The great reshuffle fallacy

A prime minister in the doldrums is often tempted to reshuffle the ministerial team to revive their fortunes: but does it work?

You can argue about the precise moment at which the prime minister’s current difficulties became an acknowledged crisis, but one familiar sign certainly came on Sunday when Matt Hancock, the former health secretary who resigned after an affair with one of his department’s non-executive directors, Gina Coladangelo, suggested that Truss should reshuffle her cabinet. He seemed to ignore the fact that the current line-up was only created at the beginning of September, and, given the lacuna of State Mourning for the late Queen, most ministers are still familiarising themselves with their posts and responsibilities.

If it seemed an implausible and rather absurd suggestion, we should not judge Hancock too harshly. Reshuffling the cabinet is a remedy for political crisis to which prime ministers often resort, in the belief that it will have a significant effect on their fortunes. Minor reshuffles occur from time to time when a minister unexpectedly resigns or leaves office for some other reason, but major changes to the first XI are reserved for special occasions, only a few times each parliament, when a prime minister wants to send a powerful signal to the electorate.

There are three main reasons for cabinet reshuffles. The first is a straightforward one, to jettison ministers who are underperforming or in some other way no longer suitable for the front rank. This is only natural: the peculiar way in which the British constitution appoints ministers, with little emphasis on expertise and much more on political factors, means that appointing anyone to a major role in government is something of a leap in the dark. Diligent junior ministers may lack the grip or vision to run a department; a secretary of state may find a department or policy area difficult or less than conducive; and team players sometimes lose their spirit of collegiality under the pressure of everyday politics. The uncertainty which attaches to any cabinet appointment will always mean a prime minister may need to redeploy a minister, either banishing them entirely or, less often, persuading them to step down a rank and go back to junior ministerial office.

A second reason, which is the flip-side of the first, is that a government which is in office for any length of time, and certainly one which holds power over more than one parliament, will need to develop and promote new talent, allowing MPs to rise up the ministerial ladder with the promise of cabinet rank if they are good enough. This is partly to regenerate the governing party’s talent pool, and also to make good the ever-present promise of patronage. While promotion is held out in offering to far more than those who receive it, a prime minister must have the ability to redeem at least some promises.

The third, and most sharply political, reason for reshuffling the cabinet is the idea, fixed firmly in the political consciousness, that a fresh set of faces is a good way for a prime minister to regenerate a beleaguered government, shake off previous difficulties and appear bold and dynamic to the electorate. This is also the most dubious motivation for a reshuffle. It relies on two essential fallacies, the first of which is that the electorate does indeed see a major reconfiguration of the government as a sign of energy, and the second, more fundamental, that the average voter either cares or, even, notices.

The evidence for this last presumption is particularly weak. Most voters could not identify every minister in the cabinet: a survey conducted in 2015 found that the average recognition rate of “leading” cabinet ministers was only 50%. Half the electorate, therefore, did not even know who senior ministers were, let alone what portfolios they held or how well they were performing. Of course the great officers of state will be well known. The survey found that the prime minister, David Cameron, was identifiable by 98% of voters, while George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, and the home secretary, Theresa May, were known to more than 70%. But some senior ministers were surprisingly anonymous. Philip Hammond, then foreign secretary, was familiar to only a third of voters, while the profile of the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, was at only 15%.

Given these rather modest levels of recognition, it seems ambitious to argue that moving ministers around makes any impact on voters at all, let alone being sufficiently well reported as to make them think more positively of the prime minister or the government. And let us not fool ourselves: our politicians are not (generally) stupid, and they must know this too. So why do they invest in a patent fallacy?

The last major point to be made about reshuffles in principal is that they are attractive to prime ministers because they are events wholly, or almost wholly, within their control, being essentially insular and inward-looking. Patronage is one of the premier’s most potent tools, and in general they have the untrammelled power to hire and fire. Inevitably, of course, there will be ministers whom leaders must reluctantly retain because of political support. Most obviously, Tony Blair had to retain his great rival Gordon Brown at the Treasury for the whole decade of his premiership, from 1997 to 2007, because Brown’s support in the party made him indispensable. Blair did sometimes consider installing a new face as chancellor, and in 2003 hatched a plan called Operation Teddy Bear to dismember the Treasury entirely, creating two new departments dealing with macroeconomics on the one hand and departmental spending on the other.

