Ruth Wishart: Suella Braverman and Tories have sullied Home Office

The Cenotaph will be adorned with ­dozens of poppy wreaths, and ­broadcasters will intone that Remembrance Sunday ­celebrates a moment of maximum national pride and togetherness. Families who lost sons and daughters will be interviewed and their loss and still-evident grief revisited.

Those unable to join this act of ­remembrance today include many millions, both military and civilian, who died in worldwide conflicts.

Some chose to serve, some died in ­random act of bombing in places like ­London and Clydebank. Some starved to death in the siege of Leningrad in a conflict which saw Russia – then an ally – lose some 24 million civilians. Some died in Dresden and Hamburg where we incinerated whole cities to “hasten peace”.

And we will be told that none of them died in vain but that their descendants would enjoy freedom from tyranny and the right of free speech. How hollow that claim rings this morning.

Innocents were incinerated too in ­Hiroshima and Nagasaki when we were ­assured that the use of atomic bombs would prevent us from ever going to war again, so ­unthinkable were the consequences.

And throughout decades of subsequent atrocities, from Srebrenica to Sri Lanka, from Cambodia to Rwanda, we looked aghast at the carnage and vowed we would never let such humanitarian catastrophes occur again.

Except we do. We wring our hands over the desecration of Ukraine though careful not to admit that country to Nato which might involve sending troops rather than bigger and “better” weapons.

And, yet again, we witness horror in the Middle East. Horror in Israel where ­certifiable and bloodthirsty madmen kill and maim and capture, and horror in that tiny strip of Palestine called Gaza which the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen – a man with a high shock threshold born of reportage from sundry war zones – advised us was now “a wasteland”.

Gaza has been devastated

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, illegal ­settlers handed assault weapons sent from the USA, kill Palestinian farmers for no better reason than, for generations, they have worked the land. Land which some Israelis – even some in today’s cabinet – still insist belongs to them.

The Israel Defence Force, outraged by the wanton murders and hostage-taking of a month ago, tells people still working in hospitals in the North of Gaza to go south or else. Even in the knowledge that such transfers of incubated babies and ­intensively cared for patients is a ­ practical impossibility.

We watch those who can leave that wasteland on foot for a southern region, already awash with refugees, where food and water and fuel and medicine are not available, and, where bombs also drop.

Those who would indulge that post-war freedom to speak against yet more ­carnage are derided as haters and a mob.

Not by some right-wing eejit like the ­English Defence League’s former leader Tommy ­Robinson (below), who called for vigilantes to come and defend a Cenotaph which ­nobody has targeted – but by a UK Home Secretary.

Once described as one of the four great offices of the land, it has been occupied in turn by a series of incumbents hardly noted for their ready empathy.

There was the long-serving Theresa May who introduced the hostile environment, the ineffable Priti Patel who was promoted despite previous ­parliamentary “convictions” for freelancing, and of course, the unlovely Suella Braverman who lasted a whole month before having to resign over sending confidential info to one of her right-wing chums.

She bounced back again when ­appointed by Rishi who, by common ­consent, used her to placate his right-wing – if such a term is relevant in a ­government now more or less entirely right-wing since Boris sacked anyone ­considered too ­centrist by half.

In between, we had Amber Rudd who ­resigned when caught telling ­porkies about Home Office targets for ­forcibly ­removing folk like the Windrush ­generation; ­Sajid Javid who also resigned when a certain Dominic Cummings frogmarched Javid’s spokesperson out the building, and that man for all ministerial seasons, Grant Shapps, who lasted a whole six days. What a shower.

In short, the days when that office could reasonably be called great ended many administrations ago, and the likes of genuine liberal reformers like Roy ­Jenkins are an increasingly hazy memory.

One of the very many reasons why this shambles of a UK Government has to get its jotters is because a talent pool which was always shallow now only contains those whom we might charitably describe as ­“political minnows”, were that not an insult to small fish.

Once, the idea that someone like ­Braverman could delude herself that she was Tory leadership material was ­something only a serial fantasist could envisage. Now she feels emboldened to career around the palace of ­Westminster grabbing headlines, trashing ideals, ­blaming victims, and, not at all ­incidentally, daring the man in Number 10 to make her day if he’s brave enough.

It is said that Sunak (below) is more or less “on the same page” as Braverman, ideologically speaking, it’s just that he can’t quite bring himself to use language once only fit for bampots or Tory vice-chair Lee Anderson – delete as appropriate.

If that is so, if the Prime Minister is ­really as devoid of common humanity as the woman he rescued from deserved ­obscurity to seal the Number 10 deal, then things are even worse than we ­suspected. If that’s possible.

In a few days’ time, there will be a court judgment on a policy which Braverman has championed and he has regularly ­endorsed – sending asylum seekers to Rwanda for “processing”.

It is of course all of a piece with ­chucking men and their families out of ­hotel accommodation after solemnly promising that interpreters and fixers, on whom our military daily relied in Afghanistan, would be given if not a home fit for heroes, at least a decent home.

This government is now content to boast that it is decanting 400/450 a week, even if some councils, left to pick up the tab, are saying that half of them will become homeless. That would be the ones not dumped in a barge.

Worse than that, we have still to evacuate some 400 others and their 1600 family members from a country where they have a very large target on their back and are being hunted down by the Taliban.

We made commitments to all these brave people, also war veterans, who risked their lives supporting our ­military and were left to their fate when we ­decamped.

You may recall that the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab could not be stirred from his luxury hols to oversee the disastrous retreat from Kabul.

He too was uniquely unqualified for a “great” office, but was made Johnson’s deputy when the latter was ­hospitalised with the Covid virus he had airily ­dismissed as not a real and present threat.

So our act of remembrance today, ­however we choose to mark it, should ­encompass memories of those who served with us, but whom we treated with less than respect.

My late uncles all served, my late father too. I need no lessons on the sacrifices families made when the call came and they went off to foreign lands persuaded that future freedoms depended on it.

These freedoms are now under a very different kind of threat. Slowly but very surely, this authoritarian regime in ­Westminster is dismantling the rights we imagined to be sacrosanct.

The protest group Led By Donkeys took their title from a chief of staff of the German army in the First World War. Lions led by donkeys was his verdict on our army.

In terms of the current UK ­Government, it still holds good.