Suella Braverman’s book has sold only 106 copies. This is why

Crack ‘em while you can, though, because Suella’s star might just be on the skids. Despite plugging her book on Question Time, on Tim Shipman’s Spectator podcast, in serialised excerpts in the Daily Mail, and in a fawning interview with Allison Pearson in the Telegraph, in its opening weekend, Patriot sold precisely 106 copies.

Seeing as this figure includes preorders, I asked a leading publisher how many more might be sold in its second week. “None,” was the answer. (This was later amended to “two”.)

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The book has been issued by a fringe print-on-demand publisher (Mensch) that offers its authors a higher than standard royalty rate – it could be as much as 50% of each sale – rather than a standard advance. Admittedly, this arrangement would perhaps be more appealing if Patriot was widely available in bookshops. Or even narrowly available. Of the 323 branches of Waterstones, nationwide, only three have it in stock. 

Beneath a title that reads like a Word of the Day calendar having a nervous breakdown, for the delectation of a very select band of readers, Braverman has compiled a shopping list of hard right hot-topic bellyaches. She rails against “wokery” and “cultural Marxism”, against “the DEI monster” and politicians afraid to “defend our history”. 

In a despicable passive voice, she writes (more than once) of “the death of George Floyd”. As was proven in a court of law, it was in fact a murder. 

Woven into this tapestry of bilious grievance is the story of a child of immigrants whose pluck and endeavour transported her from ordinary circumstances in the donut boroughs of London all the way to home secretary. Her lofty perch afforded the luxury of holding subordinates in low and lazy regard.

“Want to get promoted in policing?” she writes. “Start up a woke group that disadvantages the white male in some way, and you’re odds on to get noticed by the top brass.” 

Like snipers in the trees, the enemy is everywhere. “Black Lives Matter advocated to defund the police, decolonise the curriculum, dismantle capitalism, pay reparations, and end the ‘war’ on black people,” she declares. Okay, sure.

But at the end of 14 ruinous years, the Conservatives’ own efforts at decapitalisation meant that Britain’s police forces employed 3000 fewer officers than in 2010. An estimated two-thirds of police stations were closed. When it came to denuding the boys and girls in blue, the Tories did a lot more than talk. 

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At the micro level, meanwhile, Braverman’s own appetite for destruction reaped consequences of which she seems peaceably unaware. Far from acknowledging that her one-woman insurgency against the government of the day may have contributed to the epochal defeat that awaited the parliamentary Conservative Party, in 2024, her certainty that the weaklings and turncoats of Rishi Sunak’s administration would have benefitted from a stiffer dose of her harsh medicine is absolute. 

“Canvassing [tells] you what polling sometimes misses,” she writes of knocking on doors in her Hampshire constituency of Fareham. “Whole roads, on long sunny days, would tell me the same thing. ‘We adore you, Suella, but your party is rubbish. We’re voting Reform this time.’” 

Having at last finished Patriot, this weird tidbit has lodged in my brain. Can it be true that entire thoroughfares of voters really used the word “adore” – as opposed to “like” or “respect” – to describe their parliamentary representative? Or might it just be, as the evidence of her book suggests, that the psychological makeup of Suella Braverman requires that she be worshipped while everything around is being razed to the ground? 

Case in point: two days before the general election, her reckless decision to type an op-ed for the Telegraph predicting heavy defeat at the polls and the possible death of the Tories themselves invited fury from MPs on her side of the divide. “I was excommunicated, again,” she writes. 

“This was becoming a regular reflex of the Party – let’s have a go at Suella, that’s how we can feel better.” Yeah, you tell ‘em, girl. Some people get the arse over any little thing. 

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Like an asylum seeker in a small boat, to muted fanfare and no one’s surprise, she washed up on the shores of Reform UK. At the end of 300-odd pages of Olympic standard moaning, her book ends with an endorsement of her new party which seems hurried, routine, and uncharacteristically bloodless.

“There is a path forward,” she writes. “The vision is simple: family, community, country.” 

Hang on, which country? In a sinister refrain, Braverman (who was born in Harrow) writes, “No way am I English. Geography of birth cannot be the determinant of ethnicity, any more than if I were born in Japan, I would not call myself Japanese.”

Leaving aside the ugly prose –  “no way am I English”? – her book is called Patriot. But for what? Is it possible to be patriotic in a country to which one doesn’t belong? 

As with so many of her claims, this one is easily dispelled. Rather than waste time demanding that exclusionists such as Braverman, Rupert Lowe, or the former academic Matt Goodwin explain why King Charles and Jude Bellingham aren’t English, the whole nasty business can be dismissed with a single question. Who the fucking hell are they to decide the admission policy of an entire nation? 

While we’re about it, who exactly is the patriot identified in the title of this angry and monomaniacal book? “Great Britain is in deep crisis,” its author writes in a pedal-to-the-metal introduction. “An epidemic of tolerance has meant that our culture and civic pride are unravelling before our eyes.” Of course, other opinions are available.

Suella Braverman can claim to love our country as loudly as she likes. The evidence on the page suggests she can barely stand the place. 

Patriot: Empire, Betrayal, And Hope is available now from Mensch Publishing