Reshuffle will make Sunak weaker

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is reshuffling his cabinet. Among the agenda items: a reconfiguration of the business department and the appointment of a new Conservative party chair. Some thoughts on the gamble he is making and why in today’s note.

I know I said in yesterday’s newsletter I would write about my thoughts on Liz Truss’s remarks, but a reshuffle takes precedence, obviously. Fortunately Louis Ashworth has given Truss’s article a superb Fisking over at Alphaville.

Rishi-shuffle

The Institute for Government’s Catherine Haddon had a nice phrase to describe Rishi Sunak’s first cabinet: “a winter cabinet that, like the winter wardrobe, is likely to be shuffled out if better weather arrives”.

The prime minister’s first cabinet is an uneasy chimera designed to make it easier to get the Conservative party to swallow a series of unfortunate fiscal events. His chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was effectively chosen for him by Liz Truss in her final roll of the dice to keep her government on the road. His home secretary, Suella Braverman, is in place because Sunak (in my view, correctly) thought that giving her the job she wanted was a price worth paying for her endorsement in the race to replace Truss. His foreign secretary, James Cleverly, is a holdover from the age of Truss, kept on because he is a well-liked ally of Boris Johnson.

So, all that would justify conducting a reshuffle at some point (combined with the need to select Nadhim Zahawi’s successor). But the political weather has not improved for Sunak. Far from it, in fact. Polling by Redfield & Wilton puts Labour 26 points ahead — the largest lead for the party since Sunak became prime minister.

The big picture story of Sunak’s premiership is this: he has made the Conservatives marginally less unpopular than they were when he took over, but the Conservative party has made Sunak significantly more unpopular than he was when he became leader.

As Professor Will Jennings from the University of Southampton explains well in his (free!) Substack, a lot of the Conservative party’s malaise is best explained by the underlying social and economic fundamentals facing the UK. The party has been in power for 12 years and at this point we would expect most voters to blame it for most of the UK’s problems:

If one inspects the polling data closely it becomes evident that the spring of 2021 marked a turning point in approval of the Conservative government.

This was the period in which the threat of Covid was perceived by many to have receded. It could be argued that events since have in part reflected an unwinding of the Covid “rally” in government support and accumulation of what political scientists call the ‘costs of governing’ (things such as bad news stories and policy decisions that alienate specific subgroups of voters — gradually weakening the electoral coalition of the governing party).

The calculation Sunak has had to ponder is this: given the grim underlying fundamentals facing the UK, given his own opinion poll decline, will he ever be in a stronger position than he is now? If he thinks the answer is “yes”, then he should wait until then to conduct another reshuffle, because reshuffles always make prime ministers weaker and increase the number of enemies they have. (Broadly speaking, not everyone who you promote will thank you, but everyone you sack will blame you.)

If he thinks the answer is “no”, then he should do the overhaul now, before his authority is further weakened by the local elections in May and by whatever happens to Dominic Raab.

Sunak has gone for that second option. He plans to deliver on his promise to break up the business, energy and industrial strategy department (BEIS), according to his colleagues, and establish a new science ministry.

Has Sunak chosen correctly? Well, the honest answer is: we’ll never know. It’s possible it may go incredibly badly, and we’ll look back on his reshuffle as a catastrophic moment in the life of his government. But no matter how painful the fallout, we won’t be able say for sure that he would have been better off not doing it.

But I would make some general points:

1) Broadly speaking, because the whole of the civil service is set up to reward civil servants moving roles rather than staying where they are, there is no real benefit to reorganising single departments. A ministry of science and digital is not going to have any more experts in it than the DCMS or the BEIS departments do now. If you want to do that, you need to embark on a much more wide-ranging programme of civil service reform.

2) Reforming the institutions of government inevitably has consequences for the speed and effectiveness of government approaches to the other challenges it faces. However, given that the Conservatives are too divided to pass meaningful legislation on most fronts, the cost of this is smaller than it appears.

3) Splitting government departments allows you to create more jobs and therefore, if you are a prime minister facing a fractious party, gives you more patronage to hand out. This is an important way to shore up support ahead of what is likely to be a difficult set of local elections in May and an increasingly restive party.

4) Nonetheless, if I were advising Rishi Sunak, I would not be having a reshuffle today. The biggest upgrade would be for him to make a change at the Home Office, without angering too many of the party’s power brokers. Everything else is trivial, frankly. But I don’t think he is strong enough to be able to pull that change off. In any case, Sunak has made such categorical pledges on curbing arrivals of people via small boats that the benefits of making a change are pretty small.

Given that every reshuffle adds to the ranks of sacked and disgruntled ministers on the backbenches, I just wouldn’t bother in Sunak’s shoes. I think he is in the midst of making a very big mistake.

Now try this

I have made a great discovery: the Concertino app, which works brilliantly with an Apple Music subscription to find decent recordings of classical music, avoiding the appalling search functionality of Apple Music or the long tail of bad recordings on Spotify.

The FT’s free schools access programme and the World Bank invite 16-19 year-old students around the world to enter their annual blog writing competition on recovering from disruption and preparing for employment. The deadline is March 31. Get the full details here and read previous winning entries here.

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