The Rishi Rishuffle: post-match analysis

The rumours of a cabinet reshuffle emerged late but proved to be accurate in most of their particulars, so how does Whitehall look in the aftermath?

On Tuesday, with Harry Cole of The Sun earning his corn by unearthing a fairly comprehensive anticipation of a cabinet reshuffle, I looked at what was proposed and attempted to answer two questions: would these machinery of government changes make Whitehall more effective, and would they have a positive impact on the government’s political and electoral fortunes? (Spoiler alert: the answer was essentially “Possibly, with luck” and “Unlikely”.)

Now that most of the pieces are in place, with junior ministers being redeployed across the new departments and portfolios reassigned, I have taken the view that almost any commentator worth his or her salt had conducted an immediate autopsy on the operation, so it would only be right for me to do so too.

The easy bit of the reshuffle, and its proximate cause, involved no administrative changes at all. After the prime minister had sacked his party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, a new candidate for the post had to be found, a position which is now critical as we are, whatever else happened, less than two years away from a general election (the last possible date for polling day is Thursday 24 January 2025). It seems to have been more difficult than was anticipated, as Zahawi was sacked on 29 January, and a whole week went by with no chairman of the Conservative Party.

The reason is not hard to guess. If we accept that on current psephological predictions, the Conservatives will lose the next election, then whoever is chairman will have to work ceaselessly until polling day to minimise the losses (or even score the lost unlikely win since at least 1970), and is inevitably going to bear a good deal of the responsibility for a Tory defeat. For anyone who already has a substantial, certainly cabinet-level profile, it is not a task which is welcome. That was why some names being bandied around—Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Oliver Dowden, Mark Harper, Brandon Lewis, even Boris Johnson—were never plausible candidates, nor was the former home secretary Priti Patel. Matt Vickers, the young MP for Stockton South and acting chairman after Zahawi’s dismissal, might have accepted the post given its seniority but was not eventually favoured.

Rishi Sunak found his man in the end: the veteran trade minister (he has done the job three times) and Member for Chelsea and Fulham, Greg Hands. He may prove to be an effective appointment; he has huge experience, with 18 years in the House of Commons and a dozen years of ministerial tenure across the Whips’ Office, the Treasury, International Trade and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He was deputy chief whip from 2013 to 2015 and flitted through the cabinet as chief secretary to the Treasury in 2015-16. His educational pedigree of state school followed by Robinson College, Cambridge (where he was the year above 2010 icon Sir Nick Clegg) is neatly balanced, he spent eight years working in finance in the City and New York. Hands has formidable organisational and campaigning skills with a background in local government and his time as a whip, and is an enthusiastic attack dog, rarely missing an opportunity to lob shells at the Labour Party. Expect to see a lot more of Hands on the media in the coming months.

The changes to the machinery of government are more complex but will have more long-term impact. I make no apology for being a Whitehall obsessive: I have always been fascinated by the structure of our government, the way responsibilities are divided and carried out, and the intricate relationships and power dynamics between different parts of the administration. (Regular readers of this blog will already have reached this conclusion unaided.) Although politicians sometimes put too much faith in the effects of departmental changes, thinking that by definition they will unlock huge policy advantages and efficiencies, the structure of government matters: what areas are gathered in the same department, where departmental dividing lines fall and what impact they have, internal working cultures, relationships with the outside world and so on.

Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

In terms of political priorities, probably the most important innovation of the reshuffle is the creation of a standalone ministry to handle energy policy. It is a portfolio which has periodically had individual cabinet-rank leadership in the past: in June 1942, at the height of the Second World War, various responsibilities were extracted from the Board of Trade to form the Ministry of Fuel and Power, headed by Gwilym Lloyd George, son of the great Liberal prime minister; it was renamed the Ministry of Power in 1957 and the absorbed into the Ministry of Technology in 1969. There was then no independent minister until January 1974, when the Department of Energy was established to deal with the oil crisis; this institution lasted for nearly 20 years, until it was merged back into the Department of Trade and Industry in 1992, since most of the energy industries it had supervised had now been sold to the private sector. Finally, in 2008, Gordon Brown set up the Department of Energy and Climate Change, reflecting the greater prominence of issues of global warming and environmental protection, and this ministry was then absorbed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy when Theresa May became prime minister in 2016.

