Suella Braverman has made herself look silly

This time round, nobody needs to bother to ask the question. She doesn't have a job. No. 10 will have been dismayed but probably unsurprised to read her article in the Telegraph yesterday in which she blamed the Prime Minister for the catastrophic local election results. She implied he should have been dumped months ago and warned that the general election will be even more of a rout if the party doesn't immediately do the things Suella Braverman has always wanted it to do.  

You don't need a politician to have fancy prose, but you do want to feel that there's an intelligent mind at work

Who knows: perhaps she's right. But she weakens her case by making it in such a wretchedly clumsy piece of writing: so posturing, so silly, so riddled with cliché and so full of implausible and unpersuasive assertions. If she's to present herself after the election as a plausible candidate to lead the Tory party forward, she'll need to show a lot more in the way of intellectual and rhetorical quality than that.  

She starts, intending to sound tough and no-nonsense, with an unmoored cliché: 'Let me cut to the chase so no one wastes time overanalysing this: we must not change our leader.' It gives the reader a little head-wobble. Overanalysing what? The election results, presumably, but it would have been good to say so. And how does cutting to the chase prevent us overanalysing them? It seems a little hubristic to imagine that once Suella has spoken, the matter is settled. Will an ambitious backbencher asserting, ex cathedra, that we shouldn't change the leader really cause the entire apparatus of the Conservative party to settle down and stop 'overanalysing' things? Should it? 

She continues: 'Changing leader now won't work: the time to do so came and went. The hole to dig us out is the PM's, and it's time for him to start shovelling.' Immediately, the reader's head wobbles again. Far from being a statement of support, we now realise, this is a statement of regret. She's saying we shouldn't change leader, but we should have changed leader - to Suella, presumably. Is this 'cutting to the chase'? Or is it, to use another cliché, 'crying over spilt milk'?  

Whatever. Now we've missed our chance, and 'the hole to dig us out is the PM's'? Is there a missing 'of' there? Are we in the hole, or is the PM in the hole? Are we all in the hole, but the hole belongs to the PM? Is 'shovelling' what you need to do in the bottom of a hole? Proverbial wisdom suggests otherwise.  

'I've lost count of the number of election counts I've attended over the decade,' she continues, 'count' rhyming with 'count' with a terrible clunk. On she goes to claim that she and her supporters cried first 'tears of sadness' when they thought they were going to lose and then 'tears of relief' when they realised they had, after all, won. Are you buying that scene? I know I'm not.  

'From the south coast to the Midlands or London,' she declares (bathos: it's not exactly from sea to shining sea, is it?), 'wherever I knocked on doors and spoke to our voters, the message was too often: "We're lifelong Conservatives but you're not a Conservative party anymore. We can't vote for you. Show some backbone."' That categorical 'wherever' is deflated by the limp 'too often'. The quotation, even as paraphrase, is at once implausible and too specific. Donald Trump's habit of meeting never-named voters who call him 'Sir' and say exactly what he'd like them to say comes to mind. Funny that she didn't seem to meet the voters many of her colleagues met on the doorstep, who said they won't vote Conservative because they're fed up with the childish infighting. 

She went on: 'If we continue like this, we will hand over the keys of power to Labour without much of a fight, either because we have failed in the scramble for the centre ground or because we are destroyed from the right by Reform?' 'Keys of power' is a phrase redolent of a sub-Tolkien fantasy novel - she means 'keys to No. 10', maybe, or 'reins of power'. And the whole sentence is miasmic. Are we handing the keys over on a battlefield? If we're scrambling for the centre ground is that because we're in flight from the people destroying us from the right? How do you fail in a scramble? Can you scramble without a fight?  

After some mad nonsense about Keir Starmer's 'hard left fanatics' and what she imagines they will do in government (spoiler: it's quite unconnected to anything they've said they'll do in government), she has a bash at a zeugma. 'We need to demonstrate strong leadership, not managerialism,' she wrote. 'Make a big and bold offer on tax cuts… Place a cap on legal migration… Leave the EHCR…' That's all going well enough: each phrase an implied continuation of 'we need to…' Then, clunk: 'Tangible improvement to our NHS'. A random noun phrase where a verb phrase was needed.  

And on, hopelessly, it goes. Now she's claiming that 'it pains me to say' that Rishi Sunak's Tories are a dead loss (when it obviously gives her nearly as much pleasure as it gives me). Then she says 'instead of paying lip service in guidance on transgender ideology in schools, let's actually change the law' (lip service to? And 'lip service' denotes a grudging and cursory obeisance, when her complaint is that we've given in wholesale to woke). And look out, here comes another electoral 'earthquake'.  

This is not nitpicking, or not just nitpicking. A literary style is the window to a writer's mind. Orwell, who wrote that 'the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts', was one of many who have pointed out that clarity of writing is connected to clarity of thinking. You don't need a politician to have a fancy prose style, but you do want to feel that there's an intelligent mind at work behind the prose: one that seeks to connect with its audience, one that recognises that words mean something and have a relationship to one another. You are entitled, at least, to hope for something that would come back from a GCSE summative assessment marked 'working at or above the expected level'. 

Here, instead, was an argument bolted together from second-order clichés and dead metaphors, which gave us in no more than ten paragraphs 'cut to the chase', 'bucked the trend', 'pains me to say it', 'deep trouble', an 'earthquake' (that was also 'a wake-up call'), 'path to victory', 'delivery', 'crushing result', 'heartlands', 'change course', 'hard left fanatics', 'all is not lost', 'we need to be frank', 'strong leadership', 'bold offer', 'stop the boats', 'take back control', 'our NHS', 'lip service', 'ploughing on regardless', 'troops on the ground', 'crying out for', 'sparing blushes', 'no-one else to blame'. 

You get a rough sense of what she's trying to convey: that the PM has messed this up, and he needs to fix it. But you also get a rough sense of someone typing prompts into ChatGPT while wearing wicket-keeper's gloves.