Prime minister Rishi Sunak has “full confidence” in his home secretary Suella Braverman, Downing Street has said.
The statement came as Ms Braverman was embroiled in two rows, over leaks from her mobile phone and deteriorating conditions at the Manston processing centre for migrants in Kent.
She will address parliament and take questions from MPs on both issues this afternoon.
Challenged over reports that Ms Braverman fuelled overcrowding at Manston by refusing to book hotel rooms to house migrants, the prime minister’s official spokesperson pointed to a Home Office statement describing the claim as “baseless”.
And asked if the PM still had full confidence in his home secretary, the spokesperson told a regular Westminster media briefing: “Yes.”
The home secretary today admitted sending official documents to her personal email address on six different occasions.
The admission, in a letter to the Commons Home Affairs Committee, comes shortly after she resigned from Liz Truss’s administration after sending a confidential cabinet document to an ally. Opposition MPs questioned Mr Sunak’s integrity when he appointed her back to her previous post just six days later.
In today’s letter, Ms Braverman claimed that the documents “did not pose any risk to national security” and were not secret or top secret.
At the time of her resignation, the information in the email sent to MP John Hayes was said to be “OBR-sensitive” – in reference to the Office for Budget Responsibility, which draws up forecasts of the likely impact of government policy on the economy and growth.
But the prime minister’s official spokesman today said: “My understanding is that it wasn’t in any way marked ‘market sensitive’ and the data in it was publicly available.”
Asked whether the PM believed Ms Braverman’s letter had “drawn a line under” the matter, Mr Sunak’s spokesperson said: “The prime minister feels that this sets out a detailed account of what happened and responds to some of the interest in this, and that the home secretary is providing a full account.
“The prime minister is confident that the home secretary and indeed Home Office ministers are working on the issues that matter to the public – not least the ongoing issues of illegal immigration and tackling crime.”
The spokesperson said Ms Braverman had set out a “detailed account” both of the initial security breach which led to her resignation and of her handling of the issue once she became aware of it.
“She has provided a detailed account around those issues, both the individual issue of forwarding that email and a further investigation,” said the spokesperson.
“I think she has set out in quite a lot of detail what has happened and the mitigations that have been taken.
“Clearly, as she makes clear, she made an error of judgment, she recognises that the approach she took was not right and it is for those reasons that she felt it was right to resign, and obviously she has apologised, both to the prime minister, the MP involved, and she has set out a detailed letter to the committee today.”
Following claims that Ms Braverman ignored advice to secure accommodation elsewhere to ease overcrowding at the former airfield in Manston, the spokesperson said: “The Home Office put out a statement about the home secretary taking urgent decisions to alleviate issues at Manston and to source alternative accommodation.
“I believe they’ve said that the claims that advice was deliberately ignored are completely baseless.”
The spokesperson said there was a “significant ongoing challenge” with the Manston site.
“The government takes the safety and welfare of those being housed there extremely seriously,” he added.
