Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has accused the Conservatives of “betrayal” as she became the latest MP from the party to defect to Reform UK.

She is the third sitting Tory MP to join Nigel Farage’s party in the last eleven days, and takes Reform’s tally of MPs to eight.

At a press conference following her defection, Braverman said she had felt “politically homeless for the best part of two years” pointing to differences over areas including Brexit and immigration.

Her defection comes hot on the heels of Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell, who also left the Conservatives earlier this month.

Responding to her defection, the Conservative Party said it was “always a matter of when, not if, Suella would defect”.

“There are some people who are MPs because they care about their communities and want to deliver a better country. There are others who do it for their personal ambition,” the spokesman added.

The party’s initial statement also said: “The Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health, but she was clearly very unhappy.”

They later issued a corrected statement which removed the sentence, saying the original lines were “a draft version” which had been “sent out in error”.

Braverman said the reference to her mental health was “a bit pathetic” and “more signs of a bitter and desperate party that seems to be in free-fall”.

The former Conservative MP Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said the party should sack whoever approved the press release remarking on her mental health.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Sir Jacob said it was a “dreadful and inexcusable thing to have said”.

Responding to questions about when she decided to leave the Conservatives, Braverman compared the process to “a divorce”.

“Gradually there is an erosion of trust and the breakdown of affiliation, love even, if you can call it that,” she said.

She accused the Conservatives of failing on Brexit while delivering “out-of-control immigration” and high taxes.

She said “the final straw came in the last few days” as there appeared to be a “concentrated effort, a witch hunt to hound out right-wingers”.

She urged local Conservative activists in her constituency of Fareham and Waterlooville – who she acknowledged would feel “upset and disappointed” – to join her at Reform.

Asked about suggestions that Reform was accepting too many former Conservatives, Farage said: “We need the experience of people who were on the front line – that is the one commodity we are short of.”

A major figure on the right of the party under the last government, Braverman had long been seen as a potential Reform defector at Westminster.

But her unveiling as Reform’s latest recruit came as a surprise announcement by Farage during an event to launch a party group for military veterans in London.

An MP since 2015, Braverman was attorney general under Boris Johnson and became home secretary under Liz Truss in September 2022.

She was forced to step down from the role a month later, after it emerged she had sent an official document to a Tory colleague using her personal email.

Rishi Sunak re-appointed her to the position just six days later upon entering Downing Street, but sacked her the following year, over an article accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in the policing of pro-Palestinian protests in London.

Farage said he had been talking to Braverman for “just over a year” about the possibility of defecting and that she had “reached the view that actually the centre-right of British politics needs to unify around Reform”.

He said her record as home secretary had been “utterly useless”.

“They all were utterly useless because they were stuck within the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights],” he told reporters.

“The government was a failure but she’s now prepared to put her hands up and say, ‘we got it wrong’.”

The ECHR has been blamed by some politicians for making it harder to deport illegal migrants.

The Labour government is in negotiations over how the treaty is interpreted.

Braverman said the Conservatives’ pledge to leave the convention altogether was “a lie”.

In addition to the four sitting Conservative MPs who have now switched to Reform, around 20 former Tory MPs have made the move since the general election, including former ministers Nadhim Zahawi, Nadine Dorries and Jake Berry.

Henry Smith – one of those ex-MPs to make the switch – said Braverman had tried to “steer the last government in a Conservative direction” but had been “very much stopped in her tracks”.

Speaking to Matt Chorley on BBC Radio 5 Live, the former Crawley MP said that while the Conservative leadership “might be making noises to the right”, many Conservative MPs were “quite frankly more comfortable in a much more Liberal Democrat position”.

Appearing on the same programme, Conservative MP Sir Bernard Jenkin said: “People like Suella and Rob Jenrick are leaving the Conservative Party just at the time when Kemi is sorting all these things out, and she’s beginning to pull us up in the polls.

“Maybe it’s because she’s doing better that they’re leaving.”

Labour Party chair Anna Turley said: “Nigel Farage is stuffing his party full of the failed Tories responsible for the chaos and decline that held Britain back for 14 years.”

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said “Farage has recruited yet another Conservative minister with selective amnesia – one who complains about broken Britain while conveniently forgetting they helped break it.”