Rishi's reshuffle: observations in the margins

Cameron and Cleverly were the big stories of the unexpected reshuffle, but there were other aspects of the personnel changes which political observers shouldn't miss

Rishi Sunak managed a supreme achievement of containment by surprising Westminster with a reshuffle many did not expect at all, and by placing at its centre the return to frontline politics of the former prime minister David Cameron. The new foreign secretary is the first ex-premier to sit in cabinet since Sir Alec Douglas-Home held the same post under Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974, although one-time party leaders William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith have held cabinet positions, while Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition 2010-15, is currently a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow team.

I will be writing about the main features of the reshuffle elsewhere; and I also stand by the opinion I expressed last year that cabinet reshuffles, while they fascinate the Westminster village, have very limited impact on the electorate as a whole, and should not be invested with too much solemn significance. This will not make or break Sunak’s electoral prospects, and, having occupied the airwaves for a day, the shuffling of the pack will fade into forgotten memory. But it may contain nudges of the course of politics, and these are worth alighting on for a few moments.

Someone has to make way

One of the problems of conducting a reshuffle is that some ministers have to be removed if there is to be room for changes. This means that the axe can sometimes fall on ministers who had not regarded themselves as failing, let alone failing so badly to warrant dismissal. The most stylishly Wodehousian example of this came during Harold Macmillan’s panicky July 1962 reshuffle, known for its breadth as the “Night of the Long Knives”, when seven cabinet ministers were removed. One was the lord chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, approaching his eighth anniversary on the Woolsack though only just 62 years old. Although he had previously indicated that he would retire when the prime minister wished, Kilmuir still found his dismissal shocking, and complained he was given less notice than one would give to a good cook. Macmillan, characteristically and whimsically, observed that good cooks were harder to find than good lord chancellors.

The catalystic sacrifice for Sunak was Dr Thérèse Coffey, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs. A peculiar figure, intelligent and down to earth, popular with colleagues but having irritated some civil servants with clumsily prescriptive drafting instructions when appointed health and social care secretary, Coffey had been her old friend Liz Truss’s deputy prime minister after what was seen as a solid innings at the Department for Work and Pensions from 2019 to 2022. Rishi Sunak retained her in cabinet but demoted her to DEFRA, where she had been a junior minister for three years during Theresa May’s turbulent premiership. She had struggled in recent months amid rising public concern over pollution in coastal waters, and had not helped her cause with tin-eared remarks on thrift and lack of prosperity.

This public series of gaffes made her a relatively easy target to remove. She was an early arrival at Downing Street on Monday morning, which led some to speculate that she might be given a new job rather than simply dismissed; executions are usually performed in the prime minister’s office in the House of Commons. But the commentariat was over-interpreting, and Coffey was merely dropped from office. Creating that vacancy allowed Sunak to make other changes: Steve Barclay, formerly health and social care secretary, was moved across to DEFRA to take her place, while Victoria Atkins joined the cabinet as Barclay’s replacement.

Coffey had not been a success as environment secretary, but by the standards of Westminster it is not clear than her performance was so poor as to merit dismissal. However, Sunak had to start somewhere, and dropping Coffey gave him some elbow room. In other circumstances, she might have limped on until the general election, but she provided the easiest target for Sunak, who then went to work more broadly. She turns 52 at the weekend so is at an awkward age: even a one-term Labour government and a Conservative recovery at the following election would mean she would be 57 or so before a cabinet return was even possible. It would be more realistic for her to look to a select committee chair, the lead of an international delegation or some extra-parliamentary position for further career fulfilment now.

This was, simply, an object lesson that reshuffles are bloody businesses: Gladstone was on the money when he remarked that “the first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher”. Of course there are myriad examples of PMs removing ministers who are obviously not fit for the job. Most famously, Clement Attlee informed one minister that he was being dismissed: several candidates have been mooted, but the most likely is John Parker, Labour MP for Dagenham, who was removed as under-secretary of state for the Dominions in May 1946. Disappointed and rather desperate, Parker asked why he was being fired. Attlee told him simply: “Not up to the job.”