Given the heightened importance of rising energy prices and the security of our energy supplies, Rishi Sunak has now fulfilled the pledge he made in the first Conservative leadership election last year. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero was given the task of “securing our long-term energy supply, bringing down bills and halving inflation”, which is of course a mixture of pressing political necessity and more distant future strategy. The new ministry fulfils a very basic function of creating media coverage and implicitly assuring the electorate that rising energy costs are towards the top of the government’s agenda as they are having a direct and immediate effect on household budgets. It is, in one essence, a reassurance that the government “gets it”.

The disbandment of DECC in 2016 attracted considerable criticism from many corners. The charge was that, by no longer having a dedicated department, policy on energy generation and climate change mitigation would become less visible and therefore slip down the government’s list of priorities. It was also alleged that the lack of an energy department would make it less likely that policy was coherent and joined-up. The arguments in favour of the move were that DECC had been a small department, lacking in influence, whereas “hard-wiring” energy policy into the larger BEIS would in effect spread its considerations into far wider decisions, allowing it to become what the World Wide Fund for Nature called a “real powerhouse for change”.

The years since DECC ceased to exist have been dominated politically first by Brexit and then by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those issues have occupied much of Westminster and Whitehall’s bandwidth, and it was the UK’s relationship with the European Union which claimed the scalps of two successive prime ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May. The period between 2018 and 2020 in particular was focused on the negotiation of a withdrawal agreement with the EU and then its agreement by the House of Commons. May had called an early election in June 2017, hoping to increase her parliamentary majority and secure a more personal mandate for her policies, but the almost-incredible leads in the opinion polls disappeared in the run-up to polling day and she was left having to negotiate a confidence-and-supply agreement with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to remain in office.

Did the importance of Brexit and the pandemic mean that energy policy would inevitable slip into the shadows, whether or not the government had a separate department to oversee it? Perhaps; but the Conservative manifesto at the 2017 election had contained a deeply dirigiste and anti-free market pledge to introduce price controls on domestic energy bills, saving up to £100 a year for each household. The prime minister wrote in The Sun that “the energy market is not working for ordinary working families”, her language chosen with considerable care. This commitment had nothing to do with the existence or not of an energy department. Instead, it sprang wholly from May’s identification with hard-pressed middle-class families, the “Jams” or those who were “just about managing”. This demographic was key to her conception of Toryism, encouraging hard work but using the leverage of the state to ensure that industry was rewarded and the economic circumstances were not slanted against the middle classes.

The Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Act 2018 was passed in July of that year. Ofgem published the levels of the price cap in November and the legislation came into force in January 2019. One effect was to cut the profits of energy suppliers, and the subsequent increases in wholesale gas meant that some of the suppliers were unable to make any profits. By 2021, 24 energy suppliers had gone out of business. It was clear that, in Theresa May’s words, “the energy market is not working” even after government intervention, and the price cap has not solved the problem of high fuel prices; indeed, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has only made the issue more complex and internationalised. There is no doubt, however, that the government had proactive energy policies during the period in which there was no independent energy department, a demonstration, perhaps, that if the subject is sufficiently pressing and of public concern, governments will, for reasons of self-preservation as much as anything else, address it as effectively as it can.

One other factor which kept energy at the forefront of the government’s collective mind was the UK’s hosting of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021, delayed by the pandemic from 2020, in Glasgow. In February 2020, the business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, Alok Sharma, was appointed president of the conference, and he gave up his ministerial office in January 2021 to focus on COP26 full-time. The government recognised the reputational value of the conference as well as the opportunity to carry out significant climate diplomacy; there were 25,000 delegates from 200 countries, and 120 heads of state (but not the president of China, Xi Jinping, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, or the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan). What emerged from the event was the Glasgow Climate Pact, an undertaking to try to maintain the 1.5 °C temperature rise of the Paris Agreement, a commitment to limit the use of unabated coal and plans to support climate finance for developing countries.

