Former Conservative cabinet minister Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has launched a blistering attack on Suella Braverman, calling the home secretary “dangerous and divisive” for her comments on pro-Palestine marches that “embolden the far right”.
The Tory peer and former party chair also said some in government “project as patriots but they are arsonists” in a brutal assessment of the Rishi Sunak administration.
Appearing on Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge on Sky News, Warsi did not hold back in her views on Braverman, who has labelled the demonstrations as “hate marches”.
Warsi took issue with Braverman’s take on the demonstrations due to take place around Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.
The Met Police has said organisers are “willing to avoid the Whitehall area”, staying away from The Cenotaph where high-profile events paying respect to the war dead will take place, and Warsi accused Braverman of making this “a political issue to embolden the far right”.
She said: “She’d been briefed by the Met of what the route of the march was going to be, and the fact that they didn’t have concerns at this stage, she has now made this a live political issue because that’s the way she operates, right?
“She fights culture wars. She doesn’t fix things, she breaks things.”
Warsi added: “I think she’s dangerous and she’s divisive. If you look at her rhetoric, it is always about pitching A against B.
“We have now, sadly, some of my colleagues in government who project as patriots but they are indeed arsonists. They set this country alight, they pit community against community, they create these fires. And that is not the job of a government.
“The job of a government is to keep us all safe.
“And you do that by creating a sense of ease, not by fighting culture wars.”
The government has actively discouraged any demonstrations next weekend, during Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, and PM Rishi Sunak has said it would be “disrespectful” for such a march to go ahead.
He claimed that it would present a “risk” to the Cenotaph and other war memorials could be “desecrated”.
Armistice Day is marked with a two-minute silence on November 11 every year in the UK, and honours the agreement which ended the fighting of the First World War before official peace negotiations began.
The march’s organisers at the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign are calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.