{"id":544665,"date":"2026-01-26T18:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T18:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/544665\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T18:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T18:44:10","slug":"former-british-home-secretary-suella-braverman-defects-from-conservatives-to-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/544665\/","title":{"rendered":"Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman defects from Conservatives to Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON (AP) \u2014 Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman<\/a>, an anti-immigration Conservative lawmaker, on Monday became the latest politician from the party to defect to hard-right rival party Reform UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Braverman, who was fired from her job as interior minister in 2023 after repeatedly diverging from government policy, said she had quit the Conservatives after 30 years and would represent her southern England constituency in Parliament as a Reform lawmaker.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender,\u201d Braverman said. \u201cOr we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength. I believe that a better Britain is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Braverman is the latest high-profile Conservative to embrace Reform leader Nigel Farage\u2019s message that Britain is broken and overrun by migrants. Her move on the heels of Robert Jenrick\u2019s recent defection<\/a> gives Farage\u2019s party eight of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. <\/p>\n

The Conservatives have 116 seats and remain the official opposition to Prime Minister Keir Starmer\u2019s Labour government. <\/p>\n

Although Reform has a tiny number of seats in Parliament, it leads the governing Labour Party<\/a> and the Conservatives in opinion polls ahead of important local elections in May, including for the parliaments in Scotland and Wales. <\/p>\n

Braverman was sacked by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak<\/a> in November 2023 after she called migration a \u201churricane\u201d heading for Britain, said homelessness was a \u201clifestyle choice\u201d and accused police of being too lenient with pro-Palestinian protesters that she called \u201chate marchers.\u201d <\/p>\n

Critics blamed her rhetoric for inflaming tensions when far-right protesters scuffled with police<\/a> and tried to confront a pro-Palestinian march by hundreds of thousands in London. <\/p>\n

The 45-year-old lawyer who has criticized liberal social values and what she has called the \u201ctofu-eating wokerati,\u201d said she had declined to enter the contest for leadership of the once-dominant center-right Conservative Party<\/a> after it was trounced by the center-left Labour Party in the July 2024 election.<\/p>\n

The Conservative Party said in a statement that Braverman couldn\u2019t muster the support to run for party leadership two years ago, and noted that Farage originally said he didn\u2019t want her in his party. \u201cIt was always a matter of when, not if, Suella would defect,\u201d the party statement said. <\/p>\n

Labour Party chairwoman Anna Turley said Braverman was partly responsible for botching the U.K.’s breakup with the European Union and that the move showed Farage lacked judgment for embracing the worst Conservatives. <\/p>\n

\u201cNigel Farage is stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years,\u201d Turley said.<\/p>\n

Braverman had urged the party after the 2024 election loss to reach out to welcome Farage into Conservative ranks. Writing in the Daily Telegraph at the time, she said Conservative colleagues were unwilling to listen to her, and branded her \u201cmad, bad and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Farage has welcomed her into Reform\u2019s growing party.<\/p>\n

Farage, who said Braverman was \u201cutterly useless\u201d as home secretary in stopping migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats, said she is now willing to admit her party got it wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019s reached the view that actually the center-right of British politics needs to unify around Reform,\u201d Farage said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON (AP) \u2014 Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, an anti-immigration Conservative lawmaker, on Monday became the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":544666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[239884,1226,90,57,17723,50,25930,80,145495,147228,235115,239883,376,103,107],"class_list":["post-544665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-anna-turley","tag-conservatism","tag-elections","tag-general-news","tag-keir-starmer","tag-news","tag-nigel-farage","tag-politics","tag-rishi-sunak","tag-robert-jenrick","tag-send-to-apple-news","tag-suella-braverman","tag-united-kingdom","tag-world","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}