Will the new department make a difference? The concentration of energy policy in terms of immediate domestic costs, future generation, security of supply chains and progress towards the UK’s net zero 2050 commitments in one administrative unit does focus the minds of the public, politicians and the mandarinate. It should encourage joined-up decision-making across the subject; but it deliberately chooses the opposite route to ‘mainstreaming’ energy and climate change measures which was one argument in favour of abolishing DECC in 2016.

The structure of the department offers what is either an opportunity or a potential hazard. It encapsulates short-term and long-term problems: it must seek to manage domestic energy bills immediately and try to keep costs to business affordable, which carries a substantial political penalty for getting it wrong. At the same time, it must absorb the conclusions of former energy minister Chris Skidmore’s review Mission Zero, which deals with longer-term issues of making net-zero measures business-friendly, working across Whitehall to implement the policies required and finding the potential opportunities for industry in achieving these targets. Maintaining this balance without neglecting either side will be a demanding task in political, administrative and managerial terms.

When Edward Heath created the Department of Energy in 1974, he chose as secretary of state Lord Carrington, then defence secretary, an experienced minister with an unflappable and phlegmatic manner whose character and membership of the House of Lords made him emollient and able to lower the temperature of any situation by a couple of degrees. Sunak’s pick for secretary of state is a different prospect. Grant Shapps has had a volatile ministerial career, rising to the cabinet as party chairman from 2012 to 2015, slipping back into the minister of state ranks, having to resign for mishandling cases of bullying in the Conservative Party, being resurrected by Boris Johnson in 2019 and even enjoying six days as home secretary at the end of Liz Truss’s brief premiership.

Shapps is a bouncy and positive figure; although he became notorious (and somewhat risible) in 2015 when it transpired he had been conducting business under a pseudonym, he emerged under Johnson as one of the cabinet’s more effective media performers, able to ride out (or perhaps simply ignore) criticism and put the most optimistic spin on government policy. An anonymous colleague described him as an “odd mixture of ambition, boldness, implausibility, realism and professionalism”. Shapps may well prove effective in projecting and justifying the government’s policies as his department gets into its stride, but the notion of him taking a firm grip of the policy field is less certain; his tenure as transport secretary (2019-22) has not resulted in an especially positive set of circumstances, with widespread industrial action. He is dedicated and hard-working, but that is not in itself enough.

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

The other brand new department carved mostly out of BEIS but also taking digital policy from DCMS is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Like the energy department, this too fulfilled a pledge made by Rishi Sunak last year as he elbowed his way to the Conservative leadership. He had talked of securing the UK’s status as a “science and technology superpower”, and promised that “science and innovation will be at the heart of my government”. This arose from criticism distilled by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee which last August published a report entitled “Science and technology superpower”: more than a slogan?, in which science policy was labelled “somewhat incoherent”, and their Lordships predicted gravely that the UK was “not on course to meet its ambitions” of becoming a science superpower by 2030.

It was unfortunate that, when Sunak assembled his government in October 2022, an element of confusion meant that for a short time both George Freeman and Nusrat Ghani claimed publicly to be science minister. Both were announced by Downing Street as ministers at BEIS, and each tweeted about their enthusiasm for the role. The following day, the matter was clarified: Freeman was confirmed as minister of state for science, research and innovation, while Ghani, formerly science and investment security minister, was assigned to be minister of state for industry and investment security, also some days later taking on the construction brief. The flurry of tweets and announcements was not important, nor did it cause much anxiety, but it was both symptomatic and emblematic of the journeyman status of the science brief. It certainly did not fit in with Sunak’s leadership campaign promising to put science at the “heart of our government, and not pushed out to the fringes of Whitehall”.

This new ministry therefore creates an independent ministerial voice for science for the first time certainly since Gordon Brown’s short-lived Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills was abolished in 2009 after two years under the stewardship of John Denham, and before that since Viscount Hailsham was minister of science (but without a corresponding ministry) from 1959 to 1964. The position of the brief had previously found itself all over Whitehall (I am currently working on a long read on the history of ministerial responsibility for science, starting in the 1910s, for those who like that sort of thing).