Just as often, however, the judgement calls are much finer, and ministers may have annoyed their superiors once too often, espoused inconvenient views, served too long or have a face that doesn’t fit. Or perhaps the prime minister simply needs a way into a reshuffle, a fingernail under the first tile before everything else can be accomplished. Coffey could plausibly have ticked two or three boxes. In any event, her departure opened the door for the reshuffle to go on.

Everyone has a sell-by date

One of the less remarked departures was Nick Gibb, the schools minister. Once a Conservative student activist and an accountant at KPMG, he was elected to the Commons for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton in 1997, and enjoyed a slightly turbulent front-bench career in opposition until Michael Howard appointed him education spokesman in 2005. That set the pattern for his career. David Cameron gave him the schools brief from 2005 to 2010, and he was minister of state for school standards under Michael Gove 2010-12. Dropped in a reshuffle, he returned as minister for childcare, education and school reform in 2014, then reverted to the standards portfolio the following year. Johnson relieved him in September 2021 but Sunak reappointed him a year later; he stepped down on Monday and will leave the Commons at the general election.

I mention Gibb because of his extraordinary dedication to one area of policy. He has sometimes clashed with the educational establishment; within days of arriving at the department, he had ruffled feathers by suggesting that a teacher with a good degree was to be preferred to one with a bad degree and PGCE, and in 2014 he was alleged to have dismissed the teaching of public speaking as tending to “encourage idle chatter in class”. (I have written in favour of oracy and its benefits.) He has long supported the use of synthetic phonics to teach literacy: this is a system whereby the pupil learns the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, blends these sounds to pronounce words, and finally identifies which phonic generalisations apply. There is significant debate over the benefits of synthetic phonics, but it is a demonstration of Gibb’s dedication and long-standing interest in the subject.

There are frequent criticisms that ministerial tenure is too short. Rory Stewart, the former cabinet minister turned celebrity podcaster, articulated this argument in response to the reshuffle, while the Institute for Government has published an analysis of the effect of short ministerial tenure on the quality of administration. Under these circumstances, whether one agrees with Gibb’s approach to education or not, there is something to be admired in a politician who focuses on a policy area rather than personal advancement. Given some of those who have risen to cabinet rank since 2010, Gibb would hardly have been harbouring an outrageous ambition in seeing himself attaining the same level, but he has concentrated on the area which is his passion, spending more than 10 years of the last 13 as a minister of state at the Department for Education.

The other end of the scale…

I think most observers would admit that ministerial tenure is too short and churn is too great. But some portfolios seem to have attracted an almost-unbelievable level of change. One of the new appointments unveiled yesterday was that of Lee Rowley, MP for North East Derbyshire since 2017, as minister of housing. A former management consultant with experience in local government, serving for more than a decade as a cabinet member on Westminster City Council, he may well bring diligence and intelligence to his new role. But he is the 15th housing minister since 2010.

Fifteenth. Think about that. Grant Shapps, Mark Prisk, Kris Hopkins, Brandon Lewis, Gavin Barwell, Alok Sharma, Dominic Raab, Kit Malthouse, Esther McVey, Christopher Pincher, Stuart Andrew, Marcus Jones, Lee Rowley (episode 1), Lucy Frazer, Rachel Maclean. Quite a cocktail party, perhaps, but also the roster of ministers responsible for housing and planning since David Cameron came to power in May 2010. On average, then, each tenure has been 10 months, though in reality they have ranged from the six weeks of Rowley’s first stint under Liz Truss to two-year postings by Shapps, Lewis and Pincher.

This is, surely, indefensible. Of course there will sometimes be circumstances in which there is a lot of ministerial change, and the short Truss premiership was the greatest example of that. But there were five different housing ministers in 2022. Some must hardly have reached the bottom of their first red box. This is not purely a Conservative phenomenon, either, though it has become exaggerated since 2010. The 13 years of Labour government which preceded it saw nine ministers hold the brief, still an average tenure of less than a year and a half.

