SUELLA Braverman must be fizzing. Not about being sacked – most observers had concluded she was goading Rishi Sunak into doing it – but about being upstaged.

For all her scheming and plotting, and strategic signalling to the far-right wing of the Tory party, could she ever have predicted yesterday morning’s top headline?

It certainly seemed to take everyone else by surprise, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. Sunak has been in a sticky spot ever since he appointed Braverman as home secretary in return for her support for his leadership bid. In doing so he was keeping his enemies close.

Braverman is not just a member of the European Research Group (ERG), but a former chair of it.

Last night that group’s deputy chairwoman, Andrea Jenkyns, didn’t even pause to calm herself down before submitting a barely coherent letter of no confidence in Sunak, ranting that he had “purged the centre-right from the Cabinet” and sacked the only member with “the balls to speak the truth of the appalling state of our streets”.

READ MORE: Calls for Lords reform as David Cameron to dodge Commons grillings

She encouraged other “MP’s” [sic] to follow suit, rather than “sit on their hands and let he [sic] and his out-of-touch advisors damage our party irrevocably”.

Writing is clearly not the forte of this former education minister, who might have better conveyed her message by simply repeating the one-fingered gesture she gave when walking into Downing Street to watch Boris Johnson’s resignation speech. She certainly can’t be accused of sitting on her hands.

If Sunak wants advice on what not to do when being held to ransom by enemies in the party-within-a-party that is the ERG, he could do worse than ask David Cameron. The man we’re now expected to call “Lord Cameron” responded to these pressures by taking a huge and ultimately disastrous gamble.

Cameron has insisted he does not regret pledging, in his party’s 2015 manifesto, to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership after “negotiating a new settlement for Britain in the EU”, arguing that such a vote would have to happen eventually.

The National:

But he has also claimed he thinks every day about “the referendum and the fact that we lost and the consequences and the things that could have been done differently, adding: “I worry desperately about what is going to happen next.”

Sunak presumably doesn’t want to spend his post-politics days desperately worrying about a rash decision he made while trying to unite his warring party. But the very act of appointing Cameron – essentially, as of Sunday, just a man off the street – to the role of Foreign Secretary perhaps conveys that he isn’t very impressed by the calibre of his colleagues, and isn’t willing to give unserious people serious jobs just for the sake of party unity.

It’s quite the message to send, and it’s a sign of the times that many folk who were strong critics of Cameron during his time as prime minister have confessed to feeling at least a little relief that he will be the one representing the UK internationally during these turbulent times.

This despite a parliamentary inquiry finding that he showed a “significant lack of judgment” by engaging in a personally lucrative lobbying campaign on behalf of the now-defunct bank Greensill Capital.

READ MORE: Devil will be in detail of the Scottish Government’s new Housing Bill

The current Prime Minister seems to be banking on the fact that because Cameron didn’t move like a robot, look like a scarecrow or talk like a halfwit, the jaded British public will now assess him as a competent former leader.

That voters might think “well, he didn’t hold hands with Donald Trump, or botch the response to a pandemic, or crash the UK economy”, and therefore he can probably be trusted with a great office of state at a globally critical moment.

Cameron hit the ground running yesterday, within hours of James Cleverly vacating the role of Foreign Secretary by becoming Braverman’s replacement. It is Cleverly who will have to respond to tomorrow’s Supreme Court ruling on whether the UK Government’s Rwanda deportation policy is lawful, so don’t expect Braverman to keep quiet for very long.

The National: Suella Braverman

If she was hoping that her recent headline-grabbing remarks – about street homelessness as a “lifestyle choice” and pro-Palestine demos as “hate marches” – would get her sacked, she will also have been planning exactly how to respond to the ruling from the sidelines.

It is widely expected that the court will rule against the UK Government, agreeing with the June decision of the Court of Appeal that it is unlawful to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Should this happen, we can expect even more inflammatory rhetoric from the woman who just days ago accused the police of “playing favourites”.

She once said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see the Rwanda flights take off – so she will make it her business to become Sunak’s worst nightmare if the plan is thwarted by judges.

Sunak may live to regret making “stop the boats” one of his five pledges, unless he has another idea up his sleeve. Braverman doesn’t need another idea, or even any evidence that the Rwanda plan would actually have worked.

She just needs a platform from which to rant.