DSIT has been formed from the science and research elements of BEIS and the digital policy areas of DCMS (which were only transferred there in full in 2015, having previously been shared with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills). I wrote last spring in City AM that the then-ministerial responsibility for digital was chaotic and that DCMS, as the lead department, was failing to get a grip of the subject. Perhaps the prime minister is a regular reader. Presumably—the government has not released details yet—the new department will be based round the Science, Innovation and Growth and Chief Scientific Adviser’s directorates from BEIS, and the Digital Infrastructure, Digital and Tech Policy and Cyber Security sections (at least) of the Digital and Media directorate at DCMS. According to the placeholder internet page:

It will build on our strong foundations of world-class research, a thriving technology scene and global networks of collaboration to create a golden thread from outstanding basic science to innovations that change lives and sustain economic growth. It will direct record levels of research and development, and deliver talent programmes, physical and digital infrastructure and regulation to support our economy, security, public services and wider government priorities.

One of the problems of science and research policy, especially for post-Thatcher Conservatives, distrustful or ideologically antipathetic to interventionism, is knowing how to carry out that policy. In the early days of the 20th century, when state involvement was limited to oversight of the universities by the lord president of the Council (because the Privy Council was responsible for those institutions created by royal charter) and gentle direction of research councils, it was hard to avoid a laissez-faire approach, but once ministers decided they wanted to influence what should be researched and why rather than simply relying on the genius of invention, mechanisms became more appropriate.

There have been positive comments from the new department’s stakeholders and clients. COADEC (the Coalition for a Digital Economy) said it was “good for British tech startups” because it would unite BEIS’s research and funding with DCMS’s digital policy-making. Daniel Rathbone of the Campaign for Science and Engineering also welcomed the presence of a spokesman for science at the cabinet table, but stressed that real progress and growth depended on real-world issues like reform of the tax-relief system for research and development and access to European research programmes. Experts agree that what will genuinely move the needle is the government being attentive and reactive to the needs of the sectors the new department is serving.

This positivity owes a great deal to the buzz which still clings to the realm of science. There are new-ish and modish terms which excite politicians, like “digital” as a noun, and “innovation” and (a favourite of many sectors, this) “disruptor”. Members of Parliament are not, on the whole, particularly tech-savvy (much less members of the House of Lords), and even the appearance of expertise can boost a career disproportionately: for an example, see (disgraced former health secretary) Matt Hancock, who was appointed minister for digital policy in 2016 by Theresa May and then stepped up to be digital, culture, media and sport secretary when Karen Bradley moved to the Northern Ireland Office. This was based in no small part on his superficial facility with social media at a time when it was less common, despite tweeting a story he later tried to contradict about late arrival at a meeting, and retweeting a poem which described the Labour Party as “full of queers”. But he seemed enthusiastic, was keen on full-fibre broadband and was young enough that colleagues believed he knew what he was doing.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology might work. Former Downing Street adviser and innovative entrepreneur Daniel Korski has written an assessment which welcomes the new ministry. And it is an important function of government to create the right mood music and engineer the conditions in which private enterprise can flourish. But we can presume that, in the current economic conditions, the new department will not unlock significant increases in government funding for science and research, so it may be a matter of incremental gains for the time being. DSIT will have to address UK participation in European research programmes and funding, as well as pro-business matters like the Global Talent Visa designed to attract outstanding individuals to settle in the UK.

As head of this new and future-looking department, the prime minister has chosen Michelle Donelan, the former culture secretary who has been managing the digital brief among others at DCMS since September 2022. At first blush, she is not an obvious choice: her previous expertise is in marketing, including working for Marie Claire, The History Channel and World Wrestling Entertainment, a global entertainment and integrated media company. She has served as a minister in several capacities in education (including a record-setting two days as secretary of state for education) but has no obvious expertise in science, research or technology. Admittedly, when appointed to DCMS by Liz Truss, she identified one of her priorities as “supporting digital and tech innovation by cutting red tape, ensuring it sits at the heart of our plan for growing the UK economy”. It is also true that in the British system, of course, lack of professional or technical skills is not necessarily a bar to holding a ministerial portfolio; but it asks a question.

