At the beginning of July last year, I sat down for a curry in the Cinnamon Club – a posh Indian restaurant in Westminster – for dinner with the chairman and founder of the Common Sense Group Sir John Hayes.
The intention of the dinner had originally been to discuss the perilous state of Boris Johnson’s beleaguered Government and what the MPs on the right might do if the then Prime Minister was forced to quit.
But we were joined by his close friend, the then Attorney General Suella Braverman who, while making a name for herself, was then very much on the fringe of the cabinet and public consciousness.
The conversation turned quickly to her future and ambitions which included eventually running for the leadership.
In fact, within a week Mr Johnson had announced he would quit (on July 7) and she became the first to declare her candidacy, although at the time of the dinner there was still a belief that Johnson would hold on.
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Ms Braverman has gone through a learning experience as a public speaker which took her to her commanding performance earlier this week, but she has always been an impressive politician in conversation.
She obviously avoided discussing cabinet meetings, but she had a clarity of what needed to be done, especially regarding the travails over illegal immigration, small boats and blocking of the Rwanda flights.
“In my view, the only way we will get Rwanda to work is by leaving the ECHR,” she said. A line she then publicly repeated in her brief leadership pitch.
Sir John, a long term mentor, was, like the majority of his Common Sense Group, very much of the same opinion.
But, as he reflected at the time, the majority of the parliamentary party strongly disagreed.
There is after all a very strong bond between the Tories and the ECHR.
It was a Conservative David Maxwell-Fyfe, who served as Winston Churchill’s Lord High Chancellor and was responsible for the document after he was a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
His relationship with the Convention was such that he was described as “the doctor who brought the child to birth”.
But as Tory critics on the right have pointed out “the politicisation of the ECHR by Strasbourg judges” has changed the Convention completely and made the Strasbourg Court much more interventionist and proactive.
When Braverman said she would leave the ECHR in July last year as part of her leadership bid, she was praised by Nigel Farage but attacked by fellow Tory MPs.
I ran into one minister on the One Nation left of the party who was still making up their mind.
The MP, who is a lawyer, said: “Well for me it’s anyone but Suella. She’s just extreme with that ECHR stuff. She’s stupid.”
All the way back to Margaret Thatcher, right wing women have often been tagged with the word “stupid” to dismiss them and it was as wrong about Ms Braverman as it was the Iron Lady in her time.
Braverman proved that in Washington DC this week with an extremely cogent and thoughtful speech which completely deconstructed the current state of the international legal system on asylum.
Before she became the first senior politician willing to put properly tackling the ECHR on the table, the conversation had up to then been about trying to find a way of maybe replacing it with a Bill of Rights – something Hayes and his supporters believe would just become a new equally problematic ECHR.
That died when Dominic Raab was booted out as Justice Secretary and the more leftish Alex Chalk put in his place.
Despite the abuse, during the leadership contest Braverman made a strong impression and it landed her the Home Secretary role with both Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak.
Sunak, in particular, wooed her on his second attempt after Truss’s fall and has since backed her up in taking a robust attitude to illegal immigration and stood by her when wets on the Tory left wanted her sacked for her speech this week.
But with her in that key role others have followed. Members of the Hayes’ Common Sense Group and its partner the New Conservatives have chipped away at the ECHR.
In particular New Conservative group co-founder Danny Kruger, Ipswich MP and Common Sense deputy chairman Tom Hunt and Stoke North MP Jonathan Gullis have badgered the government with amendments and deputations.
Braverman is now the natural leader of the right and, unlike a year ago, she has a solid platform of support to end the ECHR’s Strasbourg court’s jurisdiction in the UK.
That was proved by Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s very public endorsement of her this week – a Braverman/ Anderson leadership ticket would be quite something.
Now after months of frustration over small boats and still no flights to Rwanda, there is a real prospect that leaving it could be in the next election manifesto, much to the horror of those on he left of the Tories.
While Braverman has taken a lot of flak for failing to stop the boats, her courage and leadership over the last 14 months has transformed the conversation not just in her party but across the nation.
