Braverman’s defection confirms Farage ‘stuffing his party full of failed Tories’, says Labour
Labour has said that the Suella Braverman defection just confirms that Reform UK is a party “full of failed Tories”.
In a response, Anna Turley, the Labour chair, said:
Nigel Farage is stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years.
Suella Braverman helped botch Brexit and got sacked as home secretary – her defection shows Farage is willing to accept the very worst of the Conservative party and exposes his complete lack of judgment.
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Tory MP Louie French says defection of Braverman, after Jenrick, shows Conservative party ‘healing’
This is from the Conservative MP Louie French on the defection of Suella Braverman.
I’m starting to enjoy this January transfer window.
A clear out of overhyped and unmanageable players, allowing for fresh talent to take the team forward.
The Conservative Party is healing and returning to the professional, country first party that I first joined.
French seems to be referring in particular to Braverman and Jenrick. But the former MP Nadhim Zahawi has also defected this month, as has the sitting MP Andrew Rosindell.
I’m starting to enjoy this January transfer window.
A clear out of overhyped and unmanageable players, allowing for fresh talent to take the team forward.
The Conservative Party is healing and returning to the professional, country first party that I first joined.
— Louie French MP (@louie_french) January 26, 2026
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Tories imply that Braverman’s ‘mental health’ factor in her defection, saying she was ‘clearly very unhappy’ in their party
The Conservative party has suggested that Suella Braverman’s “mental health” was a factor in her decision to defect to Reform UK.
In an unusually brutal comment on her decision to leave the party this morning, a Conservative party spokesperson told journalists in a statement.
It was always a matter of when, not if, Suella would defect. The Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health, but she was clearly very unhappy. She says she feels that she has ‘come home’, which will come as a surprise to the people who chose not to elect a Reform MP in her constituency in 2024.
There are some people who are MPs because they care about their communities and want to deliver a better country. There are others who do it for their personal ambition. Suella stood for leader of the Conservatives in 2022 and came sixth, behind Kemi [Badenoch] and Tom Tugendhat. In 2024 she could not even muster enough supporters to get on the ballot. She has now decided to try her luck with Nigel Farage, who said last year he didn’t want her in Reform. They really are doing our ‘Spring cleaning’!
As always happens with Reform, they unveil defections just when the Labour government is tearing itself to pieces – Rayner, Mandelson, now Burnham. Reform are too busy opposing the Conservatives to hold the Labour government to account. The Conservative party is now the only party that believes in smaller government, less welfare and Britain living within its means, and has the team and the experience to get Britain working again.
This is not the first time Tory HQ has briefed aggressively against a defector. When Nadhim Zahawi joined Reform, the Conservative party let it be known that he only quit after trying, and failing, to get Kemi Badenoch to nominate him for a peerage.
But to mention someone’s “mental health” as a factor in a defection is particularly vicious – and also likely to anger anyone who feels that mental health should not be trivialised, or weaponised, in such a way.
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No 10 confirms Starmer going to China this week for first visit by UK PM in eight years
Keir Starmer will travel to China on Tuesday for the first prime ministerial visit to the country in eight years, Downing Street has confirmed. As PA Media reports, Starmer will also fly to Japan this week, No 10 said. The visit marks a significant moment in Starmer’s bid to build bridges with Beijing after a freeze in Sino-British relations in the final years of the Conservative government, PA says. It comes after controversial plans to build a huge new Chinese embassy in London were approved by the government last week.
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In the Commons there will be an urgent question on the Chagos Islands deal at 3.30pm. A Foreign Office minister will respond. Last week the government postponed one of the final debates on the bill that will implement the treaty amid concerns the Trump administration has switched its position on the deal and is now opposed.
Then, after 4.15pm, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, will make her statement about police reform.
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Braverman ‘so bad’ she was forced to resign by Truss, and sacked by Sunak, say Lib Dems
And Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, made much the same point in the response issued by her party. She said:
Farage has recruited yet another Conservative minister with selective amnesia – one who complains about broken Britain while conveniently forgetting they helped break it.
Suella Braverman was so bad she was forced to resign from Liz Truss’ cabinet and got sacked by Rishi Sunak.
