There was no parade of Ministers up Downing Street for the cameras. No fuss. There was no staggered list of appointments to seek maximum coverage.
Instead, the Prime Minister has made a series of technocratic and instrumental changes that he believes in.
The return of an Energy Department was part of Rishi Sunak’s leadership election manifesto last summer. Last November, I asked where it was. Now here it is. Although the Government statement announcing the news mentions Net Zero at its end, the thrust of it is about the need for energy security – rightly.
Gordon Brown created a Department of Energy and Climate Change, Theresa May merged it with the Business department (her then Chief of Staff, Nick Timothy, thought it was too green-focused), that department duly became rather green itself…and Sunak appears to be recreating the original, 1970s-style, security-preoccupied energy department.
Were the Prime Minister thinking of sending Kemi Badenoch to the new department, he’d have thought again very quickly. For during her bid for the leadership she was critical of Britain’s Net Zero project (before falling back into line). At any rate, he has plumped for Grant Shapps, who will focus on security as he will have been asked to do.
Sunak is not known to have been the biggest fan of the old BEIS department, and so has stripped the green element out of it, joined it up with Trade – and sensibly let Badenoch expand her writ from International Trade to encompass business. Again, he seems to be reinventing a 1970s creation: the old department of Trade and Industry. Industrial Strategy’s out of the title, by the way.
The Department of International Trade was a bit out of the public eye (though that didn’t do Liz Truss any harm when she led it), and the new amalgamated department will give Badenoch, surely a future leadership contender again at some point, a chance to move nearer centre stage. Note that she remains responsible for policy on trans as Minister for Women and Equalities.
The Prime Minister’s interest in tech has been as thoroughly written about as his passion for maths (not least on ConHome) – going all the way back to his Mais Lecture as Chancellor. So we are to have a “dedicated Department for Science, Innovation and Technology” – once again, there’s a touch of the 1970s about it.
It’s claimed that Sunak wanted to send Michael Gove to lead it: so just as the latter fronted Boris Johnson’s idea, levelling up, so he might apparently have fronted the Prime Minister’s venture, the new science and tech department. I’m not sure that would have been a good idea, unless Sunak wanted a series of “Now Sunak kills Johnson’s dream”-type headlines.
So Michelle Donelan moves there from a Culture Department which, without digital, will be more like the one that John Major set up. Lucy Frazer leaves housing to replace her. (That’s 15 housing Ministers in some 12 years.) As predicted, women are prominent in this mini-shuffle. Frazer, like Shapps (eventually, and Donelan second time round) last year, is a Sunak supporter.
As is Greg Hands, sent to be Party Chairman as the ultimate safe pair of hands. A former Deputy Chief, he has been, we are told, “a Government minister since October 2011” (and must thus be counted the ultimate survivor, too). As a Tory MP with a London seat, he is relatively unusual. And as a politician who prefers attack to defence, the same applies.
Hands has been on the fringe of Cabinet for some time but, since promotion opportunities for straight white men are not quite what they once were, has had to wait to the point where the opportunity seemed gone. Hands is both a former Treasury Chief Secretary from the George Osborne era and a staunch opponent of Customs Union membership.
So, then: nothing for the Trussites, no recall for Conor Burns (which seems strange), and George Freeman, with his devotion to the subject will surely consider himself unlucky not to get the Science gig.
To Sunak, these changes are important. To you, they may be shuffling deckchairs. Whether they come to anything or not may depend on whether the civil service really rows win behind them, or is quietly dismissing the Prime Minister as a lame duck.
Meanwhile, Sunak has cheered us all up by appointing Lee Anderson as Deputy Party Chairman. As for Dominic Raab, if he leaves the Cabinet soon, expect a few small changes confined to the law officers.