HENRY DEEDES: A storming start, swell Suella hits Tory sweet spots

A storming start, swell Suella hits Tory sweet spots: HENRY DEEDES sees the new Home Secretary wow her colleagues at party conference

Bravo, Braverman! Lift-off at last. After two days of tumbleweed alley, the Home Secretary gave the Conservative Party conference hall something to cheer about.

She went down a storm. Five stars, two thumbs up – a show you’ve got to see. She galvanised the crowd with a no-holds-barred speech on law ’n’ order that tickled their chins and massaged their sweet spots.

After the chaos and cock-ups of the past few days, at long last the faithful had something meaty to chew on.

The big relief for Team Suella, however, was that her voice held out.

The poor woman had spent the early part of the day fighting an autumn lurgy. Fears mounted of a repeat of Theresa May’s excruciating 2017 conference speech, in which she lost her voice so completely that the then chancellor Philip Hammond had to hand the rasping PM a throat sweet.

Bravo, Braverman! Lift-off at last. After two days of tumbleweed alley, the Home Secretary gave the Conservative Party conference hall something to cheer about

I’m told things were so dicey yesterday that by mid-morning the Braverman larynx had acquired the husky resonance of Bernard Manning working his way through a full pack of Embassy filters.

Think of a salty old seadog scraping the barnacles from the underside of his skiff. A record needle scratching across a wobbly vinyl table. Potions were drained, lozenges popped. By the time she walked on stage with a polite wave to the audience, the voice merely carried modest Marlene Dietrich undertones.

She wore dark Conservative blue, and dangly earrings the size of gold ingots.

First up was a tribute to the work done by her predecessors. Hat-tips were offered to Priti Patel and even Mrs May herself. Michael Howard, of all people, received an unexpected shout-out. Been a while since we’ve heard his name mentioned at conference. Was it me or did the auditorium suddenly turn a tad chilly?

There was the customary pledge to support the police – but Braverman was soon warning them she wanted them out on the streets ‘catching real criminals’ and not faffing about ‘policing Twitter pronouns’ or ‘non-crime hate incidents’. Coppers taking the knee? Not on her watch! Like Priti, she ain’t shy about upsetting anyone. Not least the metropolitan drips demanding lax laws and multiple chances for serial offenders.

She decried the ‘poison of identity politics’ which has seeped into Labour Party and ‘distracts our public servants from doing their real job’. Finally, she came to the never-ending Home Secretary headache – illegal migrants crossing the Channel

But Priti’s speeches always slightly felt like having your head shoved into a shark tank. Mrs Braverman, a KC, is eloquent, cerebral, passionate.

The audience glugged back every word. And they sure had needed a boost. Until this point, the poor dears had endured a dreary afternoon of dull speeches by Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey and geezerish Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis.

The atmosphere had resembled a waiting room in a provincial railway station. I spotted several people enjoying a late afternoon snooze. In one corner, a group of schoolchildren who’d been ushered in gazed distractedly at their phones. Poor mites. Shouldn’t Childline have been called? Fast-forward to 5.30pm, though – and Braverman had them eating out of her hand.

There was tough talk directed at the crusty eco-zealot mob: ‘No, you can’t just start a riot, glue yourself to the roads and get away with it!’

Career criminals were told: ‘We’ll keep putting you behind bars!’ As for the trans lobby: ‘It is wrong for biologically male police officers to strip-search female suspects.’

She decried the ‘poison of identity politics’ which has seeped into Labour Party and ‘distracts our public servants from doing their real job’.

Finally, she came to the never-ending Home Secretary headache – illegal migrants crossing the Channel. Suella was determined to make the Rwanda scheme work. The room thundered to cheers.

Powerful forces, she warned, would be hell-bent on making her fail – Labour, the Lib Dems, The Guardian would stop at nothing to kill Rwanda dead.

But she was determined to face critics down. ‘I stand ready to serve you. I stand ready to deliver. The time is ours, the time is now.’ By God, it was the speech this conference needed.

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