Britain's Conservative Party loses another high-profile lawmaker to hard-right Reform

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LONDON (AP) — Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, an anti-immigration Conservative lawmaker, on Monday became the latest politician from the party to defect to hard-right rival party Reform UK.

Braverman, who was fired from her job as interior minister in 2023 after repeatedly diverging from government policy, said she had quit the Conservatives after 30 years and would represent her southern England constituency in Parliament as a Reform lawmaker.

“We can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender,” Braverman said. “Or we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength. I believe that a better Britain is possible.”

Braverman is the latest high-profile Conservative to embrace Reform leader Nigel Farage's message that Britain is broken and overrun by migrants. Her move on the heels of Robert Jenrick's recent defection gives Farage's party eight of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

The Conservatives have 116 seats and remain the official opposition to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government.

Although Reform has a tiny number of seats in Parliament, it leads the governing Labour Party and the Conservatives in opinion polls ahead of important local elections in May, including for the parliaments in Scotland and Wales.

Braverman was sacked by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in November 2023 after she called migration a “hurricane” heading for Britain, said homelessness was a “lifestyle choice” and accused police of being too lenient with pro-Palestinian protesters that she called “hate marchers.”

Critics blamed her rhetoric for inflaming tensions when far-right protesters scuffled with police and tried to confront a pro-Palestinian march by hundreds of thousands in London.

The 45-year-old lawyer who has criticized liberal social values and what she has called the “tofu-eating wokerati," had declined to enter the contest for leadership of the once-dominant center-right Conservative Party after it was trounced by the center-left Labour Party in the July 2024 election.

She had urged the party after the loss to reach out to welcome Farage into Conservative ranks. Writing in the Daily Telegraph at the time, she said Conservative colleagues were unwilling to listen to her, and branded her “mad, bad and dangerous.”

Now Farage has welcomed her into Reform's growing party.