Sue-Ellen Braverman might have tried to transform herself into Suella – only to be dubbed “Cruella” by her many enemies – but perhaps she couldn’t ever have escaped a fate sealed – like that of so many tragic protagonists before her – by the impatience of her unquenchable ambition.

For, on Monday, November 13th, the UK’s controversial Home Secretary was fired from her lofty position – for the second time in just over a year.

She’d previously been forced to resign from Liz Truss’s short-lived administration for a breach of the ministerial code, but had been reappointed to her job about a week later when Rishi Sunak had entered Downing Street, keen to reunite the extremes of his fractured party.

The moderate and pragmatic new premier had gambled that the presence of the right-wing Ms. Braverman in one of the most senior positions in his new government would placate the Tories’ more ardent Brexiteers and anti-immigration zealots.

But Suella Braverman, emboldened by a sense of her apparent political immunity, quickly became a mouthpiece for what critics within her own party have depicted as its “nasty” wing.

She condemned the homeless as having made an antisocial “lifestyle choice”. She described the arrival of asylum-seekers as constituting an “invasion” and announced that 100 million such refugees were on their way to British shores. She called multiculturalism a “failure” and declared war on those progressive elements in society which she characterized as being represented by the “tofu-eating wokerati”.

It appears that Mr. Sunak had already decided to sack her even before the events that hastened her departure. Indeed, Number Ten had initiated talks with former Prime Minister David Cameron about his return to government as Foreign Secretary – thus facilitating Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s move to take over from her as Home Secretary – before Suella Braverman had chosen to defy the Prime Minister’s office and ignore changes it had requested to a draft article she was writing for The Times newspaper.

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But the repercussions of that brazen breach of protocol – and in fact, once more, of the ministerial code – meant that she had to be dispatched with a degree of haste that seemed surprisingly decisive for her usually cautious boss.

It wasn’t simply because she had called a planned demonstration predominantly calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza – a demonstration deemed legitimate by London’s Metropolitan Police – a “hate march”. It wasn’t just because she had publicly accused the police of being guilty of bias, and specifically of “playing favorites” in support of left-wing causes. Nor was it even because she had, as a serving Home Secretary, broken important protocols by openly attempting political interference in the police’s operational decisions.

It was, in the end, because she had been wrong.

As police intelligence had predicted, the demonstration itself – a large event comprising about 300,000 supporters – had for the most part passed peacefully and lawfully, and therefore (as the lawyers had advised) shouldn’t and couldn’t have been banned under current legal powers.

By contrast however, the majority of the day’s lawlessness – and violence and subsequent arrests – had come from a relatively small group of far-right counter-protesters, a mob of thugs who (her detractors have since claimed) may have been riled up by Ms. Braverman’s inflammatory remarks – and who had themselves directly targeted police officers with both verbal aggression and physical violence.

And so, she had to go – at last, and fast. Her disciples on the right of the Conservative Party – and in the populist media – would of course like to see her back in frontline politics as soon as possible, but there are also many on her own party’s benches – traumatized by her tragic penchant for divisive indiscretion – who are evidently very relieved to see the back of her.

The day after her departure, she published a letter denouncing the failures of Rishi Sunak’s government, alleging he's never had any intention of fulfilling his “pledge to the British people”.

In doing so, she has crossed her Rubicon. It remains to be seen whether she will succeed in dragging her party and her country into the potentially tragic impacts of her apparently inexhaustible self-belief.