Suella Braverman was paid £16,876 of taxpayers’ money when she was sacked as the home secretary under Rishi Sunak last November, new accounts reveal.
The former cabinet minister now sits as a backbencher in the Commons, but had served on the Tory frontline until she was fired for writing an article in The Times slamming the police.
She made a series of inflammatory remarks ahead of some London protests, claiming the police were guilty of having a left-wing bias, and hitting out at “pro-Palestinian mobs” ahead of a wave of right-wing violence in Whitehall.
Downing Street soon revealed she did not get the text cleared with No.10 before publication, suggesting a split between the PM and his then-home secretary.
She was promptly sacked, triggering a major cabinet reshuffle days later.
But, the Home Office published the annual report and accounts for 2023 to 2024 today, and revealed Braverman received the generous “non-taxable exit payment” at the end of last year.
That was the second time Braverman had to resign as home secretary; she was fired by Liz Truss after she breached the ministerial code by sharing an official document from her personal email address with a parliamentary colleague.
She was reappointed six days later when Sunak was in No.10, after the new PM said she had “accepted her mistake”.
A Labour source told HuffPost UK: “The fact that Suella Braverman was able to walk away with a tax-free payout of this size after being sacked for the second time in a year demonstrates how the ministerial severance system was brought into disrepute by the last Tory government, and why it will need to change under Labour.”
Braverman was expected to try and run to be the next Tory leader after Sunak announced he would be stepping down following their historic election defeat.
However, she announced she was withdrawing from it – even though she supposedly had the 10 MPs required to to enter the contest – because the “traumatised” party did not want to listen to her take on why it failed.
Many supporters expected to back her reportedly switched to fellow right-wing Tory Robert Jenrick after the election.
Jenrick, the former immigration minister under Sunak, resigned from the government last December – but he also received a generous tax-free pay-out, according to the Home Office accounts.
He was handed £7,920 when he quit the front bench over the Rwanda deportation bill, claiming it did not go fair enough.