Britain's real racists? The Lefties who called me a 'coconut' for daring to say we must curb mass immigration: SUELLA BRAVERMAN

Tough on immigration. It's the one policy the Tories offered, once Brexit was done, that the public actually liked. What bewilders me to this day is why my Cabinet colleagues, during their last two years in power, were so smugly determined to ditch the only vote-winning idea we had.

I was treated as a heretic for believing in it, as a loose cannon for insisting on it, as mad or somehow evil for demanding that illegal immigrants who crossed the Channel in small boats should be sent straight back to France, where they had been safe in the first place.

And when I carried on believing, insisting and demanding, Rishi Sunak threw me under the bus. Sunak – the man who owed his coronation as party leader largely to me. The quickest way to ruin a friendship, as a wise proverb says, is lend someone money. But making someone Prime Minister doesn't do much for your British political career either.

To say I had no confidence in Sunak, when I backed him to succeed Liz Truss at No 10 in 2022, was an understatement. I had seen him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I knew my fears about him as PM were well grounded. What I really wanted was to see Boris Johnson return. Boris was the people's choice. He was my choice. But no one ever dug a political grave more lustily than Boris did.

He had let woke run riot and immigration run out of control. He simply wasn't viable any more

Back him, and it would be months or maybe even just weeks before we had yet another change of PM. But what did Sunak offer? The wrong things more efficiently done – and, let's be honest, he was an election-loser. I was amazed at how little that particular factor seemed to bother my parliamentary colleagues. My one hope was that, with his promise of reform of human rights legislation and a cut to legal migration, I had a fighting chance to get things done.

I was treated as mad or somehow evil for demanding that illegal immigrants who crossed the Channel in small boats should be sent straight back to France, writes Suella Braverman

Filled with self-disgust, I announced I was backing Sunak and, the next day, he became Prime Minister.

In came the Rishi clique: Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Oliver Dowden, the reassuring grown-ups of vanilla continuity. The 'Sensibles'. It was a Cabinet packed with Truss's biggest critics: Grant Shapps, Simon Hart, Mark Harper – men who, in my opinion, stood for very little apart from their own careers.

And me? Rishi called and I was returned to the Home Office. I was back in the Cabinet. Same chair, same job.

But something was different. From the very first day, I felt it: a dislocation. As if I'd walked into a room full of unfamiliar faces. I was a senior member of this Cabinet, but deep down I didn't fit and wasn't wanted. Over time, my gnawing doubts turned into quiet dread.

On legal migration – the defining issue of our time, as I saw it – the message from No 10 was clear: not now. Or, more honestly, never.

I asked for meetings. They were postponed. I loitered after meetings the PM couldn't dodge or weasel out of, I dialled his mobile, I nagged his gatekeepers. I was holding a Great Office of State, supposedly the most powerful woman in government and I was trying to do something we had all promised in our manifesto. Yet I became someone to be 'managed'.

In a scene more reminiscent of a Tom and Jerry cartoon than a ministerial conversation, I chased Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, around the Palace of Westminster after PMQs until I cornered him and pleaded for a reduction in legal mass immigration.

He tried to fend me off: 'The Office for Budget Responsibility won't wear it,' he said, half-apologetically, half-horrified. 'If you cut migration by 200,000, they'll revise down their GDP forecast. That's the trade-off and we can't afford that.'

I received my fair share of attacks from the establishment elites simply for wanting to stop the boats, Suella writes

Another Cabinet member flat-out refused to any lessening in the number of foreign students: 'I'll have you know they contribute £300 billion per year to our economy. You're nuts if you think I'm going to put that at risk.'

It wasn't just the Treasury that was failing the country. The Ministry of Defence is such a car crash of a department (hierarchical, inefficient, and disorganised) that it makes the Home Office look like a paragon of competence. Their 'data breach' in February 2022, which leaked the personal details of more than 18,700 Afghans at risk from the Taliban, along with data on 100 British operatives or more, epitomised the institutional failure of the MoD.

It was a gross breach of national security that put peoples' lives at risk and undermined the integrity of our intelligence. That Ben Wallace (on whose watch as Defence Secretary it occurred) does not get more scrutiny for the failure of his department remains a source of intrigue.

As far as legal migration was concerned, Sunak wasn't going to touch it in any meaningful way. He certainly wasn't going to give me the green light at the Home Office to use our new Brexit freedoms. That was just a lie to get power.

On illegal migration and the so-called refugees, the messaging was different. There were busy plans and grand promises, late nights and early mornings working on the details, armies of civil servants scribbling their notes. It was all an illusion. Because underneath the spreadsheets and the photo ops, the one thing no one around me was prepared to confront was our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The lawyers, of course, were ready. At every turn, at every attempt to enforce a rule or remove an illegal migrant, there was an army of them, all funded by taxpayers. Aiding those who had arrived on a boat, guiding them step-by-step through a legal maze designed to delay, and then delay again.

