Sue-Ellen Cassiana "Suella" Braverman ( ; ; born 3 April 1980) is a British politician and barrister who twice served as Home Secretary from 6 September 2022 to 19 October 2022, and again from 25 October 2022 to 13 November 2023.
As a member of the Conservatives, she was chair of the European Research Group from 2017 to 2018 and Attorney General for England and Wales from 2020 to March 2021, and again from September 2021 to 2022. She has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Fareham and Waterlooville, previously Fareham, since 2015. Braverman was elected as a member of the Conservative Party, but defected to Reform UK on 26 January 2026.
In the January 2018 cabinet reshuffle, Braverman was appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state for exiting the European Union by Prime Minister Theresa May. In November 2018, she resigned in protest against May's draft Brexit withdrawal agreement. Braverman was appointed Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle; she was appointed as Queen's Counsel automatically on her appointment.
Following Johnson announcing his resignation in July 2022, Braverman stood as a candidate to succeed him in the July–September Conservative Party leadership election; she was eliminated from the ballot after the second round of voting. She subsequently supported Liz Truss's bid to become Conservative leader, and was appointed home secretary on 6 September 2022 when Truss became prime minister. Braverman resigned as home secretary on 19 October 2022 following public claims that she had broken the Ministerial Code after having sent a Cabinet document using her personal email address. Six days later, she was reinstated as home secretary by Truss's successor Rishi Sunak. She was dismissed from her post by Sunak in the November 2023 British cabinet reshuffle.
Early life and education Braverman was born Sue-Ellen Cassiana Fernandes on 3 April 1980 in Harrow, London, and raised in Wembley. She is the daughter of Indian Christian immigrants, Uma (née Mootien-Pillay) and Christie Fernandes, who had immigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya respectively. She is named after the character Sue Ellen Ewing from the American television soap opera Dallas, of which her mother was a fan, but Sue-Ellen was abbreviated to Suella by her primary school teachers. Her mother is an Indian-Mauritian of Tamil descent, and was a nurse and a councillor in Brent, and the Conservative candidate for Tottenham in the 2001 general election and the 2003 Brent East by-election. Her father is an Indian-Kenyan of Goan descent.- - - worked for a housing association. She is the niece of Mahen Kundasamy, a former Mauritian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
She attended the Uxendon Manor Primary School in Brent and the fee-paying Heathfield School in Pinner, on a partial scholarship, after which she read law at Queen's College of the University of Cambridge. During her undergraduate studies, she was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.
Braverman lived in France for two years, as an Erasmus Programme student and then as an Entente Cordiale Scholar, where she studied for a master's degree in European and French law at Panthéon-Sorbonne University.-
Legal career Braverman was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 2005. She completed pupillage at 2–3 Gray's Inn Square (now Cornerstone Barristers) but did not start tenancy there, beginning practice at the London branch of a large Birmingham set, No5 Chambers. She worked in litigation including the judicial review "basics" for a government practitioner of immigration and planning law. She passed the New York bar examination in 2006, becoming licensed to practise law in the state until the licence was suspended in 2021 after she did not re-register as an attorney. She was appointed to the Attorney General's C panel of counsel, the entry level, undertaking basic government cases, in 2010.
Braverman founded the Africa Justice Foundation in 2010 alongside barristers Cherie Booth and Philip Riches.
Parliamentary career Braverman's name was already on the list of Conservative parliamentary candidates at the time of the 2003 Brent East by-election, and she had to be persuaded not to seek the nomination. Her mother, Uma Fernandes, a Conservative councillor, was selected to fight the seat, and Braverman campaigned for her. At the 2005 general election, Braverman contested Leicester East, finishing in second place behind Labour's Keith Vaz, who won with a 15,876-vote (38.4%) majority. She sought selection as the Conservative candidate in Bexhill and Battle, but was unsuccessful, and was eventually selected to be the Conservative candidate for Fareham in Hampshire. Braverman also sought election to the London Assembly at the 2012 Assembly elections and was placed fourth on the Conservative London-wide list; only the first three Conservative candidates were elected.
Braverman was elected to the House of Commons as the MP for Fareham at the 2015 general election with 56.1% of the vote and a majority of 22,262. She gave her maiden speech on 1 June 2015. She has taken a particular interest in education, home affairs and justice and has written for The Daily Telegraph, Bright Blue, i News, HuffPost, Brexit Central and ConservativeHome.Articles:
She was a member of the British delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2015 to 2017, and was a full member of the Assembly's Committee on the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights.
Braverman opened a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons- on the failings of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and chaired meetings with the Trust's executives and with other MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Hampshire, in which instances of poor care quality and the deaths of patients were investigated.
