Braverman Plotting to Oust Sunak? UK Minister Ignored PM’s Request to Make Edits to Opinion Piece – News18

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is facing pressure from the opposition to sack Indian-origin UK interior minister Suella Braverman after Braverman criticised the police for its actions taken during pro-Palestinian marches in the UK.

Braverman suggested that officers were “playing favourites” during those protesters and ignored “pro-Palestinian mobs” as they protested the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Sunak is facing mounting calls to sack Braverman after she suggested officers “play favourites” when policing protests and claimed they largely ignored “pro-Palestinian mobs” during recent demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war.

Rishi Sunak appeared to back his minister and Downing Street insisted it had full confidence in Braverman. However, Sunak’s office is probing how her comments were published in The Times newspaper without his office’s consent. The ministerial code requires Downing Street to give consent to opinion pieces before they are published.

“The content was not agreed with Number 10,” a spokesman for Sunak told reporters, referring to the Prime Minister’s Downing Street office. Sunak’s office requested changes but those changes were not made, news agency AFP reported.

The news agency citing people familiar with the developments said that there are speculations that Braverman is positioning herself for a future Tory leadership contest. They also think it is a deliberate ploy by Sunak’s party to appeal to right-wingers before the next general election.

“Right-wing and nationalist protesters who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law,” Braverman wrote.

Braverman added she did not believe the protests were “merely a cry for help for Gaza” but were more an “assertion of primacy by certain groups — particularly Islamists”.

Sunak said that a planned pro-Palestinian march in London on November 11, which is also Armistice Day, was “provocative and disrespectful” and urged the London’s Metropolitan Police to ban it. The Met, however, said the march does not meet the legal threshold for requesting a government order to stop it.

Tensions between London’s Met Police and Sunak appeared to ease on Wednesday as both of them held an emergency meeting at which the force’s chief, Mark Rowley, confirmed the march would not clash with remembrance events for the country’s war dead.

Tom Winsor, a former police watchdog chief, said the home secretary’s claim that the police were softer on left-wing groups went too far and was contrary to the principle of police independence and felt that Braverman’s article was scathing about the Met’s policing, according to the AFP report.

“By applying pressure to the commissioner of the Met in this way, I think that crosses the line,” Winsor was quoted as saying by AFP.

Leader of the opposition party, the Labour Party, told the news agency that Braverman was “out of control” and Sunak was “too weak to do anything about it” and said Sunak should immediately replace Braverman.

The Met police have arrested almost 200 people since the Hamas attacks, either for hate crimes or incidents linked to the protests, while anti-Semitism cases have surged in the UK.