Starmer's first planned reshuffle may be only months away

A full reshuffle within a year of taking office would be unusually quick and raise questions over Sir Keir Starmer's initial choice of ministers

Cabinet shuffles are catnip to anyone who watches or commentates on politics, and I freely admit that I’m no different. The relentless pace of news, or at least its 24-hour availability, has shrunk attention spans and made us crave change, novelty, rumour like a jaded gourmand in search of some yet-more-exotic dish. Naturally enough, there are fertile and fallow periods, and it is assumed that, in the wake of a general election, planned changes at the top of the government will be off the menu for some time; a prime minister confirmed in office will usually take the opportunity to make alterations to ministerial ranks, while a party freshly voted in from opposition while bring a whole new team.

However much I feel the lure of the reshuffle’s excitement, I know, like any addict, that it isn’t healthy. “Ministerial churn”, as it the shorthand has it, is absurdly high and getting worse, which leads to instability, ministers unable to master their briefs or see through policy changes, and statistics which anyone at any part of the political spectrum should be able to agree are farcical: in 20 years, we have had 21 ministers responsible for housing (and Lee Rowley served twice, in 2022 then in 2023-24); 19 ministers in charge of immigration (sometimes more than one at once, with the portfolio divided between them); and 17 culture secretaries, running a department with shifting responsibilities. This is self-evidently a ridiculous and damaging state of affairs.

There is also an unshakeable fallacy attached to reshuffles, as I explained a few years ago. Prime ministers believe that changing the faces around the cabinet table will in some indefinable way “refresh” the government and make it more popular with the electorate, despite very clear polling evidence that most voters can barely recognise more than a handful of cabinet ministers and make very little connection between their tenure of office and the government’s direction and performance in general. The reshuffle retains its attraction, however, because it is a process almost wholly within a prime minister’s control. There can be mishaps, if a minister takes dismissal more badly than anticipated or is reluctant to agree to a proposed move; Theresa May’s reshuffle in January 2018 was held up because Justine Greening, then Education Secretary, unexpectedly refused a transfer to the Department for Work and Pensions and told the Prime Minister she would rather leave the government entirely.

It is sometimes hard to remember that the current administration has only been in office for seven-and-a-half months. Rishi Sunak’s monsoon announcement of the imminent dissolution of Parliament seems like an episode from another lifetime. Yet Sir Keir Starmer really is only in the first days of his premiership, albeit he has already outlasted George Canning (1827), Viscount Goderich (1827-28), Andrew Bonar Law (1922-23) and Liz Truss (2022), and within days will ease past the Duke of Devonshire (1756-57). On the face of it, talking of a reshuffle already seems at best premature.

Nevertheless, enough stories have appeared in the media without categorical denials by Downing Street that it seems there will be changes within cabinet and further down the ministerial ranks in the near future, and today’s story in The i Paper is only the latest of such reports. Exactly when this will happen is still unclear, with “late spring or early summer” the closest to a specific timeframe: the Chancellor of the Exchequer will give a statement on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s spring Economic and Fiscal Forecast at the end of March, there are local government elections in May and the results of the Spending Review are due to be announced in June, after which Starmer might think a reshuffle is plausible and seemingly orderly.

At this stage, rumours fall largely into two categories, the plausible and expected, on the one hand, and the frankly unlikely on the other. The i Paper reports, for example, rumours that Rachel Reeves could be moved from HM Treasury and replaced by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, then adds that these have “been rubbished by senior Government sources”. I am the first to say that Reeves’s tenure as Chancellor has been so far dismal, but there would be no advantage to the trauma of dismissing her (which would inevitably summon up memories of Liz Truss’s disposal of Kwasi Kwarteng after 38 days as Chancellor in 2022) without a wholesale change of economic policy, of which there seems no likelihood at all.

More plausibly in the firing line is the Attorney General, Lord Hermer. A surprise appointment when the government was formed last July, leaving Dame Emily Thornberry, who had shadowed the post since 2021 and 2011-14, without a ministerial role, Starmer’s former close colleague at the Bar and frequent junior counsel has combined lack of political deftness with an unusually public profile. His insistence on the primacy of international law is felt to have caused many of the government’s current woes over the British Indian Ocean Territory, while his previous professional associations with former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah, Islamic State hanger-on Shamima Begum and disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner have won him few new friends. My own feeling is that Hermer merely expressed aloud and explicitly many sentiments which Starmer shares, but he would be a relatively pain-free sacrifice to some of the Prime Minister’s critics.

Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy is also believed to be at risk. She was moved sideways into the brief when Shadow Culture Secretary Thangam Debbonaire lost her Bristol West seat at the general election and became the only full member of the cabinet learning a new subject area. It is now said that Downing Street regards her as unreliable and that she spends too much time at the department’s site at Trinity Bridge House in Salford (she is MP for Wigan, 15 miles away). Nandy has made little impact so far: I looked at her address to the Royal Television Society last September for CulturAll, which was heavy on aspiration and light on detail, and she has failed to get to grips with the issues surrounding the future of the BBC, in view of the expiry of its current royal charter at the end of 2027.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there are question marks over the future of Bridget Phillipson. The Education Secretary is currently overseeing the legislative progress of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has just completed its committee stage in the House of Commons, but its rolling back of the freedoms of academy-status schools has not been universally well received. In addition, Phillipson’s handling of the reforms of Ofsted, her hesitancy over the implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 and the imposition of VAT on fee-paying schools have made her seem uncomfortably doctrinaire to some Labour moderates and, it seems, to some in Downing Street. Nevertheless, while she may be given a quiet yellow card by the Prime Minister, I would be surprised to see her leave office.

Starmer has already lost three ministers, of course. Louise Haigh was forced to resign as Transport Secretary in November after a scandal over a 2013 conviction for fraud by false representation; the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Tulip Siddiq, stepped down after a drawn-out and embarrassing potential connection to corruption in Bangladesh, where her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, was prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and 2001 to 2024; and this week a junior health minister, Andrew Gwynne, was dismissed after he was revealed to have made offensive remarks in a WhatsApp group with other Labour politicians. We should also bear in mind the resignation in October last year of the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Sue Gray (who this week was introduced into the House of Lords as Baroness Gray of Tottenham).

Conversely, the Prime Minister, perhaps rashly, guaranteed two senior ministers in their current roles for the rest of the parliament. In November last year, amid criticism of David Lammy for previous candid and uncomplimentary remarks about Donald Trump, Downing Street let it be known that the Foreign Secretary would remain in post until the next general election. Last month, the Prime Minister’s office fended off criticisms of the government’s economic policy by declaring that Rachel Reeves would be Chancellor “for the whole of this Parliament” (notwithstanding the rumours referred to earlier). Were these panicked responses to immediate political crises or considered reassurance for beleaguered colleagues? Starmer is believed to value continuity, as witnessed by the extremely high rate of translation from shadow portfolios to government departments at the general election last July. Nevertheless, such public and explicit pledges have denied him room to manoeuvre for years to come: if either Reeves or Lammy leaves office, whatever the circumstances, his guarantees will be used as evidence of bad faith or weakness.

There is one wider issue of judgement. If, as seems likely at the moment, there is a reshuffle before July, then the Prime Minister will be moving and replacing ministers who have been in office for less than 12 months. It is not unreasonable to ask, in those circumstances, what made Starmer appoint them in the first place, and why they have proved to be substandard in such a relatively short time.

After becoming Prime Minister in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher made her first cabinet changes almost two years later, in January 1981, with a more wide-reaching reshuffle that September. John Major, having formed his administration in November 1990, kept the same team in place until after the general election of April 1992. Tony Blair waited 14 months after his election victory in May 1997 to shuffle his cabinet, and was working with the twin strictures of a shadow cabinet which was still largely elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party and internal party rules which guaranteed ministerial positions for members of that shadow cabinet. David Cameron did not conduct a deliberate reconstruction of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government until September 2012, more than two years after it had taken office. To conduct a wholesale revamp of a government which has been elected after 10 or 11 months would be extremely unusual.

There are some extenuating factors. It is not always possible to predict with absolute accuracy which opposition spokesmen and spokeswomen, however able and effective, will also be competent and efficient ministers and managers of government departments, since the skills required are in many ways different. At the same time, some shadow ministers may fail to shine but prove to be capable Whitehall warriors once installed in office. Any prime minister must be allowed a margin of error.

Nevertheless, a reshuffle in the next few months will, and should, prompt questions about the Prime Minister’s instincts and personnel management. Examining the rise and downfall of Sue Gray last week, I argued that her appointment as Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition and then in Downing Street had failed in part because of a misreading of her abilities and experience, for which Starmer was to blame. The departure of Lord Hermer, wholly Starmer’s choice as Attorney General, would represent another unforced error. William Gladstone once said that “the first essential for a prime minister is to be a good butcher” in terms of making ministerial changes, but just as important is the initial creation of an administration. Picking the right people for the right jobs is vital, and the suspicion lingers that Sir Keir Starmer is simply not very good at it.