Far-right clashes in London not caused by Braverman remarks, says Shapps

Far-right protests in London which saw nine police officers injured were nothing to do with Suella Braverman’s rhetoric, Grant Shapps has argued as the government began an apparent defence of the home secretary amid widespread calls for her sacking.

After the violent scenes around the Cenotaph on Saturday, where far-right groups fought officers in what was billed a counterprotest to a much larger pro-Palestine demonstration, Labour said Braverman had intentionally inflamed tensions and undermined the police.

But Shapps, the defence secretary, said the violence caused by what police said were mainly football hooligans had nothing to do with Braverman’s statements calling the pro-Palestine demonstration a “hate march” and accusing police of dealing less robustly with leftwing protests.

Shapps also argued that while the bulk of the 126 arrests on Saturday were among the far-right crowds, this was likely to change as officers pored over footage of seemingly antisemitic placards and chants at the pro-Palestine march.

Asked whether Braverman had in part provoked the far-right violence – a view seemingly taken by the Met police, which said “a week of intense debate about protest and policing” had contributed to inflamed tensions – Shapps said it had not.

“The counterprotest was already going to happen,” he told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday show. “Those people who were going to come and try and disrupt this weekend had already said they were going to do it. They were doing it, in their own twisted way, because they were protesting themselves against other marches.”

Shapps said he expected “far more arrests still to be made” from the pro-Palestine march – which attracted an estimated 300,000 people, and took place away from the Cenotaph after the Armistice Day silence – “simply because either the police were distracted [by the far-right violence]] or because they weren’t able to intervene immediately”.

The defence of Braverman will be seen as a sign that Rishi Sunak is minded not to immediately sack her, despite calls for him to do so after she defied No 10 by submitting an article to the Times about the marches without making Downing Street’s requested changes.

There is speculation that with the supreme court decision on the government’s Rwanda deportation scheme for asylum seekers coming this week, Sunak might remove her in a later reshuffle, potentially after this month’s autumn statement.

Speaking before Shapps on Sky News, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said both Braverman and Sunak had “made it harder for the police to do their jobs, both in inflaming tensions but also undermining confidence and respect in the police”.

Asked whether this had helped distract attention from Labour divisions over whether to back a ceasefire in Gaza, Cooper said: “I think this is much more serious than that. Suella Braverman decided to launch an unprecedented attack on the impartiality of the police, and also to deliberately inflame tensions in the run-up to remembrance weekend.

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“No home secretary has ever done that before. Her job is supposed to be to support the police and to work with the police and to calm tensions. She did the opposite. And she did the opposite in a really damaging and irresponsible way.”

Asked whether Braverman should resign, Cooper said: “She should not have been doing this job in the first place.”

In an overnight comment article for the Sunday Telegraph, Keir Starmer said Braverman’s recent comments, including a description of homelessness as a “lifestyle choice” showed “a total lack of respect for this country’s values and its principles”.

He wrote: “Few people in public life have done more recently to whip up division, set the British people against one another and sow the seeds of hatred and distrust than Suella Braverman. In doing so, she demeans her office.”

Writing in the Sunday Mirror, Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, said that if Sunak did not sack Braverman, “he’s too weak or agrees with her”.

Sacking Braverman would, however, prompt anger from her allies on the right of the Tory party. One of them, the MP for Devizes, Danny Kruger, said the main lesson of the weekend had been that “maybe it would have been best if the [pro-Palestine] march hadn’t been allowed to go ahead”.