Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.
When I became transport adviser to Boris Johnson, I asked Boris who my Secretary of State was going to be.
“Michael Green,” he replied. Sorry, Michael who?
Was there some Tory MP I’d never heard of? It was, of course, Grant Shapps, who’d used that pen name in his business career. For a while in the mid-2010s, it was mildly fashionable for The Guardian, Nick Clegg and other such pillars of good judgment to diss Shapps for things he’d supposedly done (or in practice, quite often hadn’t done at all) years before.
Now, puzzlingly, Kemi Badenoch appears to have joined in.
Just under a fortnight ago, it emerged that Shapps, a former defence secretary, business secretary, energy secretary and party chairman as well as transport secretary, had been blocked from even seeking selection as a Tory candidate at the next election.
“I want people to know that this is a new Conservative party,” Badenoch said when challenged about it. “It is not going to be making the mistakes of the past…We are changing policies, we are changing people, we are changing process. What I have said is we want people who are going to meet the standards which we are setting, who are going to abide by the policies I have put red lines on.”
There are certainly several dozen former Tory MPs I wouldn’t want back in a hundred years: egomaniacs, troublemakers, game-players, shysters, architects of stupid, harmful policies. But having worked with him, I know Shapps wasn’t any of those things. He was a good minister, a doer and a very effective communicator. He was collegiate.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no policy differences between him and Kemi Badenoch.
As for fresh faces untainted by past failure, 22 of the 23 members of the Shadow Cabinet served in the last Tory government. Badenoch’s spokesman said last year that she would not reshuffle them before the next general election (she may have softened a bit on this since).
But part of the Tory pitch at that election ought to be that the party is more serious than Reform, with better experience and strength in depth. That the party is not comprised of amateurs.
Shapps has spent part of the last two years on Conservatives Together, his organising project outside the party structure to train and support potential Tory candidates. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the fear is that it’s an embryonic faction to challenge the leadership and usurp Kemi Badenoch later down the line.
I don’t think it is. But it’s true that Shapps has in the past been an organiser. He was Boris’s numbers man, and strikingly good at it too. He could have used those skills for Badenoch as he did for Johnson.
I hope somebody realises at some point that barring him from candidacy is a mistake.