(Bloomberg) —
(Bloomberg) —
UK cabinet minister Michael Gove defended the reappointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary after a new report cast doubt on her statement that she was quick to disclose a security breach that led to her resignation earlier this month.
Braverman stepped down on Oct. 19 after acknowledging sending sensitive information in an email from her personal account, and said she “rapidly” reported it as soon as she realized the breach. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak re-appointed her six days after her resignation when he replaced Liz Truss, who served only seven weeks in the post.
The BBC reported that prior to acknowledging the breach, Braverman sent an email to the initial recipient of the information asking the person to delete and ignore the message, and it may have been hours before she reported the security breach. The BBC said it had obtained a copy of her email asking for the deletion.
The public and the media shouldn’t rush to judgment and it was appropriate for Braverman to ask the recipient to delete the email, Gove said in an interview with the BBC. It’s “standard practice” to ask erroneous recipients to delete information, he said.
Sunak has come under fire for re-appointing Braverman from both the opposition Labour Party and some Tory allies. Labour has called for the government to make public its review of the security breach and denounced the re-appointment as a “grubby deal” that was payback for supporting Sunak’s bid to replace Truss.
Read More: Sunak’s Uneasy Truce With UK Tory Right Already Exposes Risks
“You can’t have a home secretary who is not trusted by the security service, who is not trusted with important government information,” Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, told Sky News.
Gove said that making more details public could itself be a threat to national security, but that he was glad Sunak gave Braverman a second chance and that she was “absolutely” a politician of integrity.
Braverman is also coming under pressure as tensions mount over a jump in the number of migrants crossing the English channel from France, despite the government’s pledge to crackdown on arrivals. A Border Force migrant centre was attacked with fire bombs Sunday. No one was injured, though the attacker killed himself after throwing three fire bombs, Reuters reported.
The attack came a day after almost 1,000 migrants are estimated to have successfully crossed the channel, the highest daily number for weeks. Nearly 40,000 have reached the UK so far this year. Asylum processing centres are overwhelmed, and David Neal, the chief inspector of borders and immigration, told MPs last week that he was left speechless after visiting the Manston centre in Kent where conditions were “wretched.”
Gove also defended Braverman after a report that she had failed to act on the warnings about Manston, but acknowledged in an interview with Sky News that the situation at the centre “is not what it should be.” Braverman, is considered a hardliner on immigration and said earlier this month that was her “dream” to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, a policy of the Boris Johnson government that got sidetracked by legal challenges.
There are now 2,800 people being housed at Manston in a facility with a maximum capacity of 1,600. The centres are meant to be for 24-hour stays while initial paperwork for asylum claims are processed before migrants are moved to longer-term facilities. The flood of migrants has strained the immigration system and the government is now spending about £7 million a day to house asylum seekers in hotels, the Home Affairs office said this week.
Gove, who serves as housing and leveling-up secretary, also said he couldn’t comment on details of another report by the Daily Mail saying that Truss had her phone hacked by Russian intelligence when she served as foreign secretary under Johnson, but said the government takes cybersecurity “incredibly seriously.”
(Updates with immigration issue from 8th paragraph.)
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