1. Sue-Ellen Cassiana "Suella" Braverman is a British politician and barrister who served as Home Secretary from 6 September 2022 to 19 October 2022, and again from 25 October 2022 to 13 November 2023.
80 Facts About Suella Braverman
1. 2.
Suella Braverman has been the Member of Parliament for Fareham and Waterlooville, previously Fareham, since 2015.
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Suella Braverman was appointed attorney general for England and Wales and advocate general for Northern Ireland by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle; she was appointed as Queen's Counsel automatically on her appointment.
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Suella Braverman subsequently supported Liz Truss's bid to become Conservative leader, and was appointed home secretary on 6 September 2022 when Truss became prime minister.
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Suella Braverman resigned as home secretary on 19 October 2022 following public claims that she had broken the Ministerial Code after having sent a Cabinet document using her personal email address.
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Suella Braverman was dismissed from her post by Sunak in the November 2023 British cabinet reshuffle.
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Suella Braverman was born in Harrow, Greater London, and raised in Wembley.
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Suella Braverman is the daughter of Uma and Christie Fernandes, both of Indian origin, who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya respectively.
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Suella Braverman is named after the character Sue Ellen Ewing from the American television soap opera Dallas, of which her mother was a fan, but Sue-Ellen was abbreviated to Suella by her primary school teachers.
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Suella Braverman's mother, of Hindu Tamil Mauritian descent, was a nurse and a councillor in Brent, and the Conservative candidate for Tottenham in the 2001 general election and the 2003 Brent East by-election.
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Suella Braverman is the niece of Mahen Kundasamy, a former Mauritian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
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Suella Braverman attended the Uxendon Manor Primary School in Brent and the fee-paying Heathfield School, Pinner, on a partial scholarship, after which she read law at Queens' College, Cambridge.
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Suella Braverman lived in France for two years, as an Erasmus Programme student and then as an Entente Cordiale Scholar, where she studied for a master's degree in European and French law at Pantheon-Sorbonne University.
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Suella Braverman was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 2005.
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Suella Braverman worked in litigation including the judicial review "basics" for a government practitioner of immigration and planning law.
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Suella Braverman passed the New York bar examination in 2006, becoming licensed to practise law in the state until the licence was suspended in 2021 after she did not re-register as an attorney.
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Suella Braverman founded the Africa Justice Foundation in 2010 alongside barristers Cherie Booth and Philip Riches.
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Suella Braverman's name was already on the list of Conservative parliamentary candidates at the time of the 2003 Brent East by-election, and she had to be persuaded not to seek the nomination.
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At the 2005 general election, Suella Braverman contested Leicester East, finishing in second place behind Labour's Keith Vaz, who won with a 15,876-vote majority.
20.
Suella Braverman sought selection as the Conservative candidate in Bexhill and Battle, but was unsuccessful, and was eventually selected to be the Conservative candidate for Fareham in Hampshire.
21.
Suella Braverman sought election to the London Assembly at the 2012 Assembly elections and was placed fourth on the Conservative London-wide list; only the first three Conservative candidates were elected.
22.
Suella Braverman gave her maiden speech on 1 June 2015.
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Suella Braverman has taken a particular interest in education, home affairs and justice and has written for The Daily Telegraph, Bright Blue, i News, HuffPost, Brexit Central and ConservativeHome.
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Suella Braverman was a member of the British delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2015 to 2017, and was a full member of the Assembly's Committee on the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights.
25.
Suella Braverman opened a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons on the failings of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and chaired meetings with the Trust's executives and with other MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Hampshire, in which instances of poor care quality and the deaths of patients were investigated.
26.
Suella Braverman campaigned to leave the European Union in the 2016 EU membership referendum; a majority of votes in her constituency were for Leave.
27.
Suella Braverman was chair of the European Research Group, a pro-Leave group of Conservative MPs, from May 2017 until her promotion to ministerial office; she was replaced by Jacob Rees-Mogg.
28.
On 15 November 2018, Suella Braverman resigned on the same day that Davis' successor, Dominic Raab, resigned as Brexit secretary in protest at Theresa May and Olly Robbins's draft Brexit deal, which had been released the day before.
29.
In March 2019, Suella Braverman stated in a speech for the Bruges Group that "as Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against Cultural Marxism".
30.
Journalist Dawn Foster challenged Suella Braverman's use of the term "cultural Marxism", highlighting its antisemitic history and stating it was a theory in the manifesto of the mass murderer Anders Breivik.
31.
On 5 April 2023, the re-selection vote was held and Suella Braverman won the vote by 77 votes to 54.
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Suella Braverman was made QC at the time of this appointment.
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Suella Braverman was later criticised by members of the Bar Council for her poor choices in the role.
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Suella Braverman was designated as a minister on leave while pregnant on 2 March 2021, shortly after the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021 was enacted to allow this arrangement.
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Suella Braverman stood in the ensuing Conservative Party leadership election, but was eliminated from the race in the second round of ballots, winning 27 votes, a reduction on her vote in the first round and the lowest of the remaining candidates.
36.
Suella Braverman said she would suspend the UK's target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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Suella Braverman was appointed Home Secretary in the new Truss ministry on 6 September 2022.
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In October 2022, Suella Braverman said that she would love to see a front page of The Daily Telegraph sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, and described it as her "dream" and "obsession".
39.
