Andrew Rawnsley nails the current dilemma in the Conservative party, although l think he's a little too confident n his assertion that they won't get enough backing as a 'nasty party'.
From The Observer - full article here
This poses an immediate-term challenge for Mr Sunak and a longer-term one for the moderate Tories who shudder at the thought of a Braverman takeover of their party. Sack her or stick with her? The question for the prime minister is how much longer he can tolerate a recklessly irresponsible and serially disloyal home secretary who can never see division without wanting to fan its flames in the cynical pursuit of her own ambitions.
It is his own fault that Mr Sunak faces this question. Ms Braverman was not home secretary when he became prime minister. She’d been forced to quit during the brief reign of Liz Truss for a serious breach of the ministerial code. Mr Sunak brought her back, not because he thought she had the character and qualities to be a capable home secretary, but because he made a desperate bargain with her in the belief that he needed the support of the party’s hard right to secure the Tory leadership. Since then, and despite the repeated trouble and strife she has caused Number 10, he has retained her in the cabinet on the Lyndon Johnson principle that it was better to have her “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in”. Mr Sunak must surely now see that she is inside the tent pissing all over him.
He has had a lot of advice to fire Ms Braverman with immediate effect, including calls to eject her from the cabinet from Labour and the Lib Dems. That doesn’t make it politically easier for the prime minister to sack the home secretary. It may make it a little harder, because some of his people will tell him that doing what opposition parties have told him to do will look weak while her claque will accuse him of sacrificing her to satisfy the Tory party’s enemies. Yet he will look even more feeble if he leaves in place a palpably unfit home secretary who has blatantly defied his authority. “She’s a disgrace and she has to go. Any previous home secretary under any previous prime minister would have been out within a day,” says one former Conservative cabinet minister. “If Rishi doesn’t sack her, he will be permanently weakened.”
The question facing all Tories, especially the party’s more moderate MPs and members, is whether they want their party to become defined by Ms Braverman’s toxic brand of politics. There is no doubt there are some votes in being an unashamedly and explicitly “nasty party”, but history suggests there will never be enough backers for it to win an election in Britain.
Yet there is clearly a significant risk that the Conservative party will fall into the hands of Ms Braverman, or someone like her, in the nearish future, and especially so if an election defeat deranges Tory activists. The challenge for the party’s moderates is whether they can muster the resolve, the arguments and the numbers to prevent that from happening. That this is a question for Conservatives underlines what a dystopian direction their party is travelling in.
