13 Nov A Last Ditch Reshuffle?
For a reshuffle which had been rumoured for months, today’s movements seem to have blind-sided Westminster watchers. The sacking of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman kicked off a round of musical chairs on a scale rarely seen from a government which is not (immediately) on the rocks.
The biggest shock was undoubtedly the appointment of former Prime Minister David Cameron as Foreign Secretary, a move which will prove controversial, as Cameron will sit in the House of Lords, away from scrutiny by elected MPs. While Cameron’s does represent a break with the Johnson and Truss era, the move is made more complicated as it undermines the Prime Minister’s attempts to position himself as a change from the last decade and a half of Tory Government. Only last month, Sunak railed against the “failed consensus” of the last 30 years in his conference speech, now he is bringing ‘the heir to Blair’ back into his government.
Other major changes included the replacement of Greg Hands as Party Chair (responsible for election campaigns) by Richard Holden, and the promotion of rising star Laura Trott to Chief Secretary to the Treasury (the Chancellor’s second-in-command, responsible for managing government spending reviews). Additionally, Esther McVey has been appointed as a Cabinet Office minister, and is rumoured to be acting as Rishi Sunak’s “Common Sense Tsar”.
Elsewhere, passionate junior ministers, such as George Freeman (Science Minister) and Nick Gibb (Schools Minister) opted to resign from government, presumably to spend more time shoring up support in their constituencies ahead of the upcoming election. More surprising was the removal of Rachael MacLean as Housing Minister – she made it very clear she did not want to leave the role.
In the Department of Health and Social Care, the changes have been particularly dramatic. Steve Barclay has become Environment Secretary (his eight ministerial role since 2020), being replaced as Health Secretary by Victoria Atkins (who has no health experience), while both Will Quince and Neil O’Brien have announced their resignation from junior ministerial roles. This leaves a significant gap in institutional memory and departmental experience, as the NHS continues to deal with pay disputes, Government struggles to meet its commitment to halve waiting lists and a winter crisis looms ever larger.
What, then, is the overarching narrative of this reshuffle. Sunak and his top team will have known that many junior ministers would take the opportunity to return to the back benches. And they will have been moving names around the cabinet table for months – this was clearly intended to be a major shake-up. And with neither the King’s Speech nor party conference having had much impact perhaps Sunak felt a major reshuffle was the only way to show strength and get back on the front foot.
Whether this last throw of the dice will be enough to dent Labour’s 20-point poll lead, or whether it is simply “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”, remains to be seen.