The establishment wants Suella Braverman out because she's a refomer - Bernard Ingham

But I like the cut of her jib. The Establishment doesn’t. She is a reformer. She means business. They aren’t and don’t.

This, I suspect, explains a lot of the hoo-hah over her reappointment as Home Secretary a week after resigning because of a silly mistake. She was canvassing policy support from a Tory MP and inadvertently pressed the wrong button and a document also ended up in the hands of a member of the staff of another Tory MP.

Initially, she was supposed to have mentioned a spy, which had the Security Services in a condemnatory flap. She cannot have named him or given the enemy an inkling of his or her identity. Otherwise, they would have gone off the deep end.

Then the story morphed into an attempt to secure support for a toughening up of the fight against illegal immigration. Not that made any difference to the First Division Association, the mandarins’ union, who were up in arms about this breach of the Ministerial code.

Then there is utter confusion over whether Ms Braverman walked or was pushed. But what possessed her to resign via Twitter instead of by simple letter to the then PM is beyond me. It underlines the view of one of my distinguished former Government Information colleagues that the first thing she would do with a new Minister is to ask for their mobile phone.

After all this, I think it reasonable to say that Ms Braverman will be much more careful with technology in future. She knows there will be no advance on the second chance Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has reasonably given her.

She should be allowed to get on with a much-needed programme of reform not merely of immigration policy but law and order generally and the vile outpouring of corruption of the young from the anti-social media.

This whole episode causes me to marvel at the hypocrisy of today’s politics. From the reaction of the higher civil service to Ms Braverman’s ‘leak’ you would have thought that the Government machine, as distinct from Ministers, was a paragon of security.

Instead, it is as leaky as a sieve. This is not surprising considering the number of people now employed in communications. Everything is leaked these days just as the Treasury in my day used to pave the way for a budget, making sure that they underplayed the goodies so that it sounded all the better on the actual day.

When I asked a senior Civil Servant for a briefing on a front page budget trailer in the Financial Times I was told I could not have it. Their job was to protect me from inadvertently leaking. And yet I spent my days talking to journalists generally without causing outrage. Their hypocrisy was complemented by arrogance.

You might also expect the Government machine in its piety to be more forensically successful in identifying leakers. Instead, they usually come up with blanks.

All this is complemented by the sheer hypocrisy of politicians themselves who never, of course, leak. They only brief. The Tory perfectionists – or stick in the muds – are wittering about Ms Braverman’s re-appointment.

But words fail me about the activities of Sir Keir Starmer on this front. A political leader who has the gall to recommend – and secure – a peerage for ex-MP, Tom Watson, who ruined the retirements of several eminent men with baseless allegations of paedophilia, has forfeited all right to criticise others’ behaviour.

Any stick will not do to berate the other side. It has to be clean or it will hurt the wielder.

In the meantime, it would help us all if the Civil Service got on with its job of implementing the policies of an elected government. I am the first to recognise that Mr Sunak is pushing it in returning to the 2019 Tory manifesto after the damage done to the economy by covid and Vladimir Putin. The situation has changed for the worse.

But that demands a real sense of urgency throughout the government to repair that damage along with reforms promised in 2019. In spite of her mistake, I believe Ms Braverman is raring to go. The rest should cut the carping and get on with it. And Civil Servants should remember that while they should give candid, objective advice, Ministers decide.