Miscellany: cabinet changes and Prince Harry
The new defence secretary is a disappointing choice; Coutinho joins the cabinet amid much hype; the Duke of Sussex reminds us of what could have been different
Defence of the realm
In July, after Ben Wallace had announced that he wished to stand down as secretary of state for defence, I examined the potential field of candidates as I and others saw them at the time. Yesterday, the prime minister took the Westminster a little by surprise and appointed the energy security secretary, Grant Shapps, to fill the vacancy. The 54-year-old MP for Welwyn Hatfield must now count as a veteran, having been elected to the House of Commons in 2005; his first candidacy was in 1997. He has had a busy year, and this is his fifth post: he had run the Department for Transport under Boris Johnson, was home secretary for six days between Suella Braverman resigning for compromising email security and being rehabilitated from that sin, was appointed business, energy and industrial strategy secretary by Rishi Sunak and then took on energy security when his department was broken up in February. Move fast and break things, Zuckerberg said…
I will be looking at the challenges facing Shapps in my City AM column on Monday, so I’ll leave policy considerations for then. Shapps’s supporters, and those seeking to put a brave face on the situation, have praised the new minister’s “communications skills” and his “Whitehall experience”. He can master a brief quickly, they claim, and will carry weight in cabinet. Perhaps. Certainly Shapps is fluent in front of the cameras, and maybe it is skill rather than shamelessness. He has an irrepressible nature which either entertains or irritates. Quentin Letts of The Times, sharp-tongued but often possessed of pinpoint accuracy, observed earlier in the year that Shapps
is, it must be conceded, an irritating fellow. That puppyish bounce he has, the implausibly sandy hair, the grin stretching to his cheek bones: these things can soon make you snap your pencil.
It is difficult not to feel some resonance. More prophetically, the sketchwriter continued:
You wouldn’t want Shapps in a Nato war room. His incessant zing might make a marshal of the air force smash the table with his fist, accidentally hitting the nuke button.
Well, perhaps we will see about that. For me, it is a little more serious than that. Shapps’s pre-politics business career is famously a matter of light and shade; he was accused of writing false testimonials for a company he owned, and the same enterprise was accused of software plagiarism which caused it to be blacklisted by Google, while his use of pseudonyms is now standard fare for satirists.
Does any of this matter? Perhaps not. It hardly puts him at risk of blackmail, as it is all public knowledge, and he has never faced criminal sanction (though that is a depressingly low bar to set for secretary of state for defence). Shapps may create entertaining and engaging TikTok videos—though I assume that will have to stop in his new role, given how much data the platform collects from its users—but one Conservative who talked to Conservative Home last summer said “he reminds me a little bit of Jeffrey Archer”. It was meant as a compliment, but is not; it does, however, have a lot of truth in it. Andrew Gimson described him as “an odd mixture of ambition, boldness, implausibility, realism and professionalism”, but for many it is more uneasy than that; Shapps is somehow shifty, indefinably disingenuous, shady.
Some have criticised the appointment because Shapps has no military experience. That is unfair; Wallace was the first former regular soldier to head the Ministry of Defence since John Nott (1981-83), and it should never be a requirement that a secretary of state has pursued the profession for which he or she has policy responsibility. It is a more reasonable observation that he has little experience or apparent interest in the area: he was an international development minister for a few months on 2015, and has been a member of the National Security Council in other cabinet roles, but, as General Lord Dannatt, chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009, has noted, he “knows very little about defence, and it’s a complex portfolio. It will take him quite some time to get up to speed”.
As I say, I will look at Shapps’s daunting in-tray in City AM on Monday. For now I will simply observe that defence watchers have the right to be at least nonplussed, if not frankly disappointed, by his appointed. There were credible, capable candidates in and around the cabinet—Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat, James Heappey—but the prime minister has chosen a rather insubstantial figure whose chief characteristic does seem to be loyalty. Everyone knows Shapps’s tenure is likely to be measured in months rather than years, and so he is a caretaker either till a victorious Sunak reconstructs his cabinet after an election win, or, currently seeming more likely, Sir Keir Starmer appoints his top team. But with the war in Ukraine ongoing, and so much at stake in terms of equipment and procurement, the new defence secretary cannot cruise. He needs already to be mastering the brief.