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Braverman’s defection confirms Farage ‘stuffing his party full of failed Tories’, says Labour
Labour has said that the Suella Braverman defection just confirms that Reform UK is a party “full of failed Tories”.
In a response, Anna Turley, the Labour chair, said:
Nigel Farage is stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years.
Suella Braverman helped botch Brexit and got sacked as home secretary – her defection shows Farage is willing to accept the very worst of the Conservative party and exposes his complete lack of judgment.
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Braverman says Tory pledge to leave ECHR ‘a lie’ because party will never implement it
After blaming the ECHR for the fact that veterans continue to be prosecuted over Troubles-era offences in Northern Ireland, Braverman acknowledged that the Conservative party is no committed to leaving the convention.
But she said the party were not being honest about this.
Saying one thing in public, doing the total opposite in private – as my friend Robert Jenrick has found, that’s the great tragedy with the Conservative party.
Great speeches, good slogans. But when the cameras are off, when the doors are shut and when they’re sat behind that table making the difficult decisions for the country, they fold. When push comes to shove, they go awol. No courage, no backbone, no resolve.
Even today, their so-called promise to leave the ECHR – it’s a lie, it’s a lie.
Half of the Conservative members, Conservative MPs, are dead against it. Another group don’t even understand it. And a mere handful sincerely believe that it’s the right thing to do …
There is no way on earth that the Conservative party will ever take the United Kingdom out of the ECHR, and there is no way on earth it will ever keep its promises to you.
Enough is enough. Enough of this political delusion. Enough of these political lies. Enough of these political chameleons who say one thing to one group and then another thing to another group.
The country is crying out for authentic leadership, credible leadership, leadership that it can trust.
Braverman said Nigel Farage was offering that sort of leadership.
Do you know how you can tell if someone is authentic and credible? You ask yourself, have they been consistent? And there is only one man in British politics who has been courageously consistent for his country, and that man is Nigel Farage.
Suella Braverman speaking at the Reform UK event this morning. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/ReutersShare
Braverman is MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, near Portsmouth. The Reform UK event this morning was billed as a veterans’ event, where Nigel Farage was going to commit to a policy of pardoning soldiers convicted of crimes in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and Braverman said she was proud of her constituency link to the naval dockyards in the port.
She claimed that servicemen and women had been let down by the Tories when they were in office. The Ministry of Defence was “broken”, she claimed.
Family accommodation is not good enough. I’ve met too many veterans who can’t get the medical treatment that they deserve for injuries that they sustained in service … It’s a national disgrace.
Why has this happened? Because over the last decade, defence spending has been hollowed out. Our armed forces stand at the smallest number in 200 years. Our equipment is inadequate. Our aircraft carriers don’t even have enough aircraft or destroyers. Our resilience is depleted. We can’t even defend ourselves. What kind of country is that?
But Braverman claimed the “biggest scandal” was the prosecution of veterans over Troubles-era offences.
She claimed that these prosecutions were happening because the UK was part of the European convention on human rights. As home secretary, she argued for the UK to leave, she said but claimed that the then PM, Rishi Sunak, “ignored me, then he blocked me and then he sacked me”.
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Updated at 07.50 EST
Braverman revives ‘Britain is broken’ claim as she explains her defection to Reform UK
In her speech at the Reform UK event this morning Suella Braverman started by arguing that Britain is broken. It is the same argument that Robert Jenrick made when he defected to Reform UK earlier this month.
Braverman said:
When a country gives you everything, like it has done me, you owe it loyalty. And loyalty demands honesty.
And honesty compels me to say this today Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well.
Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People don’t feel safe. Our youngsters are leaving the country for a better futures elsewhere. We can’t even defend ourselves and our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.
So we stand at a crossroads. We can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender. Or we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength. I believe that a better Britain is possible.
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Making a surprise appearance at a press conference in London, she said:
I resigned the Conservative whip and my party membership, my party membership of 30 years. It’s gone. It’s over today.
And because I believe, with my heart and soul, that a better future is possible for us, I am joining Reform UK.”
