As luck would have it, the Home Secretary was down to answer departmental questions in the chamber this afternoon, and a lot of those questions were on her speeding ticket. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be a repetitive session,’ said Suella Braverman in the Commons, before offering exactly that for an hour.

Braverman had not come with a different answer to every question, regardless of the details each MP was asking for. Instead, she said the exact same thing, in the exact same tone, over and over again. She had been speeding in the summer. She regretted that. She paid the fine and took the penalty. ‘Mr Speaker, last summer I was speeding. I regret that. I paid the fine and took the points. In relation to the process, in my view I’m confident nothing untoward has happened.’ She also claimed that ‘at no point did I attempt to evade sanction’.

The thing is, this didn’t answer the central question, which is that while she didn’t attempt to evade a sanction, she is alleged to have sought a private speed awareness course and to have asked civil servants if they could help arrange this. That would be a breach of the ministerial code, which is why the matter is being pursued so vigorously by her opponents.

Braverman also went on the attack against those opponents, arguing that the reason they were taking any interest in this at all was that they didn’t have their own policies and they didn’t like what she was doing to try to stop small boat crossings. ‘Let’s be honest about what this is about,’ she told the Commons. ‘The shadow minister would rather distract, really, from the abject failure by the Labour party to offer any serious proposal on crime or policing.’ She added that Labour ‘would rather the country does not notice their total abandonment of the British people’.

She had some noisy supporters behind her who cheered these comments. But within the Conservative party there is a split over Braverman. As I explained in the Observer at the weekend, a good number of MPs think the Home Secretary is embarrassing herself with her public interventions. But others do agree that the current campaign against her on speeding is because she is championing policies that are hugely popular with their constituents, if controversial in Westminster.  The problem for Rishi Sunak isn’t so much whether Braverman did break the ministerial code as it is whether she can fix the small boats problem in time for the election. He pledged to restore integrity in government, but voters are more likely to forgive breaches of that if they think ministers are doing their jobs properly and stopping illegal migration.