Reshuffles can also be delayed or derailed by a prospective minister unexpectedly turning down an appointment. There are over 100 ministers in the government as a whole (the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 limits it to 109 paid ministers), and creating this delicate patchwork from the ranks of the governing party in the House of Commons and the House of Lords is a fearsomely complicated affair. The prime minister will know whom he wants in his cabinet, but at a more junior level the premier will simply not know candidates well enough, and will lean heavily on the advice of the Whips’ Office. Given this interwoven series of ministerial posts, if one single job is turned down, the ripple effect of that will be very wide. In January 2018, as Theresa May was reshuffling her cabinet, she sought to move Justine Greening from the Department for Education and appoint her work and pensions secretary. It was not an improbable move, certainly no worse than sideways, but Greening had no wish to look after the welfare system and told the prime minister that she would rather leave the government. This consequently held up the process while plans were altered.

An obvious example of the reshuffle as removal of dead wood was Thatcher’s purge of the “wets” in September 1981. Her seizure of the Conservative Party leadership in 1975 had been unexpected, and in ideological terms she had relatively few supporters, inheriting instead well-regarded and weighty figures from the Heath era whom she could not immediately dismiss. Even when she formed her first government in May 1979, there were senior figures who still held out against her radical monetarism and were known as “wets” (as opposed to Thatcherite “dries”): Francis Pym, defence secretary, James Prior, employment secretary, and Sir Ian Gilmour, deputy foreign secretary, for example, were all at best suspicious of Thatcher’s economic policies, but their support in the party made them essential members of her top team.

By 1981, however, as Thatcher passed her second anniversary in office and remained committed to a radical transformation of the British economy, she felt sufficiently secure to reorganise the cabinet in a more conducive ideological hue. To assert her authority, she made some high-profile changes. Gilmour was dismissed, as were Lord Soames, the leader of the House of Lords and so grand that he was not only a former ambassador to France but Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, and Mark Carlisle, the education secretary. Prior was moved from employment to the backwater of the Northern Ireland Office and David Howell was switched from the critical energy brief to the more humdrum portfolio of transport.

This reshuffle was a key moment for Thatcher. By now, the key ministries—Treasury, Trade, Industry, Energy and Employment—were in the hands of her supporters. The old-school Heathmen no longer had the influence to resist her economic policies, having been moved to more peripheral jobs where they had not been dismissed entirely. The direction of travel was set for the rest of the parliament.

If reshuffles do not create the impression of dynamism that premiers hope, it does not prevent them trying. Most prime ministers have tried this trick, and have never been able to point to substantial evidence of success. One of the most famous reshuffles was Harold Macmillan’s “Night of the Long Knives” in July 1962. The Conservative government, approaching 11 years in office, was showing signs of wear, and events seemed to be running against them. A half-hearted attempt to join the European Economic Community was mired in delay (and would be vetoed by President de Gaulle at the beginning of 1963); a balance of payments crisis had forced the government to impose a seven-month pay freeze; and in March 1962, the Liberals had won the supposedly safe Conservative seat of Orpington at a by-election. Something needed to be done.

Macmillan decided that his rather stale cabinet needed to be refreshed. He planned a radical reconstruction, but his timing was upset by a typically indiscreet leak that major changes were coming from his deputy, Rab Butler. So on 13 July, Macmillan wielded the knife, and sacked eight cabinet ministers, including the loyal chancellor of the exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd. Rather than dynamic and forward-looking, the brutal political butchery simply made the prime minister seem fearful and panicky. The young Liberal MP for North Devon, Jeremy Thorpe, skewered Macmillan perfectly when he observed acidly “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.”