Under Articles 2, 3, 5, 8 – pick your flavour – the Home Office became the defendant, on trial for wanting secure borders. I had seen this scandal for over a decade: from the Bar, to Attorney General and now, as the Home Secretary. And nothing had changed.

This was what a decade of Tory failure to deliver looked like.

To say I had no confidence in Rishi Sunak, when I backed him to succeed Liz Truss, was an understatement. I'd seen him as Chancellor and knew my fears about him as PM were well grounded

And in Dover I saw it all. Young men, desperate, aggressive, draped in foil blankets in makeshift tents. Yes, the genuine cases were heart-breaking, but so many simply weren't. So many were an unambiguous threat to us.

These scenes hardened my resolve. Compassion without limits becomes cruelty by another name – cruelty to the British citizens already here, waiting for homes, to see a doctor, for a school place for their child.

But to say any of this out loud, to state that we cannot absorb the world's pain, invited accusations so toxic, so detached from reality, that it felt surreal.

I received my fair share of attacks from the establishment elites simply for wanting to stop the boats: Holocaust comparisons, Gary Lineker and his tweets, the monologues of LBC host James O'Brien, the Archbishop of Canterbury with his homilies about harm, protests in Westminster by Albanians taking offence at my pointing out the illegal influx of their countrymen and the tidal wave of crime they brought with them.

Saying that some migrants pretend to be homosexual to play our human rights system triggered Elton John, Ian McKellen and the chorus of celebrities.

This helps to explain why, when I proposed setting aside the European Convention on Human Rights for migration cases, it was the last thing Rishi wanted. My proposal was lawful under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and would have worked.

But when I finally looked him in the eye, Sunak – the Prime Minister who claimed he would do 'whatever it takes to stop the boats' – looked terrified. 'But Suella,' he whined, 'this will put us in breach of international law.'

Coldly, no other conclusion is possible: Sunak never meant to do anything about immigration and was lying all along. His empty promises were all about becoming PM: that was all he ever cared about.

Suella with her parents Chris and Uma at her First Communion. Her father arrived in London from Nairobi in the late 1960s while her mother came from Mauritius to be a nurse in Aberdeen

Every now and then, someone (on the Left) will attack me: 'Your parents were migrants. How can you possibly take such a tough stance on immigration? You're a hypocrite, pulling up the drawbridge behind you!'

The more hysterical go further with racialised accusations that I am a 'coconut', an 'Uncle Tom' or a 'race traitor', as if someone from an ethnic minority is betraying 'their people' by wanting less immigration. This idea is absurd, even downright poisonous.

It implies your parents' or grandparents' history must necessarily dictate your politics. As soon as you're from a migrant family, you've lost all choice.

My father Chris arrived in London from Nairobi in the late 1960s, escaping prejudice against Asians in Kenya, and became a commodities broker. My mother Uma came from Mauritius to be a nurse in Aberdeen. They met in Slough, at a mutual friend's wedding, and six years later, in, 1980 I was born in Kenton, North-West London.

My mum was a fan of Dallas, the prime-time US soap opera, and I was named Sue-Ellen after its heroine, played by Linda Gray. Her real heroine, though, was Margaret Thatcher. Never before had a woman, a mother, someone who ran a household and who would often invoke home economics to make her arguments about macroeconomics, become such a leader.

Mum began to lift her gaze beyond our home and ask questions. Why was the local library being knocked down? How much council tax were we paying? Who cleans the streets, collects the bins?

In the late 1980s, she was introduced to the Brent North Conservative Association by a friend. One meeting became many. Volunteering led to campaigning. The Conservative Party became more than a political party. It became a family. Mum felt recognised. For what felt like the first time in her life, her voice mattered.

She finally felt a sense of belonging that had been missing. She was now part of something greater – her local community. Crucially, race didn't matter. The local Conservatives were made up of white British, Asian, and Jewish people, all competing on merit, not quotas.

As a citizen of this country, I am free to express my own opinion about immigration policies. And like anyone living in this country, I can make up my own mind about what serves it best

So from the age of 12, I was press-ganged. Wembley's streets became my training ground, leaflets stuffed into heavy backpacks, whole days delivering leaflets to every house.

Decades later, as an MP, canvassing is one of my favourite parts of the job. It is a potent antidote to the Westminster bubble.

On the doorstep, you hear what people really think: unvarnished and perceptive. No polling, no think-tank can quite capture what you hear from regular people and it's where I learned, early on, that politics is local.

