Suella Braverman has given a bizarre reason why she sent government documents to her private email address 127 times.
The former home secretary has been accused of breaking the ministerial code by forwarding on the potentially-sensitive material.
According to The Times, the emails – which contained 290 documents – between 2021 and 2022, when she was attorney general in Boris Johnson’s government.
On LBC this morning, Braverman insisted the explanation for her unconventional behaviour was “tedious”.
She said: “I did use my personal email on occasions. Nothing was of a national security character, it’s all matters to do with the work of attorney general.”
The former Tory leadership candidate said she was unable to access her government email account from her personal laptop.
She said: “That’s not very practical when you are reading a lot of documents online and you simultaneously need to write lengthy documents and pieces as part of your work. Sometimes you need two screens.
“So it’s a bit tedious as an explanation. There’s nothing to do with spies or state secrets here. There was nothing sensitive that was transferred.
“It was literally a way to enable me to view documents on one screen and simultaneously type on another screen so that I could explain my views those people.”
Asked by presenter Nick Ferrari if she would do it again, Braverman said: “I was never advised that this was not permissible, bit we were in a strange scenario where a lot of that was done during Covid and lockdown, when there was a lot of working from home and I wasn’t getting as many papers in physical copy.”
Braverman, who had to resign as home secretary in 2022 after sending an official government document to another MP from her personal email, also revealed that she is backing Robert Jenrick in the Tory leadership race.
Posting on X, she said: “We need to rebuild trust on one of the defining issues of our age: the global migration crisis. Robert’s unequivocal commitment to leaving the ECHR and placing a cap on visas is how we start.”