Housing and planning comprise a weighty mid-level brief, as the government’s website indicates. Planning reform and home ownership are complex areas full of technical regulation. Prisk at least had a background in development and surveying, while Lewis, Raab, Jones and Frazer were trained in law. But the argument is not really about housing so much as about ministerial office in general. Even if you accept, as I do, the system of generalist ministers moving from post to post, even the ablest and more impressive minister will need time to brief himself or herself, read into the field, absorb official advice and frame some initial thoughts on the subject, and there comes an extent to which that cannot be replaced. Surely no-one, however loyal, can argue that even half of these ministers were able to carry out the job effectively at such a rate of turnover.

I am generally light-touch when it comes to constitutional requirements and rules, and I think prescribing that minister should serve a minimum of, to take Rory’s figure, two years in post would either have to be restrictively specific or bounded by so many qualifications as to be worthless. But we have many ways of changing things, of which new laws and regulations are only the stronger end of the spectrum. As effective in the long run, but harder to bring about, is a change in culture and habit. Prime ministers (and chief whips, upon whose advice they rely heavily when conducting reshuffles) need to choose ministers on at least a vague assumption that they will serve a couple of years, rather than simply finding a convenient resting place for the immediate future. By itself, that will not automatically improve the standards of governance, but not doing that, and continuing to appoint ministers who often move on before a season is out, will certainly continue to harm their effectiveness.

Party time: excellent?

I don’t know if it’s my age, or an evolving political culture, or simply different methods of communication, but my perception is that the job of chairman of the Conservative Party is less important than it once was. When I was becoming politically aware, in Thatcher’s later years and then into the Major government, the party chairman was a prominent figure, frequently appearing in the media to make the government’s case, and those chosen were often selected at least in part because they were deemed to be good communicators. Think of Kenneth Baker (1989-90), a one-time Wet who became one of Thatcher’s closest supporters by the end of her reign; Chris Patten (1990-92), who won a general election but lost his own marginal seat in the process; or Brian Mawhinney (1995-97), who attempted to repeat the trick and whose straightforward Belfast tones were hardly off the television and radio as the Major government faded.

Recently, even an obsessive like me sometimes has to stop to summon up an incumbent’s name. How many of you would automatically recall Amanda Milling’s 18-month stint from February 2020 to September 2021? Or that Lord Feldman of Elstree, an Oxford friend of David Cameron, was chairman for six years, albeit most of them jointly with others, from 2010 to 2016? Perhaps this is simply a matter of my perception, that my focus has shifted (or failed to shift). But my instinct tells me something in the real world has changed.

I bring this up because the reshuffle saw the long-serving and effervescent Greg Hands, who had taken over as chairman when Nadhim Zahawi was forced to resign in January this year, demoted to minister of state at the Department for Business and Trade. (This will be Hands’s fifth stint as a business or trade minister, after trade policy 2016-18 and 2020-21, business, energy and clean growth 2021-22 and trade policy again 2022-23.) Hands many not have been the prime minister’s first choice. More than a week passed between Zahawi’s departure and Hands’s appointment; surveying potential candidates at the time, I’m pleased to note I included Hands in my dramatis personae. But his relentless energy, combined with a mildly hectoring tone at times, has caused friction within the party machinery.

Stepping into his shoes is Richard Holden, the 38-year-old Member for North West Durham. He was elected in 2019 in a truly seismic shift of psephological behaviour, as the constituency is made up largely of former coal-mining and steel communities, and had been a Labour stronghold since the Boundary Commission sketched it out for the 1950 general election. He defeated incumbent Laura Pidcock, one of the most unbearably self-righteous acolytes of the Corbynista cult, by 1,144 votes, slender enough but still a result which would simply have been thought impossible in the County Durham around which I grew up.

Holden is not a household name. He was appointed roads and local transport minister last October, but had carved out a niche in Westminster circles with a series of high-profile campaigns, successfully lobbying to have an increase in Vehicle Excise Duty reversed in 2020, campaigning for a lower rate of duty of draught beer in 2021 and encouraging Durham Constabulary in 2022 to investigate a potential breach of lockdown regulations by Sir Keir Starmer while visiting the North East. In addition, he honed his Westminster brawling instincts as a member of the Public Accounts Committee from 2020 to 2022.

