We don’t like to talk about reshuffle insignificance, because it rather rubs people’s face in it. If Andrea Backbench-Marginal has devoted her entire adult life to the cause, and finally makes it all the way to cabinet, and is glimpsed, modest smile on face, slipping into the Ministerial Prius, it seems a little rude to shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Sorry old bean, but it doesn’t really matter, aaaat alllllll’.
If you’re one of those tutting at the reshuffle coverage and saying that the interception bill going through the Commons today is more important, congratulations. Give yourself five stars and a pat on the back. You’re right.
For proof, dive into Wikipedia, and read about Harold Macmillan’s night of the long knives, still the source of every British reshuffle pun ever. Sacked!: Watkinson at defence, Hill at local government. Shock!: Michael Noble, new man in Scotland. Outrage!: Edward Boyle, new education secretary: I’d wager there’s barely a political nerd in Britain who could fathom a guess at what these changes meant for the governance of Britain. And what happened? Macmillan was still gone a year later.
It is 10 months before a general election and the final legislative programme has been agreed. Does anyone believe that the ship of state will steer a bold new course because Nicky Morgan has replaced Michael Gove, or Liz Truss has replaced Owen Paterson? Of course not. David Cameron is still the prime minister and the Conservatives still have the same passions and neuroses they had yesterday.
However, something does not have to be significant to be of interest. Reshuffles generally, and this one in particular, are fascinating because they reveal the fears and hopes of those doing the shuffling.
Michael Gove is shunted from education: Will Morgan unpick his reforms? Not a chance. But she may well be told to settle and soothe fractious teachers. Why? Because fractious teachers make for bad headlines and there’s an election coming. What’s more, Gove goes to the whips’ office, where he will be able to perform the occasional service for George Osborne, should it be needed.
What about the rest of much-touted rise of the women? The free-market Liz Truss is sent to the department for Tory safe seats, where she will contemplate a huge bureaucratic subsidy system she would despise in any other department, and know she cannot touch it (This is presumably why she did not get higher education or schools. She might have been tempted to do something). Esther McVey gets a seat at cabinet, but no more. Cameron knows he needs women cabinet ministers to solve a political perception, but doesn’t want them to do very much.
Then look at Iain Duncan Smith. It is hard to find anyone, Tory, civil servant, or thinktanker, who thinks his department is doing well. All concede Duncan Smith is motivated by high ideals, but his plans aren’t working, he doesn’t have the skill to deliver and he’s too stubborn (or passionate) to concede defeat.
Yet Duncan Smith is the one minister that the prime minister dare not shift, because if he is not willing to take a pleasant career-ending shift at defence, he would become both a symbol of government failure and a focus of internal opposition. No prime minister likes to admit he was wrong, or create an enemy. That noise he can do without. So the Department for Work and Pensions will stumble on until the next secretary of state quietly euthanises Duncan Smith’s reforms.
What can we conclude from all this? First, Cameron genuinely thinks he can win next year. Second, he thinks his path to victory is to change perceptions, not his policies. So more women, more young faces, no sharp turn left or right. Third, he wants to close down as many controversies as possible. Few ministers are put in a position where they can make waves. Barnacles are being scraped off boats, squeaky wheels are being oiled. The order from the captain is clear: quarter speed ahead, silent running, and let’s get everything as tidy as possible.
This is a reshuffle designed to improve the Tories’ chances of winning next year. Yet reshuffles very rarely do that, because while we enjoy discussing perceptions and people, reality and policy matter a lot more.
Cameron’s constant flaw as prime minister has been to focus on the former, when he would get a great deal more from changing his approach to the latter. But he won’t, because he is who he is.
In the end Cameron himself will decide the fate of his government. The reshuffle is just another way he has failed to do all he should.
It might help him a little. It’s a missed chance to help a lot.
———————————
Hopi Sen is a Labour blogger who writes here, is a contributing editor to Progress, and writes a fortnightly column for ProgressOnline here
———————————