The Campaign for Science and Engineering studied the backgrounds of all MPs after the 2019 election and identified 61 Conservatives as having some kind of interest or experience in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, maths or medicine). Donelan was not among them. Some of the Members are clearly not candidates for high office, having been ministers in the past, like Nadhim Zahawi (who brought the whole reshuffle about) and Greg Clark; already holding ministerial office, like Dehenna Davison and Kemi Badenoch; or falling into that category, difficult to define but easy to identify, of being unsuitable for cabinet, like Michael Fabricant and Adam Afriyie. Were there no suitable candidates who might have been fitting candidates to run the UK’s new science ministry? Far be it from me to preach to the prime minister, but one could have imagined the appointment of George Freeman, a biomedical venture capitalist and already twice holding science-related ministerial posts; Vicky Ford, a mathematics and economics graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a former MEP who did a lot of work on digital policy who also sat on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee; or the bluff Eddie Hughes, a civil engineer who wrote a Freer UK report advocating the government appoint a chief blockchain officer. But Donelan it was to be.

Department of Business and Trade

Once energy and science had been stripped out of BEIS, there was not a great deal left; the major responsibilities still intact were enterprise, long-term growth, industrial strategy (a phrase to provoke cold sweats in those of us of a non-interventionist bent) and deregulation. However, it had been suggested repeatedly that the Department for International Trade, set up by Theresa May in 2016 to manage the UK’s post-Brexit trade agreements, was small and of minimal clout, and so might reasonably be merged with another department. Sunak therefore decided to unite it with the remnants of BEIS to form the Department for Business and Trade.

This general policy area has had a long history of identity crisis. Before BEIS, there was the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2006-16); the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, perhaps the unloveliest name (2007-09); the rebrand-for-a-week in 2005 as the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry; and the traditional moniker of the Department of Trade and Industry (1983-2007, 1970-74). Different policy areas have been added and subtracted, like energy and media regulation, but the core has remained the same, essentially the management, however hands-on or light-touch, of such economic activity as does not fall under HM Treasury. As a putative counterweight to the supposedly close-fisted bean counters at the Treasury, the department has suffered from branding according to whatever jargon is in current usage. “Industry” fell out of favour as perhaps too reminiscent of the unmodernised British economy after 2007 until it was revived as “industrial strategy” by Theresa May, while “trade” became similarly unfashionable as terms like “business” and “enterprise” were available to seem more au courant.

It has been widely suggested that the department has come full circle. Dr Marc Collinson of Bangor University has written that Business and Trade “effectively recreates the old Department of Trade and Industry” and that the effective abolition of the Department for International Trade “suggests that the existence of two ministries dealing with trade and business has perhaps hampered the government’s ability to engage properly with industry”. These are both fair observations. Along with recognition has come a faint sense of nostalgia for the DTI, which existed for nearly 30 years in total, and was headed by some genuine political heavyweights like Peter Walker, Norman Tebbit, Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandelson. In its original 1970 configuration—comprising the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Technology, which had itself absorbed the Ministry of Aviation and the Ministry of Power under Harold Wilson—it was a formidable Whitehall beast, also taking in parts of the Ministry of Aviation Supply in 1971. It was, effectively, Edward Heath’s attempt to forge a department which had the heft to go toe-to-toe with the Treasury.

What we must recall, however, is that for much of its life the DTI was inefficient, prone to short-termism and more or less dysfunctional. It had lost responsibility for energy in January 1974, Wilson had divided it three ways after the February general election (Trade, Industry, and Prices and Consumer Protection), and after its reunification by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 it was never quite the same. Although prices and incomes policy was anathema to the Thatcherite settlement, the distinction between trade and industry cast a long shadow and preserved different working practices and cultures.