Our small semi-detached house and second-hand Mondeo were symbolic of neither Middle England nor deprivation. We were lower-middle class, or perhaps one rung down, the respectable working class. But our family's outward stability masked inner fragility.

During the recession in the early 1990s my father spent five years out of work, and mum was the breadwinner. He was a frustrated, unfulfilled man, unwell following a quadruple heart bypass, and he resented the expense of my private school, Heathfield in Pinner, Middlesex. During my teens, our relationship was terrible, and we fought constantly.

I remember one particular rage, when I was around 14. His face was red, eyes bulging, voice booming, he chased me through the house.

Terrified, I ran up to the only room with a lock, the small toilet, and bolted the door. I remember it vividly: dark green linoleum, the smell of bleach, a tiny window. It felt like a prison cell. But it was the safest place in the house when Dad was on the rampage.

He never hit us but his verbal abuse was vile and non-stop. By the time I was 15, I was begging Mum to divorce him. She was of the generation that saw divorce as failure, and dismissed my pleas as naive.

I worked hard, and became the first pupil in the school's history to achieve a clean sweep of A*s at GCSE. But in sixth form, my ambitions to go to Cambridge were met with a lack of enthusiasm.

'You do realise how difficult it is to get into Oxbridge?' my head teacher said, uneasily. 'It would be awful if you tried and failed. That sort of disappointment can be very hard to recover from. There are so many other good places which are easier to get into. Don't set yourself up to fail.'

I applied anyway, and was accepted to read law at Queens' College. That led to my first tenancy in chambers as a barrister, in Bristol, and then London, eventually working on the Attorney General's Panel of Counsel – a prestigious panel of specialist lawyers whose job it is to defend government departments.

Roughly 90 per cent of my work came from the Home Office. And so began my immersion into immigration law. The caseload was made up mostly of Article 8 claims – the right to respect for private and family life, which, to put it bluntly, meant sham marriages.

It was usually a man of African descent, claiming to be married to an Eastern European woman, often Romanian or Bulgarian. The evidence was picture-perfect: a pristine marriage certificate, photos of them looking lovingly at each other, even Valentine cards and love letters. I heard the same story countless times: he came here to study, they fell in love, and now a return home would violate his civil liberties.

And there were also morally questionable cases. I still remember one involving a Zimbabwean national with HIV. His argument was that the NHS offered better healthcare, in particular antiretroviral medication, than Zimbabwe. Therefore, removing him would constitute torture under Article 3.

The NHS is supposed to be a national health service, not an international health service, and certainly not a litigation tool in the immigration courts. But long before I entered parliament in 2015, as the Conservative MP for Fareham in Hampshire, it became clear to me that our immigration system was a jungle of statute, rules, and case law in which virtually any Home Office decision could be stalled or overturned.

Of course, my family's immigrant history matters to me. It shaped my upbringing, my outlook, my sense of what matters. But I'm not a spokesman for my ancestry. As a citizen of this country, I am free to express my own opinion about immigration policies. And like anyone living in this country, I can make up my own mind about what serves it best.

Gratitude is one thing, governing is another. I can feel grateful to a country for giving my parents new opportunities for a better life, and at the same time, I can think about ways to make a country better for the future generations. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Britain today looks very different to the country it was when my parents arrived. Back then, net migration was negative. Thousands of British citizens were leaving for other countries such as Australia and Canada. That trend held, more or less, until the 1990s.

A third of all ethnic minorities, including my parents, voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. An even larger proportion, 43 per cent, say that immigration levels today are too high. That doesn't make them anti-immigrant. It doesn't make them 'racial gatekeepers' or 'self-loathing migrants'. It makes them cognisant of the realities of the society in which we live.

It makes them patriots who, like me, love this country and simply want the best for it. 

We should celebrate the Empire

I was raised in England, am a British citizen, and have roots in Mauritius and Kenya, with a bit of French Creole, Portuguese, and African. It’s complicated. But the one constant? Britain and the British Empire.

The arrival of my parents – right at my First Communion – in Britain was, in many ways, the natural evolution of the Empire.

It was only thanks to what British pioneers, engineers, leaders, and missionaries gave to the world that my parents even had the chance to find themselves exchanging vows at Haringey Town Hall. Cruelty didn’t bring us here: it was love, and in both directions.

Yet our young people are taught how ‘evil’ the British Empire was, how colonies were ‘raped’ and how generations later, we must atone for the ‘sins’ through reparations.

No serious country can run its immigration system as an open-ended moral obligation, an endless repayment for past actions.

How about instead of Black History Month, schools celebrate Commonwealth history and the contributions of the British Empire?

• Adapted from Patriot by Suella Braverman (Mensch, £20) to be published October 1st. © Suella Braverman 2026