Braverman says sorry
SUELLA Braverman said she was “sorry for the errors of judgment” made in the use of her personal email to send a draft government statement to an ally as she faced further questions over her conduct.
The Home Secretary set out details of the email blunder which led to her resignation under Liz Truss, revealing that although the message was sent at 7.25am it was hours later before she confessed to officials what had happened.
Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his decision to reappoint Ms Braverman as Home Secretary just days after she had been forced to quit for breaching the ministerial code.
In a letter to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee’s chairwoman Dame Diana Johnson, Ms Braverman revealed a Home Office review had found she forwarded official documents to her personal email on six occasions, although Ms Braverman insisted she had not sent them on to anyone outside the Government.
Ms Braverman resigned from the Truss government on October 19 after sending a draft written ministerial statement (WMS) on immigration policy to Tory backbencher Sir John Hayes and inadvertently - a staff member of Conservative MP Andrew Percy. In her account of the day:
- At 07.25am she used her personal email account on her personal phone to send the draft WMS to Sir John and intended to copy in his secretary’s parliamentary email address, but instead sent it to a member of Mr Percy’s staff.
- “Before or around” 10am she checked her personal email and found a reply saying the WMS had been “sent to me in error” by someone with a “parliamentary email address with a similar name to Sir John’s secretary”.
- Ms Braverman said she realised she had made a mistake and “decided that I would inform my officials as soon as practicable”. She asked the recipient to “delete the message and ignore”.
- But it was not until around noon, during Prime Minister’s Questions, that she began telling officials, having gone to meetings in the meantime.
- The Home Secretary said she had received an email from Mr Percy, warning that he was considering raising a point of order in the Commons and telling her “you are nominally in charge of the security of this nation, we have received many warnings even as lowly backbenchers about cyber security”.
Ms Braverman insisted there was nothing market sensitive in the WMS, although it had been intended to help the Office for Budget Responsibility draw up their economic forecasts.
The draft WMS consisted of “high-level proposals for liberalising our migration rules”, including “increasing the number of lowskilled foreign workers, and plans for controlling illegal migration”.