his commitment to getting to grips with the broken system.
Patel, an ally of Boris Johnson, accused the prime minister of taking a “sticking plaster” approach to clearing the backlog of 92,601 asylum cases submitted before June 2022 by the end of this year, adding that it was “too late” to make a substantial difference.
In an interview with the Inside Whitehall podcast, Patel claimed that Sunak had turned down a Home Office request to fund the digitalisation of claims which are largely paper-based. These are slower to process and contributed to the current backlog.
