Braverman under fire over email breaches and migrant crisis

UK home secretary Suella Braverman came under fresh pressure for using private emails after revealing that she sent government documents to her personal email on six other occasions.

The Conservative minister also faced intense questioning in parliament over her handling of the migrant crisis amid concerns about severe overcrowding at a migrant centre in Kent.

Some 4,000 people are being held at a disused airport in Manston, a facility designed to hold 1,600 people. The centre is only intended to hold migrants for 24 hours but some migrants have been held there for as long as five weeks in conditions described by an inspector as “wretched”.

At least eight cases of diphtheria (a highly contagious bacterial infection) and a case of MRSA (the antibiotic-resistant bacteria) were reported among migrants at Manston over the weekend.

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Hundreds more migrants were moved to the facility on Sunday after a petrol bomb attack on a separate migrant centre at Dover Port. A number of incendiary devices were thrown at the Dover facility by a 66-year-old man who was later found dead at a nearby petrol station.

Official documents

Ms Braverman came under fire in parliament on two fronts: her response to the migrant crisis and her security breaches that forced her to resign from Liz Truss’s government on October 19th before she was reappointed six days later by the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

In a letter to the home affairs committee explaining her breaches of the ministerial code, Ms Braverman said that, in her first six-week stint as home secretary, she admitted sending official documents from her government email to her personal email on six occasions between September 6th and October 16th.

This was in addition to the October 19th incident that led to her resignation when a draft written ministerial statement on immigration plans was sent from her private email address to Conservative backbench MP Sir John Hayes, a close political ally of Ms Braverman.

The breach came to light when Ms Braverman also sent the document to the employee of another Conservative MP, Andrew Percy, by mistake.

In her letter to home affairs committee chair Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson, Ms Braverman said she sent the document during a two-hour car journey to the home office when she did not have her departmental phone and only had her personal phone and email to hand.

The home secretary told the committee chair she apologised to Mr Sunak for her mistake and gave him assurances that she would not use her personal email for official business and “reaffirmed my understanding of and adherence to the ministerial code”.

Apology repeated

Downing Street offered its support for Ms Braverman, saying that the prime minister had “full confidence” in his home secretary.

Under questioning in the House of Commons, she repeated her apology for the breaches.

“I have been clear that I made an error of judgment. I apologised for that error. I took responsibility for it and I resigned,” she said.

In heated exchanges, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, claimed Ms Braverman was repeatedly told she was breaking the law by blocking plans to deal with the overcrowding at the Manston migrant facility.

Defending her response to the migrant crisis, Ms Braverman denied ignoring advice or blocking the use of hotels or vetoing the use of further emergency accommodation. She said more than 30 new hotels and 4,500 bed spaces had been approved to house migrants since early September.

She accused Labour of not being serious about “stopping the invasion on our southern coast” referring to the 40,000 migrants that have landed on Britain’s shores so far this year, compared with 28,000 for the whole of 2021.

“The system is broken. Illegal migration is out of control and too many people are more interested in playing political parlour games,” she said, drawing heckles from the opposition benches.

Labour MP Dame Angela Eagle pointed out that the Conservatives had been in power for the past 12 years.