Braverman chooses Jenrick to be her shield

Suella Braverman didn’t come to the Commons to answer the Urgent Question that her Conservative colleague Sir Roger Gale had asked about the immigration processing centre at Manston. Instead she sent a junior minister, Robert Jenrick, to respond. That’s not particularly unusual: cabinet ministers often use their juniors as a shield when difficult questions are being asked. In this instance, though, Jenrick was acting not just as a defence against political attacks on the Home Secretary, but also against further flame-throwing from the minister herself. 

It was last week that Braverman told the Commons there was an ‘invasion’ of migrants coming across the Channel. It sparked the kind of row about language that any politician trying to deflect attention from a government failure normally dreams of, rather than manages to start. That presumably was why Braverman said it. Jenrick is widely seen in Westminster as the Home Secretary’s minder in her department, appointed by Rishi Sunak to keep an eye on her after he was forced by political necessity to reappoint her. Jenrick is a more mollifying politician: the Commons equivalent of throwing a heavy blanket over a fire to suffocate the flames. He is often nicknamed Robert Generic, and it’s worth remembering that he first gained his seat through a by-election. Parties tend to select the most generic, least troublesome candidates for these battles so that they can be the most boring aspect of a fevered campaign. Into the Commons he came today with a similar aim: to muffle the flames. 

The heat came from both sides. Labour was cross that the government's official position was now that the asylum system is ‘broken’, without referring to the party that has presided over that system for more than a decade. The party’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock was also keen to talk about Braverman following legal advice on the processing centre, and even angry about Jenrick himself, asking: ‘given the minister's unlawful approval of a Tory donor’s housing project in his previous brief, is he really best placed to make that judgement?’ Jenrick didn't like that very much, complaining he had hoped Kinnock would have been more ‘constructive’. But the Tory benches behind him were just as grumpy. Lee Anderson grumbled that it was time to ‘stop blaming the French, the European convention on human rights and the lefty lawyers? The blame lies in this place right now. When are we going to grow a backbone and do the right thing by sending them straight back the same day?’

Many others were annoyed about the widespread use of hotels, including luxury ones such as Stoke Rochford, to accommodate asylum seekers. Some complained that these block bookings by the Home Office damaged their local tourism industries, others felt it was unfair to their constituents who could only dream of such luxuries. Jenrick sympathised with them all, without saying anything that was particularly striking. 

His main line from the session was that things were improving. ‘I can tell the House that, as of 8 o’clock this morning, the population at the Manston facility was back below 1,600. That is a significant reduction from this point last week, with over 2,300 people having been placed in onward accommodation. I thank my Border Force officers, members of the armed forces, our contractors and Home Office staff, who have worked tirelessly to help achieve that reduction.’ He later insisted that in the short time she had been Home Secretary, Braverman had already managed the ‘considerable achievement’ of booking more hotels and cutting the population at Manston. But of course what he couldn't say was that she is achieving any kind of immigration or asylum policy that actually makes sense.