A big opportunity for Kemi Badenoch

Critics might have dismissed Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle as little more than a rearranging of the Whitehall deckchairs, but the Prime Minister believes that it will help the Government better deliver on its priorities. Indeed, he used the opportunity created by the need to appoint a new Conservative Party chairman – now Greg Hands – to launch a broader rationalisation of several government departments.

The changes have the virtue of making some logical sense. The former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has been dismantled, with responsibility for energy security and net zero handed to Grant Shapps. It might be thought that these two ambitions are in conflict – with the embrace of green technologies leaving the UK vulnerable to swings in international energy prices – but at least this policy area will be the sole responsibility of a single Cabinet minister.

A new department focused on science, innovation and technology, led by former culture secretary Michelle Donelan, also has some promise. Proponents of the change believe that government efforts in these areas have suffered from being insufficiently joined up, although Ms Donelan will have to guard against the temptation to pick winners. Lucy Frazer, meanwhile, becomes secretary of state of a “refocused” Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which surely now becomes the leading candidate for abolition the next time a prime minister is seeking savings.

It is Kemi Badenoch, however, who has been given perhaps the most interesting challenge. On the face of it, the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade gains little from the reshuffle, given that much of the spending within the former BEIS department is set to travel with Mr Shapps to Energy. But Ms Badenoch is a rising star, and is unlikely to have accepted being sidelined.

Not only does she have a wider range over which to show her talents, but her new department also has an intriguing opportunity. In recent days, we have heard eloquent criticisms of the bean-counter mentality that has captured British institutions, and of the endemic resistance towards reforms that might liberate the productive potential of the economy. There has been no departmental force within Whitehall with an explicit focus on economic growth. Could Ms Badenoch make her ministry the intellectual counterpoint within government to a Treasury that has lost sight of what drives prosperity?