Beleaguered Prime Minister Liz Truss' government has denied claims that Suella Braverman resigned as home secretary over a change in immigration policy.
Junior Cabinet Office Minister Brendan Clarke-Smith, standing in for new Home Secretary Grant Shapps on Thursday morning, caught the flak from opposition Labour shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper and his own Conservative backbenchers.
"We’ve got the third home secretary in seven weeks. The cabinet was only appointed six weeks ago. The home secretary has been sacked, the chancellor sacked, the chief whip sacked and then un-sacked," Cooper said, referring to Wednesday night's chaos in the lobbies during voting on a motion against lifting the government's moratorium on fracking.
Cooper repeated media claims that Braverman and Truss had a 90-minute "shouting match" on Wednesday before her resignation — accompanied by a scathing letter implying the PM should also quit — and speculation that the former home secretary was preparing a leadership challenge just six weeks into the Truss premiership. "This is a disgrace," Cooper said.
Clarke-Smith insisted that Braverman had quit purely because she had sent a cabinet document still under discussion to a fellow MP from her personal email account.
"Ministers only remain in office so long as they retain the confidence of the prime minister," Clarke-Smith said. "She is the ultimate judge of the standards of behaviour expected of a minister and the appropriate consequences of a breach of those standards."
Brexiteer Rebellion
But a string of Tory MPs also challenged the cabinet office minister on whether Downing Street was going soft on its commitment to reduce the number of low-paid migrant workers in the UK.
Several supporters of Britain's exit from the EU — which Truss and her all-powerful new Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt opposed — rose to ask if the government was still committed to tackling rampant people-trafficking by sea from the European continent that has claimed scores of lives.
Gainsborough MP Sir Edward Leigh asked if Braverman's resignation was "entirely due to a technical breach of the rules, and there was no policy disagreement" between Truss and the former attorney general who backed the controversial scheme to resettle asylum claimants who arrive illegally in the east African country of Rwanda.
"Many of us had great confidence in the former home secretary's determination to ensure we meet our manifesto commitments, and that we should not replace mass migration from Europe with mass migration from the rest of the world," Leigh said, asking if the policy remained "exactly the same" as under Braverman.
Clarke-Smith replied only that the government was against "illegal" immigration.
Ashfield MP Lee Anderson described the Rwanda policy as "excellent" — and said he was "not convinced" that the Truss government was "totally behind the previous home secretary."
And North West Leicestershire's Andrew Bridgen, a leading Brexiteer, asked Clarke Smith to outline the government's current policy on immigration "for the avoidance of doubt" and asked if it was "under review."