Suella Braverman’s career as Home Secretary may be over very soon. But a long tail of it will be the criticism she has made of the Metropolitan Police. It was unprecedented for a Home Secretary to make the claims she did of ‘picking favourites’ and bias. In the long-term, reforming the police might have become harder.

Only a few months ago, the prevailing mood in Westminster was that the Metropolitan Police was in need of reform, not just because of its seeming inability to root out rogue coppers following the murder of Sarah Everard, the conviction of David Carrick, and the revelations of misogyny from the Charing Cross Police Station, but also because of the way it policed the vigil for Everard.

Patsy Stevenson was one of the women arrested that day. The striking photo of heavy-booted officers pushing her to the ground was plastered all over the newspapers. She has since been awarded substantial damages. Yesterday, she said that while she had no truck with Braverman’s description of the pro-Palestine protests as ‘hate marches’, she did think the Home Secretary’s line about the police needing to be more even-handed was ‘fair’. She said her reading of the vigil was that the police reacted to ‘the people with the microphones talking about anti-police rhetoric’ rather than trying to uphold Covid regulations.

Braverman hasn’t been the speediest when it comes to police reform: she has been nagged repeatedly by her own side and Labour to introduce the regulations the police say they need to be able to dismiss bad coppers quicker. She – and any successors – will find it harder now to hold the police accountable for the reforms forces should be making anyway.

But will picking a fight with the Met be easy for Labour if they win the election? Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper are a mixture of sticklers for standards and very cautious in character, and they may find there are other, bigger, priorities which make it very easy to let the Met carry on as it is for longer, especially if emphasising its operational independence now offers a useful point of differentiation from the Conservatives.

Politics tends to be at its worst when it takes big pendulum swings, and Westminster seems to have snapped from one argument about the Met needing reform to a protective crouch on its behalf. That may be the worst part of the fallout from Braverman’s piece, and one that is felt long after she is replaced.