Suzanne Harrington: There's always a 'full house' when you play hate bingo

Suella Braverman would have been comical if she wasn't so dangerous

Britain's former Home Secretary Suella Braverman leaves her home, in London. Pic: Toby Melville

Let’s play hate bingo.

Here are some random statements — see if you can get a full house.

• People protesting against the Israeli army bombing civilians are on 'hate marches'
• People coming from Calais in dinghies, risking their lives on open water, are an 'invasion'
• Sending asylum seekers to be detained in Rwanda is a 'dream'
• UK child grooming gangs are 'almost all British-Pakistani men'
• Being street homeless is a 'lifestyle choice'
• Using tents as shelter if you are street homeless should be 'restricted'
• Asylum seekers pretend to be gay to get 'special treatment'
• The police are 'too lenient' on people participating in 'hate marches'
• Anyone who disagrees with any of these is part of the 'tofu-eating wokerati'

To incorrectly paraphrase a well-known non-British groomer — Rolf Harris — can you tell who it is yet? A fascist chatbot experiment? The minutes of a National Front meeting in a room above a Nazi pub? A mad old racist on a park bench who shouts at pigeons?

You don’t have to be Wagatha Christie to figure it out. It’s…. the British Home Secretary. Actually — since five minutes ago — the former British Home Secretary, finally sacked when she attacked the wrong people: not society’s most desperate and vulnerable, but the police. Suella Braverman finally picked on the wrong group.

Or is it all some dastardly Machiavellian plot, as she angles for the job of PM? She sent the current PM a lengthy letter telling him how rubbish he is — “uncertain, weak, lacking in qualities of leadership” — although to be fair, being rubbish seems to be part of the job spec for ‘leading’ our closest neighbour these days.

After all, if Boris de Pfeffel Johnson can do it, why not a fascist lunatic residing in the body of a brown woman who claims to be Buddhist? Observing Braverman cosplaying Home Secretary has been like watching that demon inhabiting the child in The Exorcist. She’d have been comical if she weren’t so dangerous.

You might moan about Irish politicians being incompetent, out of touch etc, in that way everyone everywhere moans about politicians being incompetent, out of touch etc, but at least Ireland isn’t locked in the cognitive dissonance of a Black Mirror sub plot, where a Home Secretary badgers senior police to ban a legal march of buggy-pushing mums and their families peacefully protesting the slaughter of other buggy-pushing mums and their families.

In a statement which tipped into Monty-Python-sketch-edited-by-George-Orwell, she even compared pro-Palestinian marches to the marches in Northern Ireland of “dissident republicans”. Should we send her a copy of Northern Ireland For Dummies?

Anyway. She’s gone — for now — as the man who got the original hate ball rolling with his unforgivable Brexit referendum returns to the sinking ship of Tory Britain.

So moan yourself hoarse about Irish politicians, but spare a thought for the Irish in Britain living under this lot. And don’t say ‘well, leave then’ — thanks to their catastrophic economic vandalism, we can’t just sell up and run away. It’s like being trapped in a cheese dream where you never wake up.