Rishi Sunak has brokered a ‘fragile truce’, warns Tory insider
Rishi Sunak 'awful lot more popular' says Sir John Curtice
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Rishi Sunak is presiding over a “fragile” Tory coalition and has a “massive balancing act” in order to prevent internal divisions boiling over again, a Tory insider has warned. The new Prime Minister has endured a turbulent start to his new job, not least as a result the controversial reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary just days after she resigned from the administration of predecessor Liz Truss.
Ms Braverman quit after accidentally sending an official Government document to a colleague from her personal email address in contravention of the ministerial code, with former Tory Party chairman Jake Berry subsequently claiming it was one of “multiple breaches” during an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show on TalkTV.
The 42-year-old found herself at the centre of more controversy this week after accusing migrants crossing the English Channel of mounting an “invasion”.
The Tory MP told Express.co.uk: “It’s a massive balancing act, our party is at the moment and Rishi Sunak has done an incredible job to bring in voices from across the spectrum.
“It’s clearly a fragile truce and who knows how long it will last?”
Speaking about disgruntled colleagues, they added: “For me, I mean, we’re professional Members of Parliament.
“How does it help the wider party brand when we then behave like that?”
Mr Sunak’s attempt to heal divisions within the party needed to be viewed against the backdrop of the final days of Ms Truss’s Premiership, the source stressed, and specifically the chaotic and angry scenes in the Commons on the night of the vote on fracking.
The MP suggested Ms Truss’s administration had been wrong to try and force Tories to back the Government by threatening a three-line whip, explaining: “It wasn’t the hill to die on when it became about a commitment to the Conservative Party.
The inflexible attitude towards fracking had damaged Ms Truss’s credibility among colleagues, the MP explained.
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They said: “If this is what she built her project on, which was so different from the party manifesto that said, ‘No, thank you’ then it was only going to be a matter of time before she departed.”
Speaking on Monday, Ms Braverman said she had sent official Government documents to her personal email address six times, raising fresh concerns about breaches of ministerial rules while in charge of the nation’s security.
In a letter to parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, Ms Braverman said a review by her department had identified six incidents between September 6 and October 19, when she herself had transferred documents to her personal email.
Ms Braverman said she transferred the documents so she could read the documents while conducting virtual meetings and interviews on her Government phone.
However, Ms Braverman maintained that none of the documents concerned national security, intelligence agency or cyber security matters and did not pose any risk to national security.
She said: “The review confirmed that all of these occasions occurred in circumstances when I was conducting Home Office meetings virtually or related to public lines to take in interviews.
“Some of these meetings had been hastily arranged in response to urgent operational matters relating to Home Office priorities.”
Commenting, Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday: “There is a blunt immediate question, which is how many other security breaches have there been? How many other security lapses has she been involved in? And that’s the most important question.
“There’s obviously a big question about what Cabinet Office and Cabinet Secretary advice Rishi Sunak ignored when appointing her, and also there are still these real discrepancies about the account that she’s given about at what point she told the Cabinet Office, at what point she didn’t, and the reason that matters is because Rishi Sunak said he promised a Government of integrity, professionalism and accountability.
“At the moment, we’re not seeing any of those. We’re seeing real unanswered questions around integrity, reappointing someone just six days after they had breached the ministerial code, we’re seeing clearly a collapse in professional standards in some of the basic security issues.”
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