25 Jul 2019

Hot Stuff. A brutally sweeping but not illogical or irrational reshuffle

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Whitehall is ablaze and not merely because of the heat. Westminster is about to be twinned with Las Vegas. Boris Johnson has decided to go for broke and bet the farm on extracting the UK from the EU on 31 October (or as near as he can to that date). The composition of his Cabinet and those who will work for him in Downing Street reflect that imperative. If he succeeds, he will open the route to a potentially epic election victory. If he fails, he might not be Prime Minister by the end of the year.

The scale of the political slaughter yesterday was enormous. As of 24 hours ago, the five most senior portfolios in Government – namely Prime Minister, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, and Minister for the Cabinet Office and de facto Deputy PM – were all held by individuals who had backed Remain in the referendum of June 2016. As of today, four of those five have disappeared from office completely, four of the five who now hold those posts endorsed Leave in 2016, and the one exception – Sajid Javid – has so conspicuously flipped from Remain to Leave as to prove the rule. The new Home Secretary was on no one’s list to be promoted to such heights as of two days ago. This is less a sweeping British ministerial reshuffle than something closer to a sudden coup d’etat.

Yet it is neither illogical nor irrational. Quite the reverse. It is high-risk stuff but a calculated wager.

This is the Cabinet reshuffle that should have happened in 2016

On the morning that the referendum reshuffle was declared, it appeared highly probable that those at the helm of Vote Leave had not only succeeded in forcing the UK out of the EU but were about to take control over the Conservative Party, and hence the British Government, as well.

A week later, Mr Johnson and Mr Gove fell out and it was the ‘Reluctant Remainer’ Theresa May who replaced David Cameron. She then appointed a Cabinet in which the former Remain contingent were by far the most dominant tribe numerically, and in which the two key Brexit slots (Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and Secretary of State for International Trade) went not to either of the two main figures in the Vote Leave camp but to David Davis and Liam Fox, who were fringe players in the referendum campaign but on congenial terms with Mrs May personally.

It did not take long for this team to fall into line with the Establishment view that Brexit was about damage limitation and hence for them to find themselves at odds with much of the Conservative Party. Vote Leave had, it appeared, won the battle in 2016 but failed to secure victory in the war. After an uneasy internal peace (and the loss of a parliamentary majority in 2017) an insurgency occurred within Parliament.

The Cabinet that has just been formed is that one which logically and rationally should have been seen in 2016. Mr Johnson is finally Prime Minister. The clear majority of those around the Cabinet table are ‘True Believer’ Leavers or (like Mr Javid) convincing converts to the cause. The same will be valid at Minister of State level. Those departments most suspected of being citadels of Remain – the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy – will be captured and colonised by those of the firmest pro-Brexit faith. The Downing Street team will include a large number of people – symbolised by Dominic Cummings – who ran Vote Leave in 2016.

The legacy of the past three years, the shortness of time before 31 October, and the arithmetic of this Parliament means the immediate strategy for Mr Johnson and his supporters has to be different than if 2016 had actually happened in 2016 rather than been deferred until 2019. They will have to swallow hard over much of a Withdrawal Agreement that they essentially loathe, focus on the weak link in the EU-27 chain (Dublin) to extract something that can be claimed as a concession in the short-term, but make the real centre of their attention the ‘end state’ relationship with the EU with a comprehensive Canada-style free trade agreement by 31 December 31 2021 their objective.

The aim then is to make the 2020 election the one that should have happened in 2017

In the next few days, there will be an insistence from the Prime Minister downwards that an early election is ‘not on the agenda’. This is only accurate in the sense that until it is known whether the new regime can deliver on Brexit then an early election would only occur because circumstances had compelled it to transpire and not necessarily of a timing of Mr Johnson’s choosing. If Brexit (stage one) is done then an outing to the hustings will be irresistible. The numbers in the present House of Commons make it almost inevitable. So is the need to strike while Jeremy Corbyn is Labour leader.

The ambition of those at the heart of Vote Leave was about more than winning the 2016 plebiscite. It was also about detaching a section of the traditional Labour working class electorate that not only disliked the EU but had little in common with those who had seized the Labour Party in 2015. This realignment in British politics looked like it would occur in 2017 but the delay in deciding on an early election and the ineptitude of the campaign that followed meant that it did not happen. There was a sizeable rise in the Conservative vote (although it should have been higher) but Labour did better.

It is clear from this reshuffle that the electoral strategy next time will be to identify those issues beyond Brexit that can lure historically Labour voters over to the Conservatives in larger numbers. These are not especially novel but conditions may make them unusually significant in our era. They are the economy (but particularly tax), crime and housing.

It will be the function of Mr Javid to set out an eye-catching, tax-slashing Budget at some point in November or December that draws a line under the austerity of the George Osborne and Philip Hammond decade.

The appointment of Priti Patel to the Home Office implies a determination to make law and order a central political question. Labour are incredibly vulnerable in this area. In essence, Mr Corbyn and the Corbynites do not think that crime is primarily caused by bad people but by a bad system (capitalism). This is not an analysis that most of the electorate accepts and working class voters are strikingly hostile to it. Mrs May could never properly exploit this opportunity because her tenure at the Home Office was marked by cuts in police numbers and she was not the ideal character to run a shameless street-fighting campaign in this terrain. Mr Corbyn and Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary, were let off the hook here. Ms Patel, operating to a script long devised and perfected by Lynton Crosby, the Australian election Svengali who has been very close to Mr Johnson, will aim to make mincemeat out of her opponents.

Finally, the salience of housing (where the message will boil down to the single word ‘build’) is shown by the fact that there is not only a Secretary of State for Housing and Communities in the Cabinet but also two Ministers of State from that department who will also attend the Cabinet.

The next few months will be either a massive political success or a massive political failure

There can only be two outcomes. The effort to recreate 2016 in 2019 and 2017 in 2020 will either be accomplished, in which case by this time next year there will be a Conservative Government with not only a large majority but a fundamentally recast electoral base, or it will have crashed spectacularly and by July 2020 we will probably have witnessed a different kind of re-ordering of the electorate entirely (a sizeable shift to the Liberal Democrats) and have had conducted a second EU referendum. In political terms, we are destined to endure the sort of temperatures seen today for some time yet.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


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