Suella Braverman’s husband says he has been forced to speak out after Gary Lineker compared the rhetoric around the Home Secretary’s small boats crackdown with 1930s Germany.
In his first-ever interview, Rael Braverman said he had tried to stay out of the debate surrounding his wife’s policies, but the controversy sparked by the BBC presenter’s tweet was “too much” for him to stay silent.
Earlier this month, Lineker condemned plans to detain asylum seekers and then send them to countries like Rwanda.
“Good heavens, this is beyond awful,” he wrote on Twitter.
Responding to the sports broadcaster, another Twitter user described his comment as “out of order”, adding that it was “easy to pontificate when it doesn’t affect you”.
Lineker responded: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries.
“This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”
Speaking to the Mail, Braverman’s husband said he was “disgusted” by the comments.
He told said: “There have been mocked-up images of Suella standing outside concentration camps, outside Auschwitz, laughing. I am Jewish. I lost family members in those concentration camps. I find that offensive.
“I was disgusted. Personally, I think making comparisons between our politicians and our country and Nazi Germany is intellectually lazy – and when you have public figures doing that, you kind of legitimise the abuse, make it acceptable.”
Braverman said he had not seen any such memes before Lineker’s tweet and described the parallels drawn as “unacceptable on so many levels”.
“It really minimises the horror of what went on. It’s disrespectful to Holocaust survivors and to those who lost family members in the concentration camps, and that includes my family,” he said.
Related: Braverman insists Rwanda IS safe – despite refugees being killed for protesting