Is that it, Suella? Ministerial resignation letters aren’t what they used to be

Amid a slew of parliamentary departures, Matt Potter (who’s an expert in these things) says there’s a real art to the resignation letter – and, much like the average MP’s career these days, they’re no longer up to scratch

Suella Braverman: her resignation letter had all the maturity of a ‘Dear Diary’ outpouring (PA Wire)

There’s a phrase among pilots: “Any bl**dy fool can fly a plane – it’s landing one that’s the hard part.” And so it is with jobs in the cabinet, and the Conservative Party’s rush to shovel the smoking wreckage of Suella Braverman’s political career from the runway before it catches.

The former home secretary left office earlier this week with such an almighty flounce – spread over three sides of A4, no less – even her allies and aficionados were shocked. And not only by the immaturity of it.

For her parting gesture to Rishi Sunak was not so much a resignation letter as it was a “Dear Diary” outpouring. It all starts out conventionally enough – listing achievements in a way that’s become familiar; resignation letter as LinkedIn profile. But, soon enough, we’re into kamikaze territory.

“I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary […] on certain conditions,” she says with clamorous desperation, before diving into a list of Things I Like, followed by Things You Are Not. As she ranted about “broken promises” and “lack of direction”, you could imagine her scribbling: “AND I hate hate HATE you.”

For my written history of the resignation letter, The Last Goodbye, I examined the pithiest, angriest, most hilarious farewell messages. And if proof were needed of quite how far we have fallen as a country in recent years, we need look no further than the parting gestures of our elected leaders.

Just a day before Braverman’s departure came Andrea Jenkyns’ public letter of no confidence in the PM – and it was almost identical in delivery and furious content at a resignation note.

A parliamentarian most famous for once having flipped the bird at protesters outside Downing Street, Jenkyns was sacked by Sunak as under-secretary of state for skills last year. I’ve never wanted to get one over on an employer a full year after having been fired, and I’m not sure whether – even given that long to stew – I could think up a futile gesture that would humiliate me more.

But, in Jenkyn’s letter, she thundered that “Boris, the man who won the Conservative Party a massive majority, was unforgivable enough”. A quick proofread would have shown her that she felt that ousting Johnson was unforgivable, but, still, the point as written stands. From the mouths of fools, and all that.

Speaking of sound and fury signifying nothing, let us not forget Nadine Dorries, the former MP for Mid Bedfordshire whose own resignation wasn’t so much a “Dear Rishi…”, as a primer for her new book, The Plot.

Having kept the nation waiting 81 days before handing in her resignation letter, Dorries did not disappoint, using her departure not so much to take aim but rather random potshots at her former boss: “What exactly has been done or have you achieved? […] What exactly is it you do [sic] stand for?

She also tilted at a grand conspiracy theory about dark forces within Whitehall. “Having witnessed first-hand, as Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were taken down, I decided that the British people had a right to know what was happening in their name…” she wrote to Rishi.

Her more substantive parting gesture amounts to a 352-page resignation letter. In The Plot, she claims to dish the dirt on the downfall of Boris Johnson, but in truth it is a hastily written piece of reality-glancing “Dorries & Johnson” fanfic dressed up as political memoir. A cabal (oh yes, we’re going there) of shadowy Bond villains from the hidden wings of the British state were responsible for Johnson’s demise.

No, she doesn’t name names – and no, she wasn’t allowed to say anything more precise. Sorry, not sorry. And if government according to the class of 2019 had a motto, it would surely be this. Ministerial resignation letters certainly aren’t what they used to be.

Those who are old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 will also recall the cricketing metaphors her outgoing foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, deployed in the resignation speech that sparked her departure. He told the Commons: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

However, his written letter to the prime minister, now mostly lost to political history, was just as powerful – and an exercise in sadness and sang-froid: “I am writing to explain some of the reasons for my decision to resign from the government,” he wrote. “I do so with very great regret […] I am, of course, very sad that our long years of service together should have to end in this way.”

Even as he delivered his home truths and prepared to leave the stage, Howe, the lifelong diplomat, was trying to help his wayward friend get along with people better. It was pure Brief Encounter on Basildon Bond.

The resignation letter ought to be the perfect place for a pointed payoff – but more often, it’s merely pointless. In 2010, culture minister James Purnell had hoped to remove Gordon Brown with his parting shot: “I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.” For Labour, the rest was oblivion.

Over recent decades, with the quickening of news cycles, politics has become sloganeering – and so too the political resignation. Sajid Javid attempted a similar sporting flourish as Howe when he left the crease in September 2022, his departure prompting the crisis that eventually did for his boss, Boris Johnson. Insisting he was a team player, Javid said: “I also believe a team is only as good as its team captain, and that a captain is as good as his or her team. Loyalty must go both ways.”

Sunak’s own poised resignation letter to his former boss, also Boris, when he stepped down as chancellor, was the mark of the man – sincere and quietly scathing, rather than snarky, as is more often the current fashion. He signed off with a pointed “We cannot continue like this” – and two days later, Johnson himself was off.

As with aircraft, so with Cabinet careers. Any fool can get one airborne. Directing the movements of the hot air around you will help you stay up, even rise higher.

But when you have to touch down? That’s when we can tell who’s been unqualified all along.

Matt Potter is a journalist and author of ‘The Last Goodbye: The History of the World in Resignation Letters’