Suella Braverman, the Indian-origin attorney general, is tipped to be promoted to home secretary in Liz Truss’s new cabinet, thereby replacing Priti Patel, another right wing Indian woman who will be banished to the back benches.

Truss has yet to be formally declared as Britain’s new prime minister but in the expectation that she will beat Rishi Sunak by 2-1, there is now intense speculation about who will be up and who will be down when she appoints her cabinet.

The latest intelligence is that Rishi will not get a job. Neither will another Indian, Alok Sharma, whose period in charge of climate change as president of COP26 comes to an end this year. Nor will Shailesh Vara, who was appointed Northern Ireland by Boris Johnson in early July.

After being knocked out herself in the Tory leadership contest, it is said that Braverman endorsed Truss after extracting a promise she would be made home secretary, considered one of the “great offices of state”.

If she gets the job, Braverman will be in charge of the police, counter-terrorism and intelligence and also the responsibility to deport overstayers and illegal immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. She is a vocal supporter of sending illegal Channel migrants to Rwanda.

Braverman, who was born Sue-Ellen Cassiana Fernandes in Harrow, north London, on 3 April 1980 to a father with Goan ancestry, clearly hasn’t read Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.

She is on record as saying that “the British Empire was a force for good”, which has endeared her to the right wing of the Conservative party.

She told the Daily Telegraph in an interview: “I am proud of the British Empire. I am informed by the experience of my parents.”

She said her parents “were born under the British Empire in the 1940s, and they have nothing but good things to tell me about the mother country. Not least the fact that it was Britain that gave them opportunity and safety when they were young adults.”

She told how in Mauritius “the legal system, the language, some of the educational norms are all influenced heavily by the British Empire. In Kenya, the administration, the civil service, the infrastructure, ports, railways, roads brought by the British – the British Empire was a force for good. That is not to deny the awful things as well that went on because of the time period and cultural norms at that time”.

She took aim at the Left for having to apologise for being patriotic. “It’s born out of a left-wing apology for patriotism and an apology for Britain. Ashamed of our history, fearful of our past, a belief in the decline-ism of Britain, not the ingenuity and the genius of the British people.

“A small view of Britain that we are somehow insignificant and wrongdoers rather than a generous view of Britain in terms of what we’ve brought to the world, in terms of language, culture and the industrial revolution.”

She was born to Christie and Uma Fernandes (née Mootien-Pillay), both of Indian origin, who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius respectively. Her mother, a nurse, was a councillor in Brent and the Conservative candidate in Tottenham in the 2001 general election and in the 2003 Brent East by-election. Her father, worked for a housing association.

Braverman’s stance on trans issues – where she argues that people have become “terrified of pointing out the basic facts of biology” – also aligns with Truss, who has told hustings events: “I’m a plain-speaking Yorkshire woman and I know that a woman is a woman.”

Although her parents are Hindu, Braverman, for all her hardline views on Brexit and much else, is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Community (formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order) and attends the London Buddhist Centre monthly. She took her oath of office on the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form.

She and her husband, Rael Braverman, have two children.

Senior MPs who supported Truss will be very disappointed if they are not inducted into the cabinet and perhaps make trouble for her from the backbenches.

Andrew Neil, writing in the Daily Mail on Saturday, said: “The joke in Westminster is that she already has three foreign secretaries and four chancellors.