Séamas O'Reilly: It's hard not to feel that Britain is a deeply unserious country

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a meeting of the new-look Cabinet following a reshuffle on Monday, at 10 Downing Street, London. Pic: Kin Cheung/PA Wire

How does one explain a week like this in British politics? We should start and end, I suppose, with Suella Braverman, whose career as Home Secretary was ended for the second time in 13 months. 

In any other political era, this would be remarkable but this latest reshuffle named the Tories’ eighth home secretary in as many years, its sixth education secretary in four years and its fourth health secretary in two years, enacted by the third Prime Minister Britain has seen in the last 15 months. 

None of these come close to the traffic at the office of the Ministry for Housing, which has seen 17 ministers in 11 years. (Perhaps, in the grip of the UK’s rental crisis, it’s good to have a Housing Secretary who knows what it’s like to fear eviction at any moment).

Put simply, this week’s reshuffle was a confounding mess that feels more like a death rattle than a battle cry for the beleaguered Tory government. 

Other than Suella’s exit, the biggest headline was the return of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. 

It had the grammar of a TV show, struggling through its 13th series, resorting to fan-favourite cameos to recapture some past glory.

When said glory is the former prime minister who resigned in disgrace after Brexit, and whose only notable contribution since was pocketing £10m to make advances on behalf of a hedge fund implicated in one of the biggest financial frauds in recent memory, you get the sense their store of returning messiahs may be bare.

Quite apart from the meat and spuds of the reshuffle itself, the announcements themselves were bizarre.

Individual posts from the Conservative Twitter account announced each new appointee with a jarringly glib caption and — it pains me to report that decades’ worth of A-level politics students will have to memorise these — emojis of biceps, spaceships and fire symbols.

On a day of desolate embarrassments, these announcements may well have been the most deeply dignityphobic aspect of the entire sorry spectacle.

UK Home Secretary James Cleverly: [flexing bicep emoji], apparently

Pitching themselves somewhere between transfer gossip updates and Love Island castaway announcements, they neither reflected the seriousness of their station, nor any coherent tone at all. 

“Huge move [flexing bicep emoji]” the Conservative Party said on announcing the appointment of James Cleverly to Home Secretary. 

If it was meant to be light-hearted, it came off as glib, not merely a baffling stylistic choice, but also an impossibly confusing one. 

They were, after all, saying this to themselves, about their own appointments, in online lingo they barely understood, for reasons it was increasingly difficult to fathom.

As such, reading through the entire list of announcements was embarrassing, but also worrying and sad, like finding your father’s stash of self-penned My Little Pony fan fiction.

And this leads us to the central horror of Conservative-led politics in Britain today. 

It’s hard not to feel that Britain is a deeply unserious country with a deeply unserious political culture, vacillating at all times between cruelty and cringe.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the figure of Rishi Sunak, a vaguely plausible hologram of a politician, an AI who’s been fed too few commands to pass the Turing Test. 

He has been the real winner in the meat grinder of competence that has mulched its way through all of the more laurelled and effective politicians in the Conservative Party since 2016.

Sunak is a moderate only in the homoeopathic sense. That is, he says as little as he can and projects a sort of bland conformity that passes for statesmanship in this gravitas-denuded era. 

He’s displayed little in the way of actual moderation in his policies and has repeatedly leaned into divisive culture war sniping any time he’s been told to, not least when it comes to the star of this weekend’s firmament, Suella Braverman.

Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman: "A Dickensian character who has failed upwards by dint of being prepared to say and do anything that keeps the Right of the Tory party happy or livid"

And where can we start with Suella? A Dickensian character who has failed upwards by dint of being prepared to say and do anything that keeps the Right of the Tory party happy or livid (those two emotions are, in their case, synonymous). 

It would be pointless to try and recount her greatest hits, so let’s focus on those horrors she’s committed in recent memory:

• her abortive, and massively illegal, plan to fly migrants to Rwanda
• her housing of asylum seekers on a prison barge which immediately suffered a Legionella outbreak
• her decision to remove tents from rough sleepers, and her attendant claim that homelessness was “a lifestyle choice”
• her assertion last week that all of those marching for a ceasefire in Gaza were terrorist sympathisers on a “hate march”, culminating in her garbled comparison of such events to “the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”.

This statement had two fatal consequences. 

First, she’d displayed such a spectacular ignorance of Northern Irish politics that she’d implicate loyalists — those who do 95% of the marching — as hatemongers, rather embarrassing herself, and her ideological bedfellows in that community.

The second was altogether more serious, as far-right thugs descended on London on Armistice Day to “defend the cenotaph” from a march that was starting two hours later, and many miles away. 

Finding no Hamas fighters in view, they settled into fights with the police instead, causing a whirlwind of disruption that few could argue Braverman’s statements hadn’t helped provoke.

This was, it seemed, the bottom to the Braverman barrel, and no amount of spin from the right-wing press was enough to shield her from the chop.

Not that she may be particularly displeased, since it has been mooted for weeks — and was even alleged at Prime Minister’s Questions last week — that her increasingly hostile pronouncements were all a precursor to her own attempt to oust Sunak when the time comes.

So farewell, Suella Braverman. I doubt we’ll be lucky enough to forget you. If the past few years are anything to go by, your incompetence, cruelty and cringe will be no barrier to re-entry. See you, as leader, next time.