Suella Braverman left her cabinet position as Home Secretary on 19 October 2022.
40.
Suella Braverman said that her departure was because she had made an "honest mistake" by sharing an official document from her personal email address with a colleague in Parliament, Sir John Hayes, an action which breached the Ministerial Code.
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Suella Braverman was highly critical of Truss's leadership in her resignation letter.
42.
On 25 October 2022, Suella Braverman was reappointed as the Home Secretary by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak upon the formation of the Sunak ministry.
43.
Suella Braverman's reappointment was challenged by Labour Party MPs, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party MPs and some Conservatives.
44.
Sunak said Suella Braverman "made an error of judgment but she recognised that she raised the matter and she accepted her mistake".
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The committee stated that reappointing Suella Braverman created a dangerous precedent.
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In January 2023, Suella Braverman dropped three of the 30 recommendations set out in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
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In March 2023, Suella Braverman visited Rwanda and viewed housing which might be used by asylum seekers.
48.
In October 2022, Suella Braverman likewise stated that it was "not racist" to want to control the UK's borders.
49.
In July 2023, Suella Braverman personally intervened to prevent Siyabonga Twala, a British resident who had travelled from Manchester to Istanbul for a family holiday, from returning to the UK, ordering his exclusion "on the basis of serious criminality" in relation to a cannabis offence five years previously.
50.
Siyabonga Twala's solicitors said Suella Braverman's intervention set a "worrying precedent" for the use of exclusion order in barring people from reentry into the UK in setting "such a low bar to what is considered a serious criminal".
51.
In November 2023, Suella Braverman proposed new laws in England and Wales to limit the use of tents by homeless people, stating that many of them see it as "a lifestyle choice".
52.
Suella Braverman was dismissed as Home Secretary in the cabinet reshuffle of 13 November 2023, and was replaced by James Cleverly, who had been the Foreign Secretary.
53.
In December 2023, Suella Braverman delivered a speech in the House of Commons in which she argued that "the Conservative Party faces electoral oblivion" if the Government's policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda was not introduced.
54.
In January 2024, Suella Braverman joined pro-Israel protesters at a rally in London held to mark 100 days since the Gaza war.
55.
In June 2024, while speaking to the Times, Suella Braverman suggested that the Conservative Party should "welcome" Nigel Farage into the party to "unite the right".
56.
In January 2025, Suella Braverman attended Donald Trump's presidential inauguration in Washington, DC, and was seen wearing a 'Make America Great Again' cap.
57.
Later that month, Suella Braverman delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC and raised the question of whether the United Kingdom could become "the first Islamist nation with nuclear weapons", whilst saying she did not think that was a realistic outcome.
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Suella Braverman is ideologically on the right-wing of the Conservative Party.
59.
Suella Braverman was a supporter of Brexit, supports the withdrawal of the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and supports sending cross-Channel migrants to Rwanda.
60.
In May 2023, Suella Braverman spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in London.
61.
Suella Braverman expressed opposition to what she referred to as "radical gender ideology".
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Suella Braverman has criticised multiculturalism, saying that it allowed people to "come to our society and live parallel lives in it" and that it "makes no demands of the incomer to integrate".
63.
In September 2023, Suella Braverman spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
64.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees rejected Suella Braverman's calls for reform.
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Suella Braverman has described herself as a "child of the British Empire".
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Suella Braverman believes that on the whole, "the British Empire was a force for good", and described herself as being "proud of the British Empire".
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Suella Braverman was the founding chair of governors at the Michaela Community School, and supported plans to create a free school in Fareham.
68.
On 13 March 2024, Suella Braverman wrote an article for The Telegraph in which she discussed JK Rowling's views on transgender people.
69.
Suella Braverman voiced support for Rowling's stances, including Rowling's comments calling the broadcaster India Willoughby, a transgender woman, a man.
70.
Suella Braverman said 'what the Progress flag says to me is one monstrous thing: that I was the member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals and from our schools'.
71.
In July 2024, Suella Braverman criticised the British government's decision to restore funding to UNRWA, claiming that the decision was "naive, dangerous and shameful" and diverted "British taxpayer cash to Hamas".
72.
Suella Braverman, who is of Indian heritage, said that she feared a trade deal with India would increase migration to the UK when Indians already represented the largest group of people who overstayed their visa.
73.
Suella Braverman's details on the No5 Chambers website state that she "is a contributor to Philip Kolvin QC's book Gambling for Local Authorities, Licensing, Planning and Regeneration".
74.
In May 2023, it was reported that, following an incident where she was caught speeding by police while she was Attorney General for England and Wales, Suella Braverman asked whether civil servants could arrange for her an option to take a driving awareness course as a private one-to-one session rather than the standard group course with other motorists.
75.
Suella Braverman then asked one of her political aides to assist her, who asked the course providers whether aliases could be used with online courses and whether cameras could be switched off.
76.
Rael Suella Braverman, who moved to the UK as a teenager from South Africa, formerly lived in Israel.
77.
Suella Braverman is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Community, formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, but is not a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order.
78.
Suella Braverman took her oath of allegiance as an MP on the Buddhist Dhammapada.
79.
In July 2024, Suella Braverman was one of five politicians to cover for James O'Brien's radio show on LBC, as part of the station's "Guest Week".
80.
In December 2024, her husband Rael Suella Braverman joined Reform UK to campaign for Nigel Farage's party.