Keep your jobs and carry on: after all the hullabaloo, nothing really changes
WAS that it? All those days of hype, all those rumours of new roles for “big beasts”, all that talk of “refreshing” the Prime Minister’s “top team” … and yet, in the end, hardly anything happened. Theresa May’s big reshuffle never got going.
For the most part, what we saw instead was a procession of ministers trotting into No10, and then, a little later, trotting nonchalantly out again, to return to whatever job they’d already been doing. Amber Rudd would carry on being the Home Secretary; Boris Johnson would carry on being the Foreign Secretary; and David Davis would carry on being Swiss Toni, the used-car salesman from The Fast Show. (“Y’see … Paul … reporting on a Cabinet reshuffle is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You wait months for it to happen, you get dangerously over-excited, and then the whole thing turns out to be a terrible let-down.”)
In a bid to persuade the public that her day hadn’t been wasted, Mrs May gave two of her ministers slightly different job titles. Sajid Javid, formerly the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, became the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Given that housing had already been his responsibility, Mr Javid’s job remained precisely the same as before. It was a bit like the Secretary of State for Defence becoming the Secretary of State for Defence and Soldiers and Guns and Fighting.
Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, was no longer Secretary of State for Health, but Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Mr Hunt and Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, entered No10 around the same time, and spent a remarkable 90 minutes inside – only to re-emerge with the jobs they’d walked in with, bar the expansion of Mr Hunt’s title. Ninety minutes. I wonder what they can have been talking about. Perhaps Mrs May was offering Mr Clark an expanded job title as well. (“Secretary of State for Business and Filing Cabinets? Secretary of State for Business and Whiteboard Markers? Secretary of State for Business and Paintballing Away Days?”)
It was very odd. Either the Prime Minister was unexpectedly satisfied with her existing ministers – or she’d proven incapable of shifting them.
There were a few changes further down the ranks. David Gauke went to justice, Karen Bradley to Northern Ireland, Matt Hancock to culture.
Frankly, though, the most exciting appointment was one that didn’t happen. At 11.43am, the Tories’ official Twitter account grandly announced that the party’s new chairman was Chris Grayling. Tory MPS sent Mr Grayling their congratulations.
Suddenly, however, the tweet was then deleted. The new chairman, it turned out, wasn’t Mr Grayling after all. It was Brandon Lewis. Amid much embarrassment, a tweet officially confirming this was sent – before it too was deleted, because it was misspelt.
After that little fiasco, perhaps Mrs May decided it was safer not to move anyone after all.