A future prime minister?
Shapps’s promotion to the Ministry of Defence left a gap at the not-very-snappily titled Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (the inclusion of those last two words seemed like a good idea in February). Into that vacancy vaulted the children and families minister Claire Coutinho. She has had a meteoric rise: elected as MP for East Surrey in 2019, she became Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary at the Treasury the following year until resigning with him from Boris Johnson’s crumbling government in July 2022. Briefly a work and pensions minister under Liz Truss, Coutinho was then given a job as a parliamentary under-secretary of state, the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder, at the Department for Education last October.
Of course the story behind this is that Coutinho is a very close ally of the prime minister. After reading philosophy and mathematics at Oxford, she worked in emerging market equity at Merrill Lynch and corporate responsibility at KPMG before becoming a special adviser to Sunak in the Treasury. This connection is bearing fruit, as she has vaulted from under-secretary of state directly into a full cabinet job at the age of only 38. (She was not yet born when Ghostbusters was released. This rankles with me.) Taking charge of a policy area which is not only technically complex but also increasingly partisan for someone who has not yet served 12 months in ministerial office.
Because of the rapidity of her rise, the media have wheeled out the hoary old phrase “future prime minister” or “future party leader”. If one kept a tally for every politician to whom this had been applied, it would be a rogues’ gallery indeed: from the current continuity Blair flavour of the month Wes Streeting one could think back through David Miliband, Michael Portillo, John Moore and Shirley Williams. But there is the immovable fact that, even with the Conservative Party’s current job-sharing approach, very few people ever get to lead their party, and when we say someone is a “future party leader” we don’t really mean that we strongly anticipate that they will rise to that position.
What we mean is that someone has an indefinable set of qualities which should make them a plausible candidate for the leadership, should a vacancy arise. The Roman Curia has a word for this, “papabile”, or “popable”: that is, a promising cardinal who would be a plausible candidate for the throne of St Peter in the event of a conclave. There is a similar but not perfect analogy in the Byzantine term “porphyrogénnētos”, or “born in the purple”, to denote children born to the emperor, named for the birthing room in the imperial palace which was lined with porphyry. Perhaps this is a gap in our political vocabulary: a word which denotes the kind of person who might well win a leadership election for his or her party but upon whom there is placed no more expectation than that. Suggestions in the comments, perhaps…
The Prince Harry Games
I don’t want to dwell long on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. People have fixed and passionately held opinions, and few are open to persuasion. I don’t much like the way the couple have conducted themselves since deciding to step back from active royal duties, but that is for another time. However, Netflix is now showing Heart of Invictus, a five-part documentary series following competitors in the tournament dealing with their injuries and the ways in which their lives have changed. I’ve yet to see it but it has been quite well reviewed, here, here and here.
The Invictus Games are a tremendously noble cause, created by Prince Harry in 2014 to provide a competitive arena for wounded, injured and sick service personnel. They were inspired by his visit the previous year to the Warrior Games, organised by the US Department of Defense. I take absolutely nothing away from the prince for his achievement, and it is clearly a cause about which he feels deeply. My only sadness is that this could have been emblematic of the sort of thing he could have done, brilliantly and successfully, from within the royal family after he left the Army. In 2017, he succeeded the Duke of Edinburgh as Captain General of the Royal Marines, the ceremonial head of the organisation; he already held honorary appointments in the Royal Navy and the RAF.
This seemed perfectly suited to him. It allowed him to be less formal than some royal duties, a format he clearly does not much enjoy, and he has undoubted rapport with service personnel. The prince seems genuinely empathetic, and obviously is comfortable among those who have served and are still serving. Different choices were made, of course. But it is a pity.