Perhaps Robert Colvile, who wrote a book called The Great Acceleration: how the world is getting faster, can explain it. But for whatever reason, we delight in getting rid of our politicians just as they’ve gained enough experience to learn from their mistakes.
One Minister in Liz Truss’s new Cabinet, Brandon Lewis, sat at the top table before 2019. With the exception of the Prime Minister herself, who has been in Cabinet for eight, he will be its longest-serving member. And four years at this level, during which he will have held three jobs, is not all that many, compared to some Cabinet stalwarts a generation ago.
Penny Mordaunt served briefly in Cabinet under Theresa May. Every other full member is either new (seven of the 23) or entered under Boris Johnson (the rest).
This is a very green Cabinet, in the non-Net Zero use of the phrase, to have to deal with a post-pandemic landscape, a war in Europe, and an economic flash flood on a scale unknown for half a century. The way our political culture works now leaves no scope for the return at the top of, say a Liam Fox, on the right of the Party, or of a Jeremy Hunt, on the left.
And Truss’s tyro Ministers will be more reliant on the civil service, which doesn’t enjoy an unmixed reputation in Conservative circles, than Boris Johnson’s were – at least, if she intends to reduce SpAd numbers, as we’re told she does.
Nonetheless, most of the new appointments are relatively low-risk. Chloe Smith at Work and Pensions may be new to Cabinet, but she knows her way round government, having first held office in 2012. Ranil Jayawardena may get time to play himself in at the Environment Department, if it doesn’t find itself thrown into a crisis of shortages.
Kit Malthouse at Education is likely to find the department, as was evident during Covid, very much a poor relation to health. But he has sat around the Cabinet table for long enough to know that money isn’t everything and radicalism is overdue.
Michelle Donelan had begun to make a name for herself at Education as a bit of a hammer of woke – which is presumably why she has been sent to Culture. But the really big newcomer to a big department is Suella Braverman, who will have nowhere to hide from police failure and small boats, the latter of which shipwrecked her predecessor.
Just as the new Prime Minister is entitled to have the Whitehall that she wants, so too she has every right to the economic team she wants.
She won on a programme of tax cuts and growth, and Kwasi Kwarteng is just the man to get it going, or else perish in the attempt. The author of War and Gold knows all about the Bank of England’s past, and will be thoroughly versed in the Treasury’s too – its triumphs and disasters over the years.
The new Prime Minister can appoint the Cabinet she wants, too, and there’s little doubt that she’s done so. Out go Rishi Sunak supporters Dominic Raab, Steve Barclay, George Eustice and Grant Shapps.
Of the 31 people who will sit around Truss’s Cabinet table, I count a solitary Sunak supporter, though not perhaps a committed one: Michael Ellis. No fewer than 25 of the remainder voted for her sooner or later, with the other five undeclared. There are two ways of viewing this power play.
The first is to give it a thumbs-up, and argue that the Cabinet will be better off without leaks and splits – not that Boris Johnson was especially prone to tolerate people opposed to him sitting at his top table.
The second is to point out that, since Truss won the Parliamentary stage with the smallest percetage of votes since this electoral system was introduced (fewer than Sunak) and the membership stage too in the same manner, there’s a difference between what what she has a right to do and what it is wise for her to do.
Certainly, this triumphalist display isn’t consistent with projecting the new Prime Minister as a figure of national unity – which given what’s coming she needs to be.
One appointment seems to me to be inspired, or at least noble. Therese Coffey’s appointment at health suggests that she herself and Truss, her best friend in politics, recognise that it is the most electorally charged item in the new Prime Minister’s in tray (electricity bills excepted).
So the new Deputy Prime Minister has volunteered, or at least consented, to put herself in the political firing line. Other appointments look just as dicey but not necessarily as durable.
Jake Berry is a veteran of the Northern Powerhouse project, a champion of levelling up and the force behind the Northern Research Group. What will he do if the money runs out for Johnson’s project and he has the 2019 intake on his back? What will he say to Simon Clarke?
Kemi Badenoch has been sent to International Trade to get her out of the country and shut her up about stopping Woke. Perhaps, as Penny Mordaunt did in the same department, she will dig in her heels and stick at her desk.
Either way, I doubt that Badenoch will be gagged. Her willingness or otherwise to toe the line, and that of others, is likely to depend on Truss’s strength. To put it bluntly, ambitious politicians don’t cross more senior ones who command big majorities, or are likely to.
And were I Truss, I’d be concerned that my colleagues think my position is weak. I don’t know whether Mordaunt really turned down Northern Ireland, and if Sajid Javid did, either.
Or the full story of Iain Duncan Smith’s discussions with Truss – let alone David Frost’s, which don’t seem to have ended well. Frost is back at the Daily Telegraph, perfectly placed to denounce the new Prime Minister’s statism slide, if that’s what he determines to do.
These indications that Truss is not in a position of command – even with Boris Johnson’s 80 or so seat majority behind her – are a baleful sign for her, and so for the Conservatives and the country too.
There will be more to explore when we know the Government in full – such as who precisely, now Michael Gove is gone, has charge of policy on the Union. Is it to be negotiated between the three territorial departments? What will Nadhim Zahawi make of Truss’s plans for Number Ten?
Above all, perhaps: will Jacob Rees-Mogg, as a critic of “climate alarmism”, be able to jolly the Tory Green lobby along with a policy willing to use more domestic fossil fuels to boost energy security?
One of our regular thread contributors below, who writes under the disturbing moniker of “Alan Clark returns”, yesterday described Truss’s changes as “the ABBA reshuffle: the winner takes it all”. I’m not sure the original Clark would have known who ABBA were, but the old rapscallion couldn’t have put it better.