It struggled for leadership, having no fewer than nine secretaries of state between 1983 and 1997: Parkinson, Brittan and Ridley all had to resign due to political scandals; Paul Channon, a courtly grandee, was rather out of his depth, had to recuse himself from the investigation into the Guinness share-trading fraud due to family connections to the brewing dynasty and was moved to Transport after 18 months in favour of Thatcher’s favourite peer, Lord Young of Graffham; and Peter Lilley, later the grim-faced scourge of benefit claimants and party conference meistersinger, while clever and serious, was perhaps overpromoted when he was made trade and industry secretary in 1990 as his first cabinet position, after only three years in office. Mark Lawson said of him in the 1990s “People have tended to ask: ‘Who is he?’ ‘What is he?’” Senior ministers loyal to Thatcher held the DTI in contempt, even those who ran it. Young referred to it as “the Department for Disasters”, though his tenure (1987-89) was relatively successful.

Margaret Beckett, who was Tony Blair’s first trade and industry secretary but lasted little more than a year, spoke of the DTI’s severe challenges.

I spoke to somebody who was a special advisor there… he had ten secretaries of state. Disastrous… people were demoralised. We had a huge generation gap in the middle of the department where they’d had to get rid of lots of people and they hadn’t been replaced in the Thatcher cuts. And the department had got lots of different bits in it that had never been brought together.

Trade and Industry was, therefore, a slow-motion car crash which we ought not to seek revisit, let alone emulate. How will things be different under the new business and trade secretary, the young and ideologically hard-edged Kemi Badenoch? According to the government, the new department exists to realise “the vision of making the UK the best place to start and grow a business—driving growth, increasing jobs, and raising wages and living standards”. This is an attractive and optimistic outcome. Sunak intends that it will come about through policies which “support investment, unlock exports, and open up new markets through trade deals, with joined-up offers of support to UK businesses operating both at home and abroad”, but there are relatively few concrete ideas in that buzz-word soup. “Unlocking” exports is nebulous at best, as is “supporting” investment.

The idea of “opening up” markets is straightforward enough: it is the result of negotiating trade agreements with foreign countries, which was the prime mission of DIT for seven years. Since the UK left the European Union, new trade agreements have been concluded with Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, and last November we signed a digital trade agreement with Ukraine, as much a political as an economic measure given the current international situation. We are currently negotiating accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a pact between 11 countries with access to the Pacific Ocean: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

There are many other agreements in prospect, but overall progress has been slow, hardly helped by the global economy being plunged into stasis by the Covid-19 pandemic; in addition, 69 pre-existing agreements have been rolled over to reflect our new status outside the EU. Full details are provided by the UK Trade and Business Commission, which scrutinises and provides advice to the government on our international trading status. It is co-convened by Hilary Benn, former shadow foreign secretary, and Peter Norris, chair of the Virgin Group.

The more general objective of encouraging economic growth is more elusive. Liz Truss, for all the (generally justified) criticism directed at her mayfly-like premiership, did develop and lay before Parliament a Growth Plan, setting a target of 2.5 per cent and seeking to boost investment through supply-side reforms, substantial deregulation and lowering and simplifying taxation. In principle, these policies were a radical return to the monetarist, free-market roots of Thatcherism, and some ideologically sympathetic observers of the proposal initially welcomed the Growth Plan. However, nervousness about the plan’s affordability and the effect on the financial markets meant that “Trussonomics” were mugged by reality, with a savagery which proved to be fatal.

Sunak’s choice of Kemi Badenoch, the international trade secretary, to head the Department for Business and Trade had a degree of inevitability about it. Badenoch, having showed strongly given her inexperience in 2022’s first Conservative leadership contest, must be handled sensitively, placated with a senior position without doing too much to give her a platform to challenge the prime minister before a general election (by contrast, I explored last month the way Margaret Thatcher used the position Edward Heath gave her in 1974 to boost her credentials to challenge and defeat him the following year). She remains a somewhat enigmatic figure, in part someone on to whom Conservatives can project their own beliefs. She has spoken frequently on social issues, identifying herself in opposition to the “woke” movement, but she has yet to set out a comprehensive framework of beliefs.

On economics, Badenoch has cited the conservative American theorist and philosopher Professor Thomas Sowell as a key influence: he is generally regarded as socially conservative but a classical liberal or even libertarian on economic issues, Hayekian and strongly supportive of free markets. She is certainly ambitious (not a criticism: most politicians are, and she seems able enough to aspire to the premiership without ridicule) and self-confident, and her grasp of political theory and philosophy is sure and refreshingly engaging. However, she remains inexperienced, having only been in cabinet since Truss’s premiership in September 2022, was given her first ministerial post by Boris Johnson in 2019 and has only been a Member of Parliament since 2017.

