The long-awaited “Rishuffle” was supposed to be all about Rishi Sunak finally stamping his authority on his party.
Just as his party conference address in Manchester last month was meant to set out who he really was politically, and what he’d learned after a year in No 10, so too is this ministerial reshuffle meant as a key “moment” of his premiership.
But while the sacking of Suella Braverman was designed as a show of strength, the return of David Cameron suggests this is a prime minister who is so weakened that he is forced to rely on a predecessor to get him out of a hole. More broadly, the voters may be confused that it appears that the “real Rishi” – the “change” candidate of just a few weeks ago – is now the “continuity” candidate of today.
The public may conclude what he’s really learned after 12 months in office is that his best hope of avoiding a Labour landslide is to go back to his Plan A of presenting himself as Mr Stability who cleans up others’ messes: a safer option compared to Keir Starmer, rather than a radical reformer.
There is some merit in the continuity approach, and quite a few Tory backbenchers (at least in the south) prefer to focus on defending the “Blue Wall” from wipeout than focusing on a “Red Wall” many think is already lost.
It’s worth remembering that a large number of the current Parliamentary Tory party are a product of the Cameron era. Many ministers started their careers under the ex-PM, either in office or as special advisers, and many MPs owe their seats to his “A-list” of candidate selections.
They are in some ways still the centre of gravity of the party: Eurosceptic (though not necessarily Brexiteers), small state, fiscally conservative but socially liberal Conservatives. They’re summed up by The Thick Of It’s wonderfully lugubrious minister Peter Mannion, who when asked to come up with “new ideas” at an awayday replies deadpan: “Reduce the deficit with spending cuts.”
Indeed, Cameron’s return could be a sign that the Tory party has decided to fight the next election by defending its entire period in office, from 2010 onwards, austerity and all, rather than pretending it is a “new” Government. We had the first signs of this in the autumn statement last year from Jeremy Hunt (himself a living symbol of the Cameroon era), when he did something neither Theresa May, Boris Johnson nor Liz Truss ever did: defend austerity.
“It is because we took difficult decisions in 2010 that we could afford record funding increases for the NHS, the landmark furlough scheme, and now the Energy Price Guarantee,” Hunt said.
That theme was certainly pushed in the Covid Inquiry by Cameron, George Osborne and current deputy prime minister (and Cameron era insider) Oliver Dowden, all of whom said it was only because they’d balanced the public finances that the country was able to make the massive borrowing and spending needed in the pandemic.
It also feels as though Sunak is embarking on the Cameron strategy ahead of the 2015 election, when he famously moved to scrape the “barnacles off the boat” of government, focusing on a small number of priorities.
Just as Boris Johnson claimed he was a “Brexity Hezza”, carrying all the big state ambitions of Michael Heseltine but outside the EU, it’s possible that Sunak now sees himself as the “Brexity Dave”, with all the small state, sound money ambitions of Cameron but outside the EU.
Speculation about deep welfare cuts – a key characteristic of the 2010-2016 era – plus small funded tax cuts, and an abandonment of green policies, would certainly fit with the Cameron playbook.
Some Tories (and even some in Labour) think that Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband made a big mistake in trying to distance themselves from Tony Blair’s successes and their party should lean into its record overall rather than try to run away from it.
But deciding to “own” austerity is not without risks. Although Cameron reassured Middle England enough to win re-election in 2015, he was deeply loathed in many Labour areas which then backed Brexit a year later. Johnson’s big majority in 2019 was similarly driven by explicit promises to end austerity and pump cash into the NHS and the North.
So desperate was the PM’s press secretary to head off accusations of him being out of touch with the north, that she even blurted out to reporters that Sunak was “a Red Wall MP” himself, before quickly remembering that true blue Richmond in North Yorkshire was nothing of the kind.
Richard Holden, the new Tory party chairman, is certainly a proud “Red Waller”, but is on course to see his North West Durham constituency disappear in boundary changes. And some Conservative MPs in the north and midlands may feel they’re the “barnacles” being scraped off the Tory boat, fearing that Sunak is more focused on protecting his “Blue Wall” from a pincer movement by Labour and the Lib Dems.
If the Cameron comeback lays bare the identity crisis at the heart of the voter coalition built by Johnson, it also jars with Sunak’s own attempt in his party conference speech to dump as royally on Cameron (particularly on HS2) as on Blair.
Sunak may try to square this circle at the next election by trying to project himself with a message of “continuity and change”, though when Australian PM Scott Morrison tried that slogan in 2016, he was ridiculed by former The Thick Of It writers for lifting it from the political satire Veep. But despite a disastrous election campaign, at least Morrison clung on to office, and that’s the aim of this Government. Cameron won power by the skin of his teeth in both 2010 and 2015, and Sunak would be grateful for anything like it.
Of course, the public care much less about personnel changes in the Cabinet than real change in their living standards.
Being boring rather than exciting may be Sunak’s best hope of power, but he’s going to have to show some serious progress on the delivery of his promises on the NHS and migration – as well as tackling crime and the housing crisis (speaking of which, Sunak’s decision to appoint the 16th housing minister since 2010 contrasts starkly with his conference slogan of “long term decisions for a brighter future”).
Most of all on the economy, the only way Sunak may be able to stop a Labour landslide is if he can stop Britain’s slide into stagnation. And Starmer and his team won’t be slow to point out that it was in fact under Cameron that our anaemic economic growth really started.
If the only thing that changes is the faces around the Cabinet table, Sunak’s risk is that the voters may come to a conclusion that will worry Tory MPs across the land: that it’s not the branding or the boss that’s to blame, it’s the business itself that is bankrupt of ideas and delivery.
Paul Waugh is i‘s chief political commentator
