The Frankenstein Reanimation of a Failed Politician: Suella Braverman Defects to Reform UK

Suella Braverman’s defection to Reform UK marks the eighth Tory MP to abandon ship. But what exactly has she abandoned? And what, beyond raw ambition, has she found?

When does a political party cease to be a vehicle for principle and become merely a vessel for survival?

The news that Suella Braverman has defected to Reform UK should surprise no one who has watched the slow-motion collapse of the Conservative Party. Following Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell, her departure marks the eighth sitting MP to join Nigel Farage’s ranks. She claims she has “come home.” If that is true, then the home she left behind (the party of Disraeli, Churchill, and even Thatcher) is now little more than a hollowed-out shell, vandalised by 40 years of arrogant globalisation and betrayal of the British people. A property awaiting a new tenant or a simple demolition order.

The Reanimation of Failure

This is not a political realignment. It is a Frankenstein transplant: the reanimation of failed politicians in new party colours. Braverman’s record in government speaks louder than any defection speech. She was Attorney General when the government broke international law over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. She was Home Secretary when asylum processing collapsed into chaos, sat at her desk counting heads entering the country during the Boriswave. She was a senior Cabinet member when the Rwanda scheme became a £700 million monument to policy failure. She was sacked twice: once for sending classified documents from her personal email, and again for accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in a newspaper column. Neither dismissal prompted soul-searching or reflection. Both simply became data points in a career trajectory aimed relentlessly upward.

Now she stands beside Nigel Farage, praising his “courageous consistency” whilst embodying its opposite. The woman who spent years implementing Tory immigration policy now claims she was silenced for advocating withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. The woman who oversaw government departments now declares the state is broken and the nation weak. She sat in the office responsible for the policies she now condemns. The transformation is instant, the reinvention seamless, the accountability absent.

Her defection speech recycled the standard Reform vocabulary: Britain is broken, immigration is out of control, public services are on their knees, the nation stands weak and humiliated. Each claim delivered without a trace of irony by someone who spent years in positions of power doing precisely nothing to address these supposed catastrophes. Or rather, actively worsening them.

The Mirage of the Heartland

Welcome to the Pantomime of Politics…
Prime Minister Sir @Keir_Starmer crosses the floor of the House of Commons for a friendly chat with @Nigel_Farage… pic.twitter.com/aRWfBtTOCk

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) November 30, 2024

Years ago, a shopkeeper in a struggling Midlands town told me that he did not care who sat in Westminster, provided they stopped treating his community like a laboratory for failing economic experiments. He had watched the local library close, the police station become a part-time kiosk, the bank become a bar, and the paper shop a Turkish Barbers. To him, the “Conservative” label meant nothing if it failed to conserve the very fabric of his street.

Today, that same man is the target of Reform’s rhetoric. He is being told that his struggles are not the result of fourteen years of neoliberal mismanagement, but the fault of an “establishment” that Suella Braverman served at the highest level for years.

The apologists for the Tory leadership will argue that this is merely “spring cleaning,” as Kemi Badenoch’s team has suggested, shedding “unreliable” elements. This is a comforting delusion. In reality, the Tory membership increasingly views Farage as their spiritual leader. The “New Tory Party” is already here. It just happens to be called Reform UK.

The Price of Accountability

This is why the defections matter. Not because they represent genuine political transformation, but because they reveal how thoroughly the British political class has abandoned any pretense of institutional loyalty or democratic accountability. MPs now switch parties mid-term without triggering by-elections, treating their seats as personal property rather than democratic mandates. Ministers who failed in government rebrand themselves as insurgents without acknowledging their own records. The same faces, the same rhetoric, the same absence of genuine principle or competence.

Farage welcomes them because numbers matter in Parliament. Each defection strengthens Reform’s hand, increases its leverage, and builds the appearance of momentum. But what Reform gains in parliamentary arithmetic, it loses in coherence. How can a party claim to represent radical change whilst recruiting the architects of failure? How can it position itself as anti-establishment whilst absorbing establishment politicians? The contradiction is fundamental. Either Reform is a genuine insurgency, or it is a holding company for displaced Conservatives. It cannot be both.

The British public deserve better than this charade. They deserve political parties that maintain their principles rather than mutating into vehicles for each leader’s warped personality. They deserve institutions that stand for something beyond the career ambitions of their temporary custodians. They deserve a politics where accountability exists, where failure has consequences, where electoral mandates cannot be traded like commodities between party brands.

Instead they get Suella Braverman, standing on a Reform platform, declaring she has “come home” to a party she joined this morning, asking voters to trust her judgment after years of demonstrable incompetence, claiming courage whilst displaying only calculation.

The Frankenstein monster walks again. Same failed policies, same tired rhetoric, same politicians who broke the country now offering to fix it. Different party colours. Identical moral bankruptcy.

Thirty years of Conservative membership, abandoned in an instant. Not because the party changed, but because remaining became inconvenient. That is the only principle Braverman has ever consistently maintained: advancement at any cost.

Mary Shelley’s monster searched for humanity in a world that rejected him. He longed for connection, for meaning, for something beyond survival. There was tragedy in his isolation, pathos in his rage. Modern politicians have dispensed with such searching. They feel no isolation because they recognise no community beyond their own advancement. They require no meaning because they measure everything in office held and career preserved. Shelley’s creature was abandoned and became monstrous. Braverman and her kind were never abandoned at all. They simply calculated that monstrosity paid better, and called it principle.

The Tory Party is dead. Long live the Tory Party, now wearing a turquoise tie…