(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 only served 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 “quite proper” and “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.
The 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 former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but said the government takes cybersecurity “incredibly seriously.”
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