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Updated at 07.36 EST
Nigel Farage with former home secretary Suella Braverman at the Reform UK press conference in Westminster where she defected this morning. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PAShare
Braverman said:
I’m calling time. I’m calling time on Tory betrayal. I’m calling time on Tory lies. I’m calling time on a party that keeps making promises with zero intention of keeping them.
She told the crowd: “I feel like I’ve come home.”
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Updated at 07.50 EST
Former Tory home secretary Suella Braverman defects to Reform
Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary, is speaking at the Reform UK event this morning. She has announced that she is leaving the Tories after 30 years as a member and defecting to Nigel Farage’s party.
That means there are now eight Reform MPs in the Commons.
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Updated at 07.34 EST
Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson predicts Burnham will become MP ‘sooner rather than later’
Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, has predicted that Andy Burnham will become an MP “sooner rather than later”.
In a post on his Substack newsletter, Watson, who is now a peer, is less critical of the decison to block Burnham from being a byelection candidate than some of his Labour colleagues who have accused Keir Starmer of being cowardly, or undemocratic. But he suggests it would have been better if Starmer had struck a deal with Burnham about when he might be allowed to return to the Commons, and he says issuing a “public rebuke” to one of Labour’s most popular figures was a mistake.
Here is an extract.
[Burnham] will be sanguine about it all. After all, there is always another by-election down the road and they cannot say no forever.
Yet the decision, everyone agrees, is final. Until it isn’t. Because decisions in the Labour Party are always final, except when they change, which they often do, sometimes quietly, sometimes overnight and sometimes after someone notices that next week is beginning to look awkward.
If it were me, I wouldn’t have rushed this. I would have spoken to Andy first, established his intentions and secured some clarity about his ambitions. Perhaps even struck a deal. We owed him that much. Instead, we chose a public rebuke of one of our strongest, if occasionally tricksy, assets. Andy is a big boy. He knew exactly what he was doing. He applied for a role he could reasonably assume he was not going to get, which is not unknown in Labour politics. He can give as good as he gets. He will be an MP sooner rather than later. And it is rarely a mistake to pick up the phone.
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Updated at 06.49 EST
At the Centre for Social Justice event Szu Ping Chan, the Daily Telegraph’s economics editor who was chairing, opened the questions by inviting Andy Burnham to address “the elephant in the room”. Did he want Labour to reverse its decision?
Burnham said he did not want to comment.
I’ve said everything I’m going to say about that today … I’m very much focusing on my job.
Burnham used almost exactly the same line when he was doorstepped by reporters earlier in Manchester at the Whitworth art gallery, where he attended the launch of a new report, Class Ceiling, which highlights how the region’s working class are struggling to break into the arts world.
He opened his speech saying:
You’ve all been probably trying to escape sight of me all weekend but here I am, Monday morning. Fantastic to be here. To be honest, I have read every single word of the report because I have not had anything else to do this weekend.
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Updated at 06.26 EST
Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, is now speaking (via an online link) to the Centre for Social Justice event. He starts by joking about the fact that he will address the question on everybody’s lips today – what is the secret behind the success of Manchester’s MBacc?
The event is about technical education. Last month the thinktank published a report, Rewiring Education, and it contained forewords from Burnham, Michael Gove, the former Tory education secretary (also speaking at this morning’s event), Munira Wilson, the Lib Dem education spokesperson, and Danny Kruger, the Reform UK MP.
Burnham said he was pleased there was cross-party agreement on this.
In his foreword Burnham said:
There are millions of voters who feel alienated from politics. Most parents feel politicians are always talking about someone else’s kids. Almost half when polled say that they want more funding for apprenticeships, compared to fewer than one in four choosing university funding. Over half now identify apprenticeships as better value than degrees. Yet they see a political mainstream uninterested in them.
Technical education can move this dial. Educationally, our vision is not tied to a particular place – think of a BBacc in Birmingham, with an automotive component, an LBacc in Liverpool, with a ports component – the same picture, but with careful regional tailoring. This could be the template. All young people in school seeing a path from school to work, from the classroom to a career in the place they are proud to call home.
Andy Burnham speaking at a CSJ event online this morning Photograph: CSJShare
