Was this the moment we passed ‘peak Suella’?

What does a prime minister do with a problem like Suella? Rishi Sunak might want to make his semi-detached home secretary fully detached in his next cabinet reshuffle, but his allies suspect Suella Braverman calculates that being sacked would enhance her future leadership prospects.

On Tuesday, Braverman won a genuine rather than a staged standing ovation at the Conservative conference, for a speech in which she said “immigration is already too high” and admitted politicians had not done “a great job” in managing it in the last 30 years.

She did not push the boundaries of cabinet collective responsibility by renewing her call for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Her address, carefully vetted by Downing Street, was loyal to Sunak and mainly an attack on wokery, and a Labour Party she claimed favoured “open borders”. She cheekily accused Labour of “rhetoric” about controlling migration – her own speciality.