Suella Braverman says she has ‘concerns about the direction of this government’ in resignation letter – live

The resignation letter from Suella Braverman is fascinating, and raises a lot more questions than it answers. Here are the key points.

• Braverman says she resigned because she sent an official government document to an MP and this was “a technical infringement of the rules”. The document was a draft written ministerial statement about migration. Ministers use ministerial statements to announce relatively minor policy decisions, and although technically they count as confidential information, ministers routinely share documents like this with MPs in advance of publication. Braverman says she did this as part of “policy engagement” with a trusted colleague. Sky’s Sam Coates says the information was deemed “market sensitive”, because immigration policy will affect the OBR’s economic forecast. But this still does not feel like a mega-sensitive leak. MPs are regularly given information like this in advance, and you would need to be an exceptional economist to work out how a migration policy announcement would affect the OBR’s forecast.

• Braverman says she sent the official document from her personal email. Ministers are not meant to use personal email addresses for businesses. But many of them have done in the past, without losing their jobs. During Covid several ministers, including Boris Johnson, were reported to have used personal emails for government business.

• Braverman says she reported herself to the cabinet secretary over what she had did and is resigning because she holds herself “to the highest standards”. But it is not clear from this if she was sacked, or decided to go herself. It has been reported that what she did broke the ministerial code, and Liz Truss has said she wants to enforce higher standards than her predecessor. But the Committee on Standards in Public Life has said that ministers should not always have to resign for breaches of the ministerial code, and this seems – on what we know so far – to be a relatively minor breach.

• Braverman says “the business of government relies upon people accepting responsibility for their mistakes”. She also says pretending not to have made a mistake “is not serious politics”. This passage takes us into very different territory, and suggests she had an ulterior motive. After all, it is not hard to think of an example of another cabinet minister who recently made a mistake and then took quite a while to own up to it.

• Braverman admits she has “concerns about the direction of this government”. In particular, she says she has concerns about the government’s commitment to reducing overall migration numbers. This is a direct reference to Truss saying that she would like some types of immigration to rise, to promote growth. She also says she has “serious concerns about this government’s commitment to honouring manifesto commitments”. This passage makes this look like a policy resignation, from a rightwinger (with leadership ambitions) perhaps unhappy about the fact the Tory party is in effect under the control of the more centrist Jeremy Hunt.

On Sky News Sam Coates says the information that Suella Braverman passed on was “market sensitive”, because it related to immigration policy that would affect the OBR’s economic forecast.

Here is Suella Braverman’s resignation letter. She says she decided to resign because she realised she had committed “a technical infringement of the rules”.

My colleague Henry Dyer says Suella Braverman was the shortest serving home secretary since the second world war.

Danny Shaw, the BBC’s former home affairs correspondent, says she is the shortest-serving home secretary for 188 years.

If Suella Braverman was sacked over a mistake, then that does beg the question as to why she was appointed to such a senior post, without having had experience running a major government department, in the first place.

Reportedly Braverman will be replaced as home secretary by Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary. Liz Truss sacked Shapps when she took office. It later emerged that, when Truss dismissed Shapps, she told him that he was “one of the most competent secretaries of state in government” and “probably the best communicator in government” – but that he had to go anyway, because he did not back her in the leadership contest.

Sky’s Sam Coates says he has been told that Suella Braverman left office in relation to an “honest mistake” involving an email being on a private phone.

UPDATE: Coates says he has been told there were two reasons for Braverman’s departure. He says one problem was that she had shared secure infomation on a private phone. In other words, she broke the rules on handling confidential information. He says he does not know the other reasons.

Here is more on the departure of Suella Braverman from political journalists.

From ITV’s Robert Peston

From my colleague Pippa Crerar

From the Times’ Steven Swinford

From Cat Neilan from Tortoise

And here is an extract from the Braverman story.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}There is speculation that Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary who strongly backed Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race, will replace Braverman in another sudden revamp of Truss’s government …

Sources claimed the move was at the behest of the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who has taken over control of the government’s economic response following Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, but who they claimed was now “pulling the strings”.

Replacing Braverman with Shapps, less than a week after sacking Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor in place of Hunt, would be another sign of Truss trying to both appeal to a broader section of the Conservative party, and replacing perceived ideologues with more experienced ministers.

The home secretary, who was given the job when Truss entered No 10 in early September, was seen as a backbench and party member-pleasing choice for the role, given her robust views on immigration, law and order and culture war issues.

Suella Braverman is understood to have departed as UK home secretary after Liz Truss cleared her diary and called off a planned visit amid desperate attempts to save her premiership, my colleagues Pippa Crerar and Peter Walker report.

MPs passed the Labour motion criticising the mini-budget by 223 votes to 0. As is often the case with opposition day motions, the government told its MPs to abstain. The government takes the view that these motions are not binding, and can be ignored.

Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, raised a point of order to point out that the motion calls for the publication of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s economic forecast “immediately”, as well as government estimates of the windfall profits being made by energy companies over the next two years. He asked what could be done to ensure the government complied.

Nigel Evans, the deputy Speaker, said it was up to the government to respond in due course.

Savanta ComRes has some new polling out this afternoon. Like all polling at the moment, it is dire for Liz Truss and the Conservative party.