He is not quite the scrappy northern interloper one might think. Certainly he is from the North, though Lancashire rather Durham, but he read government and history at the LSE before working at Conservative Party Headquarters and then serving as a special adviser to (take a deep breath) Baroness Stowell of Beeston, Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, Sir Michael Fallon, Chris Grayling and Gavin Williamson. So he knows his way around the political landscape, which will serve him well. His instinct for an eye-catching campaign speaks well for him in his new role, though he will need to steel himself for a much higher media profile if the prime minister deploys him as an active media representative of the government and party.

There is one problem, invoking the spectre of Chris Patten. Holden’s North West Durham seat is disappearing at the general election under the new Boundary Commission changes which cut the North East’s number of seats from 29 to 27. Consett and Leadgate, in the north of the constituency, will form the basis of the new Blaydon and Consett; Tow Law, Weardale and Crook will move to a revised Bishop Auckland; Esh, Willington and Hunwick will be taken in by the City of Durhaml; and Lanchester moves to North Durham. Holden appealed the proposal but as matters stand he does not have a candidacy for the next election.

One fellow MP thought this would quickly be solved, and remarked rather sourly “I guess Richard can have his pick of safe seats now”. I’m not quite sure that is true; indeed, the opposite might be the case. It might prove difficult for the party chairman to insert himself into candidacies, especially for plum seats (insofar as such things exist in the worst scenarios of the next election). One has to wonder, then, how great a distraction from the job of party chairman his search for a new seat will be, especially as the months wear on. Any selection process in which he is a candidate will also be subject to extraordinary scrutiny.

There are two schools of thought about Holden’s promotion. One is that it is a waste of talent. One Conservative MP said “The appointment of Richard Holden as chairman is an unbelievable missed opportunity. To bury someone with his talents in party HQ is the epitome of giving up.” This suggests that many now see the party chairmanship as an essentially administrative role as opposed to the cheerleading function it very often had in the 1980s and 1990s. I would have thought that kind of bureaucratic role would fall more readily and naturally to the party chief executive, currently Stephen Massey, an experienced financier who donated to Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaigns.

Not everyone is convinced of Holden’s suitability. He was left floundering on Tuesday morning when grilled by Susanna Reid and Ed Balls, not the most fearsome interrogators, on Good Morning Britain, finding it hard to mount a coherent defence of the government’s direction and narrative. An appearance on LBC was less chaotic but hardly the stuff of legendary communications skills. These performances reflected a complaint from a party insider:

This chap was a data entry employee at CCHQ, then a spad, then stood and accidentally won his Red Wall seat in 2019. Now he’s party chairman?? To inspire who exactly?

Holden’s significance will depend on the role Sunak envisages for the party chairman. The appointment of the ex-work and pensions secretary and former TV presenter Esther McVey as minister without portfolio was briefed to the media as installing her as “common sense tsar” who would be “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”. The notion of a plain-speaking cabinet minister who does not come from a background of inordinate privilege is not prima facie a bad one, given the status of the prime minister, the chancellor and the new foreign secretary, and McVey’s experience in broadcasting makes her a reasonably deft performer. But if she is to be what Tony Blair’s government dubbed the “minister for the Today programme”, then it calls into question the outward-facing role of the party chairman.

Conclusion

Monday’s reshuffle was unexpected in itself, and its scale was doubly unexpected. I come back again and again to the point that cabinet reshuffles have relatively little impact on the voters and their voting intentions. Sunak’s changes may have a slight effect on the government’s “vibe”, with Cameron’s genial and breezy approach to life and the absence of Braverman’s suspicious, borderline-xenophobic anxiety, but what matters much more will be any consequent changes in policy. The government remains likely to be defeated, perhaps heavily, at the general election expected some time next year, and if this is somehow to be averted, it will not be through the cast Rishi Sunak assembles around his cramped cabinet table. But as the entrails are presented to us, we might as well examine them to see what they might show.