She is now in a position which is equal parts opportunity and risk: in cooperation with the veteran chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, she is responsible for trying to stimulate economic growth and provide the Conservative Party with some faint tracing of a positive narrative to show to the electorate at the next general election, but she faces unpromising circumstances. Wages are expected to fall back to pre-economic crash levels, prices in some sectors will remain high and GDP growth will continue to be sluggish; on the other hand, many observers believe that inflation has now peaked, the workforce is likely to expand by some hundreds of thousands, and immigrants will provide some economic growth.

Department for Culture, Media and Sport

The machinery of government changes and the carving-out of various ministerial portfolios to form the three new organisations above has left the culture department smaller and more like its shape before it took on digital policy in 2015. The government describes the “new” DCMS as “re-focused”, intended to “recognise” the importance of the creative industries to the UK economy (a phrase of imprecise meaning and dubious utility) and “build on the UK’s position as a global leader in the creative arts”. Essentially, its remit now is to supervise the media, provide funding to support the arts while widening participation and promoting UK culture abroad and oversee such government activity as is necessary in sport (for example, drafting a supposedly imminent white paper in response to Tracey Crouch’s Fan-led Review of Football Governance).

In truth, the department will become yet more of a Whitehall sprat, with fewer than 1,000 employees, little direct expenditure and impact felt largely through the many agencies and public bodies for which it is responsible. It will probably remain a nursery for rising cabinet ministers or a kind of retirement home for those on the way out, though aspects of the “Ministry of Fun” remain attractive and there may be the occasional politician whose overall ambition is tempered by a genuine passion for the brief, like Chris Smith, John Whittingdale and indeed Michelle Donelan. Although the direct levers of power are few and DCMS is small, the creative industries are a success story internationally, contributing around £100 billion to the economy, recovering strongly from the pandemic, and including some world-leading players in gaming, animation, cinema, fashion and architecture. Like the old DTI, DCMS has suffered from an absurdly high turnover of secretaries of state: the current incumbent is the fifteenth minister in as many years.

(Had I been in charge, I would have appointed as secretary of state for the reshaped department Lord Vaizey of Didcot, a real enthusiast and arts lover who was the longest-serving culture minister, first as an under-secretary of state then a minister of state at DCMS from 2010 to 2016. But I am not, alas, in charge, and the prime minister is not a man comfortable outside any box.)

Rather than leaving Michelle Donelan, a minister with experience and enthusiasm, in charge of a smaller department, Sunak appointed Lucy Frazer, minister of state for housing and planning. She read law at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a commercial barrister, taking silk in 2012 and serving briefly as a law officer. Frazer is new to the cabinet and has no obvious background in culture or the arts, which is a familiar pattern. The Press Gazette searched for indications of interest by Frazer in the department’s major policy areas and found little to report. One tweet described her, perhaps unkindly, as “something of a gifted genius” compared to her predecessor-but-one, the irrepressible Nadine Dorries; Frazer is certainly formidable given her legal repute and ministerial experience in five separate government departments. Intellectually she is capable of mastering her new brief rapidly, but the cultural world has understandably expressed dismay at her apparent indifference to the sector she now oversees.

In conclusion…

This has (as ever) become longer than I anticipated, no doubt partly due to my inability to resist an anecdote or an historical aperçu. But I hope it has given some useful analysis of the new landscape of Whitehall and the chief figures in the new departments. On the whole, they are sensible reconfigurations which sharpen the government’s focus and iron out some existing wrinkles, but, as I remarked in my preview of the reshuffle, it is far from certain that any major impact will be felt this side of a general election, and the government must work hard to ensure there is no transitional loss of effectiveness. We all know the media’s favourite metaphor involving the moving of furniture on a doomed ocean liner: expect that comparison to be aired frequently. Only time will tell how seaworthy this particular ship really is, and whether those deckchairs were worth moving after all.