Suella Braverman, Britain's interior minister, is out of a job after disobeying Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and publicly encouraging far-right rioters who attacked police on Remembrance Day.
Braverman published an "incendiary" op-ed accusing police of political bias and demanding that they ban a planned march in London in support of Palestinians; police, however, have no such power and the article was perceived as a call to arms for counter-protestors. The march for Palestine, one of the largest in recent UK history, went off largely peacefully. Right-wingers, though, clashed with police on the march's margins and at a Remembrance Day ceremony far from its route. Though tabloid newspapers attempted to spread the blame, broadcast footage of "English" louts attacking cops spoke for itself.
The home secretary has long been a contentious figure. She resigned from the same job under Sunak's predecessor Liz Truss due to a serious breach of the ministerial code, after she sent an official document from a personal email.
Braverman has repeatedly referred to pro-Palestine marches in London as "hate marches." In the letter to The Times, she said that the protests were "disturbingly reminiscent" of past scenes in Northern Ireland — comments widely condemned as both incendiary and inaccurate.
A number of far-right groups clashed with police in London following her remarks, which were criticized as undermining confidence in police ahead of a substantial protest on Armistice Day on Saturday.
Braverman was the oddest figure in Sunak's cabinet, the most plainly incompetent and undisciplined figure among them—someone for whom comparisons with ticking time bombs are inappropriate simply because this is her third or fourth trash explosion.
She is replaced at the Home Office by cabinet colleague James Cleverly, himself replaced as foreign minister by none other than former Prime Minister David Cameron—a surprise return for the man who decided to hold the Brexit referendum and resigned after the result.
