The rebel reshuffle: Boris Johnson's new team

Boris Johnson has already put noses out of joint, obliterating the old Cabinet and giving top jobs to Brexiteers Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and disruptive adviser Dominic Cummings. Julian Glover gives his take on the PM's new team 
Boris Johnson has already put noses out of joint by obliterating the old Cabinet
PA
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The French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote: “The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates” — and what was true of post-revolutionary France has become the case in Westminster today. The old traitors have dressed up in the clothes of the new patriots. Boris Johnson, the rebel who brought about Brexit, blew up his former friend David Cameron, and then helped block Brexit by destroying Theresa May’s deal, stood outside Downing Street in the sun yesterday and said a lot of optimistic, patriotic stuff about being a British hero in the cause of making Brexit happen.

Then he went over to the House of Commons, summoned in Cabinet members who thought they had done the patriotic thing all along by backing the deal to get Brexit through, whatever their private reservations, lined many of them up against a long wall and opened fire.

In their place he appointed two men and one woman to the very top jobs. Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab have the merit of being different and determined, although in two cases the senior civil servants who had to smile as they arrived in their new offices will have been wearing fake grins.

It is refreshing to have two people of British Asian background in the biggest roles in politics — it’s hard to imagine that happening in lots of supposedly progressive other EU states. But it is also hard to imagine anyone at the Home Office welcoming the arrival of Patel on policy grounds. She is a hardliner, and more than that, she resigned less than two years ago because she held 14 unofficial meetings with Israeli ministers, lobbyists and businesspeople — but she has what is now the necessary merit for success of being part of the Vote Leave campaign.

It would have been interesting too to have seen the Foreign Office reaction to the appointment of another strong Brexiteer, Raab, whose run for the leadership faltered at just the right point for Johnson to swing through to success. No one doubts Raab’s intelligence or grip. But they will wonder if he has the calm spirit which is also part of diplomacy.

"The Cabinet changes even shocked some members of the Johnson campaign team, who felt queasy last night"

Of the three, the appointment that could make the most difference and definitely made the most sense was the appointment of Javid as Chancellor. He backed Remain without seeming to mind if it lost, was badly treated by May’s advisers, and told a solid story as home secretary.

As Chancellor he’ll find he can shape things across government by turning the money on and off, but the first thing he’ll have to do is work out the financial consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Philip Hammond did — which is why he was so firmly against one. The numbers won’t change and if Javid takes a different approach he’ll have to explain why. In most governments, in the end the chancellor falls out with the prime minister, and afterwards that’s one of the reasons governments fall out of power. The two Js in Downing Street, Javid and Johnson, will make lively neighbours.

That’s if they last long enough in their new homes to settle in. Their promotion has been overshadowed by the mass obliteration of the old Cabinet, something which shocked even some members of the Johnson campaign team who admitted to feeling very queasy last night.

New British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid
EPA

A lot of people won’t mourn the losses even as they feel queasy today, at the sight of Jacob Rees-Mogg around the Cabinet table — he’ll try to run rings around the Speaker, John Bercow, as Leader of the Commons. The old Cabinet was largely unmemorable, unfocused and unsuccessful. But the scale of its slaughter is inexplicable by any measure other than that of a revolution in which increasingly crazy things happen. It’s like the Mensheviks being wiped out by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, after their brand of revolution turned out to be too mild to last.

The Prime Minister has sacked a generation of bland but innocuous and hard-working Cabinet ministers — the sort who make governments work, people such as the education secretary Damian Hinds and communities secretary James Brokenshire. You probably wouldn’t recognise them if they sat opposite you on the Tube, but that’s the point. Someone’s got to do the boring job of running things — and both of them, along with others who were better known such as defence secretary Penny Mordaunt, weren’t culled because they were bad at their jobs, but because they backed the wrong side in the leadership contest.

Now, to their shock, men and women such as these have been flipped from patriots into traitors, kicked out not by an election but by an internal disturbance in the ruling regime. The question that counts most is not who has replaced them but whether they take it well or badly — in public. In private, of course, some are already spitting blood.

Remember, the Prime Minister leads a party which yesterday was at 25 per cent in the polls, just two points ahead of the Liberal Democrats, and which holds under half the seats in the House of Commons. Even its theoretical majority of two depends on DUP MPs who see each vote as a calculation and didn’t, towards the end, always support May when she needed them. Johnson has got the access code to the security door on the No 10 flat, and a seat in the back of the armoured Jaguar, but keeping both for long depends on the tolerance of his MPs and he’s just given a lot of them less reason to be tolerant.

Home Secretary Priti Patel
AFP/Getty Images

Look, for instance, at the response of the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson to the unexpected political assassination of Scotland secretary David Mundell. “His strategic brain has been at the heart of the rebuilding project of the Scottish Conservatives”, she said on hearing the news, “David handled his coming out as the Conservatives’ first openly gay cabinet minister with customary care and grace”.

It’s not just that she’s right, but that Johnson has just reminded her why she dislikes him so much. And while he needs the DUP’s 10 MPs to stay in power an awful lot, he needs the 13 Tory ones from Scotland even more. One word was being used more than any other by former ministers yesterday — “majority”. And it is the majority, not any choice by Tory party members, which means Johnson is Prime Minister not Leader of the Opposition.

Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg
AFP/Getty Images

So it’s obvious that whatever he says, the Prime Minister must be planning for an election soon, which he will hope will restore that majority to something useful. And to do it, he has decided that compromise won’t work and nor will delaying Brexit when he fails to get a new deal from an EU which has no intention of offering one. He saw his predecessor spend three years and 12 days trying to hold together a government that included all sorts of people with all sorts of views and in the end it fell to pieces.

There’s a glory in just making a choice and charging ahead. But there’s also a rebellious freedom in deciding to run across the M25 blindfold, with the only problem being you probably won’t make it across alive.

The person he’s picked to help guide him through the oncoming traffic is his new adviser Dominic Cummings, who is one of those people who is more right about things than his critics like to admit. Anyone who has worked in government will recognise truths in his loathing of the absurd system of multiple departments and antique hierarchies in which everything is watered down and bad choices are made.

"It’s a bit like daring to run across the M25 blindfolded — the only problem is you may not make it across alive"

You might think his most recent blogpost — “High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’” — is just bulls**t or you might trace truths through its weird language. Here’s a random sample: “Example 3: we need to consider projects that could bootstrap new international institutions that help solve more general coordination problems such as the risk of accidental nuclear war. The most obvious example of a project like this I can think of is a manned international lunar base.” But it’s not boring, and anyway Johnson hasn’t hired him for this but because he’s a good strategic leader who wins things.

Will it work? The old cliches about the Tory party are dead. It’s not a broad church any more, it’s not about compromise and it’s chucked loyalty out of the window. It’s in the hands of a cabal of radical zealots with plans for the country. Only two things stand in their way. One is a lot of appalled and angry Tory MPs. The other may turn out to be the voters.

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