Suella Braverman has admitted sending official documents from her government email to her personal email address on six separate occasions.
In a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee, she apologised again for breaching security rules and set out her version of the events leading to her resignation under former prime minister Liz Truss.
A review undertaken by the Home Office confirmed she had used her personal email address to send an official government document and in her letter, Ms Braverman added: “I had sent official documents from my government email to my personal email address on six occasions.
“The review confirmed that all of these occasions occurred in circumstances when I was conducting Home Office meetings virtually or related to public lines to take in interviews.”
The home secretary insisted the four-page document containing high level migration policy proposals did not contain any information relating to national security and was not marked top secret.
She said the reason for sending the documents to her personal phone – a breach of the ministerial code – was because she was often joining meetings virtually and while in transit.
Ms Braverman said: “It was not possible to use a single device to conduct the meetings and read the documents at the same time.
Therefore, I had occasionally and exceptionally emailed them to my personal email account so that I could read the documents in order to conduct essential government business.”
Mrs Braverman’s team maintain – as she wrote in her resignation letter – that she flagged the incident rapidly and brought it to the attention of the cabinet secretary.
Others have claimed the cabinet secretary did not find out about the breach from Mrs Braverman.
Here is the timeline of events as she has laid them out in her letter:
-7.25am: Sent an email from personal account to Rt Hon Sir John Hayes and his secretary, but entered an incorrect address, sending document to someone else “unintentionally and unknowingly”
– 9am: Went into back-to-back meetings
– 10am: Checked personal emails, saw reply to someone she does not know saying ‘this has been sent to me in error’ – “realised I had made a mistake”
– 10.02am: Replied saying “please delete and ignore. Thanks”, then went into meetings
– 11.20am: Met two constituents
– 11.50am: Bumped into then Chief Whip Wendy Morton and Andrew Percy MP “by coincidence” who said my email had gone to a member of his staff and “he was concerned”
– 12pm: Returned to parliamentary office to “take action regarding my mistake”
In her letter, Ms Braverman said when she realised she had sent the email to a staffer of MP Andrew Percy by accident, she “decided to inform my officials as soon as practicable”.
But before informing the civil service, she said she bumped into the chief whip and Mr Percy, who raised his concerns to her.
After this meeting, Ms Braverman asked a special adviser to tell the private secretary what happened.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been criticised for the reappointment of MS Braverman as home secretary, a week after she resigned over the security breaches.
In the letter, Ms Braverman said she had apologised to Mr Sunak when he entered No 10 and publicly repeated that apology.
“In my appointment discussion with the new prime minister, I raised this mistake and apologised to him, and would like to do so again here,” she said.
“I also gave the prime pinister assurances that I would not use my personal email for official business and reaffirmed my understanding of and adherence to the Ministerial Code.”
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