Suella Braverman’s husband defects to Reform UK

The husband of former home secretary Suella Braverman has left the Conservative Party to join Reform UK.

Rael Braverman, who is Jewish, posted on X that he had left the party “because it has become a shadow of what it once stood for. Its incompetence and failure to deliver have betrayed the trust of the British people.”

He added: “I deeply regret that it has come to this, as there are still a handful of decent MPs trying to do the right thing. I believe in politics driven by conviction and a genuine commitment to serving our nation, not by empty promises and mismanagement.”

A spokesperson for Braverman confirmed that he had joined Nigel Farage’s party Reform UK.

Asked if she had plans to join her husband in Farage’s outfit, Braverman told the JC: “My husband and I have a healthy respect for each other’s independence—he doesn’t tell me how to do my job, and I don’t tell him how to pick a political party.”

Braverman’s defection was welcomed on by Farage, who told the JC: “I welcome Rael to reform and look forward to him playing an active role.”

Lee Anderson, Reform UK MP for Ashfield, himself a former vice chair of the Conservative Party who defected to Reform UK in March this year, said on X “The Political Tsunami Continues”.

At July’s general election, Reform UK elected five MPs to Parliament.

During the campaign, the JC reported that a number of their candidates had posted links to antisemitic conspiracy theories.

At the party’s annual conference in September, Farage promised that proper vetting of candidates would take place for future elections.

He told his party activists: “We haven’t got time, we haven’t got room for a few extremists to wreck the work of a party that now has 80,000 members and rising by hundreds every single day.”

Several recent opinion polls have said Nigel Farage’s party enjoy the support of around 20 per cent of the public.

One opinion poll conducted by FindOutNow, considered to be an outlier, even put Reform ahead of Labour on 24 per cent, with Sir Keir Starmer’s party on 23 per cent and the Conservatives on 26 per cent.

Earlier this week, at an awards ceremony by The Spectator magazine, the Reform UK leader, who was elected to Parliament for the first time in July’s general election to represent Clacton in Essex, won a “newcomer of the year” award. He told the crowd that: “at the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.”

Suella Braverman was sacked as home secretary by then-prime minister Rishi Sunak for questioning the Metropolitan Police’s approach to pro-Palestine protests and said in an article in the Times in November last year that they were being treated leniently compared to far-right protests.

She also referred to pro-Palestinian protests in the aftermath of October 7 as “hate marches”.

During the last general election campaign, she told the JC in an interview that the rise of antisemitism in the UK made her “ashamed to be British”.