Stunning in scale, the reshuffle also created enemies among those who were dismissed. The long-serving lord chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, complained that he had been sacked with less notice than a housekeeper. Macmillan shot back that good housekeepers were harder to find than lord chancellors. The minister of education, Sir David Eccles, was told that he must make way for a new man and was offered a return to his old job at the Board of Trade; he declined, and left the government. But the most controversial move was sacking Lloyd as chancellor. Lloyd was a rather lonely divorcé who had been a dutiful foreign secretary from 1955 to 1960 before taking over the Treasury, and, as a single man, he had been given use of the prime minister’s country house, Chequers. When he was sacked, he gave up not only a job which consumed his energies but also his domestic base and a salary on which he relied. His awkward predicament attracted a great deal of sympathy among Conservative MPs.

It was hard to argue that the trauma of the ruthless bloodletting improved the government’s fortunes. Within a year the Profumo affair would severely damage Macmillan’s reputation and reinforce a view of him as out-of-touch and old-fashioned (which, of course, he was), and he resigned in October 1963, suffering from an enlarged prostate and a wider sense of dismay. If the voters had noticed the cabinet carnage at all, commentators certainly did, and the prime minister’s old nickname of “Mac the Knife” was revived with a more pointed relevance.

More than 30 years later, John Major, similarly beset by political storms, tried a similar tactic. In July 1995, he forced a leadership contest to flush out his enemies, telling the parliamentary party that it was “time to put up or shut up”. For a few days, all sorts of possible challengers were mooted, but in the end only John Redwood, the awkward and uncharismatic Welsh secretary, put his name forward. There was never any chance that Redwood would win: he was virtually unknown outside Westminster, his public manner was wooden and off-putting, and those whom he rallied to his flag included the oddest, maddest and most extreme backbenchers like Anthony Marlowe, Teresa Gorman, Christopher Gill and Bill Walker. Only the former chancellor, Norman Lamont, brought any weight. When Team Redwood assembled for a photo opportunity, the resulting image simply drove home the impression of unelectable misfits.

When the contest was held on 4 July, Redwood received 89 votes—too many for Major’s comfort and a quarter of the parliamentary party but not even within shouting distance of success—while 218 MPs backed the prime minister. Major hoped that this test had lanced the boil of unrest in the Conservative Party (it did not) and immediately carried out a widespread reconstruction of the government to set the seal on the new era.

The reshuffled cabinet contained a number of new or promoted faces. Michael Heseltine, whose leadership ambitions had probably slipped away and who had backed Major loyally, was made deputy prime minister and the government’s biggest cheerleader. With the long-serving foreign secretary Douglas Hurd stepping down, the articulate and sharp Malcolm Rifkind replaced him, while the smooth and reassuring Ian Lang (who had once written scripts for the Cambridge Footlights) became trade and industry secretary. Thatcherite dauphin Michael Portillo took over the Ministry of Defence, the punchy and abrasive Ulsterman Brian Mawhinney became party chairman and the cabinet gained its youngest member in the 34-year-old William Hague, MP for Richmond, who eventually became Welsh secretary.

(Hague had been originally pencilled in as chief secretary to the Treasury, with William Waldegrave, whose Bristol constituency was at least near Wales, slated for the Welsh Office. But the chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, had no appetite for the young Yorkshireman to join his team, and Major was persuaded to switch the appointments. It was in the end a happy accident for Hague, who took Welsh lessons from his private secretary, Ffion Jenkins: she is now Lady Hague of Richmond.)

New faces, new (or merged) departments, new roles: Major had reconstructed his administration as significantly as he could. But it made no difference. The Tories were already, it is true, on a glide path to defeat after winning for general elections in succession, but when polling day came on 1 May 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour not just defeated but trounced them, the Conservatives winning fewer seats than at any election since 1906.

Reshuffles must, of course, be a part of the political routine. Ministers grow bored or stale, fall out with vested interests or turn their backs on office. Changes will always need to be made. But politicians should be sanguine about the impact of reshuffles. They confer a pleasant sense of power on prime ministers, and it is always agreeable to exercise patronage, but they rarely move the needle. On the whole, they should be rare and driven by practical rather than presentational considerations.

Liz Truss is unlikely to reach for the butcher’s knife. Although she was ruthless in dismissing her close friend and ally Kwasi Kwarteng from the Treasury, replacing him with Jeremy Hunt, the real political question now hangs over her, not her ministers. So Matt Hancock’s helpful suggestion will probably go unheeded, but it did at least signal a proper emergency, and it must be nice for him to feel included again.