Braverman campaigned to leave the European Union in the 2016 EU membership referendum; a majority (55%) of votes in her constituency were for Leave. She was chair of the European Research Group, a pro-Leave group of Conservative MPs, from May 2017 until her promotion to ministerial office; she was replaced by Jacob Rees-Mogg.- At the 2017 general election, Braverman was re-elected, increasing her share of the vote to 63.0% but decreasing her majority to 21,555. Following the election, she was appointed parliamentary private secretary to the ministers of the Treasury.
During the January 2018 reshuffle, Braverman was appointed as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union. On 15 November 2018, Braverman resigned on the same day that David Davis's successor, Dominic Raab, resigned as Brexit secretary in protest at Theresa May and Olly Robbins's draft Brexit deal, which had been released the day before.
In March 2019, Braverman stated in a speech for the Bruges Group that "as Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against Cultural Marxism". Journalist Dawn Foster challenged Braverman's use of the term "cultural Marxism", highlighting its antisemitic history and stating it was a theory in the manifesto of the mass murderer Anders Breivik.- - - Braverman's use of the term was initially condemned as hate speech by other MPs, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the anti-racist organisation Hope not Hate, among other anti-racist charities. Braverman denied that the term was an antisemitic trope, saying, "We have culture evolving from the far left which has allowed the snuffing out of freedom of speech, freedom of thought. ... I'm very aware of that ongoing creep of cultural Marxism, which has come from Jeremy Corbyn."- - - After meeting with her later, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said in a subsequent statement that she is "not in any way antisemitic", saying it believed that she did not "intentionally use antisemitic language", while finding that she "is clearly a good friend of the Jewish community" and that they were "sorry to see that the whole matter has caused distress".
At the 2019 general election, Braverman was again re-elected, increasing her share of the vote to 63.7% and increasing her majority to 26,086.
Under the 2023 review of Westminster constituencies, her Fareham constituency was dissolved and merged with part of Meon Valley to form "Fareham and Waterlooville". Her rival in the selection process was Meon Valley MP Flick Drummond. On 5 April 2023, the re-selection vote was held and Braverman won the vote by 77 votes to 54.
At the 2024 general election, Braverman was elected to Parliament as MP for Fareham and Waterlooville with 35% of the vote and a majority of 6,079.
Attorney general
In the 13 February 2020 reshuffle, Braverman was appointed Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland, succeeding Geoffrey Cox who had been dismissed from government.- Braverman was made QC at the time of this appointment. She was later criticised by members of the Bar Council for her poor choices in the role.–
Braverman was designated as a minister on leave while pregnant on 2 March 2021, shortly after the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021 was enacted to allow this arrangement. Michael Ellis became acting attorney general until she resumed office on 11 September 2021.
Leadership candidate
During the July 2022 United Kingdom government crisis, Braverman remained a minister, though on 6 July 2022, she called for Boris Johnson to resign. She stood in the ensuing Conservative Party leadership election, but was eliminated from the race in the second round of ballots, winning 27 votes, a reduction on her vote in the first round and the lowest of the remaining candidates. She then endorsed Liz Truss.
Had she succeeded in being appointed prime minister, Braverman said her priorities would have been to deliver tax cuts, cut government spending, tackle the cost of living challenges, "solve the problem of boats crossing the Channel", deliver "Brexit opportunities", withdraw the UK from the European Convention of Human Rights and "get rid of all of this woke rubbish".- (She was speaking on Sky News)- - She also said she would suspend the UK's target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. In August 2022, The Guardian reported that Braverman's leadership campaign had received a £10,000 donation from a company owned by the climate change denier Terence Mordaunt.
Home Secretary first term (2022) Braverman was appointed Home Secretary in the new Truss ministry on 6 September 2022.
In October 2022, Braverman said that she would love to see a front page of The Daily Telegraph sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, and described it as her "dream" and "obsession". The first attempted flight by the UK to send asylum seekers to Rwanda in June 2022 resulted in asylum seekers being restrained and attached to plane seats after self-harming and threatening suicide. On the matter, the UN Refugee Agency said that the "arrangement, which amongst other concerns seeks to shift responsibility and lacks necessary safeguards, is incompatible with the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention" in regard to the rights of refugees. Later Amber Rudd, a former Conservative Home Secretary, criticised the plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda as "brutal" and "impractical".
In October 2022, in the midst of a speech advocating for the government's Public Order Bill, she held responsible the "coalition of chaos" formed by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the progressive activists she referred to as the "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati", for the series of protests that led to disruptive scenarios on the streets of London.