On paper she’s the weakest link, but a fearful PM has fluffed his best chance to replace her and truly refresh his cabinet
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Simon Hart was Rishi Sunak’s chief whip from 2022 to 2024
Last week’s reshuffle was clearly rushed out of the door, half-planned, to an emergency timescale dictated by events rather than strategy. Angela Rayner was gone; Keir Starmer’s most visible and vocal minister, well and truly hoist by her own petard. And as the good ship Rayner sank below the waves, so it dragged the prime minister’s reputation, built partly on a relentlessly repeated (and rather smug) anti-sleaze narrative down with it.
I saw how challenging reshuffles can be for PM and party when I was chief whip under Rishi Sunak. They tend to make more enemies than friends, even when they are carefully planned and executed. Worse, the friends they make were probably your friends anyway, and the enemies you make are the ones who used to be your friends. In other words, there are only downsides. For Starmer, dumping the unknowns Ian Murray and Lucy Powell seems to have done little but bruise egos, and moving the well-respected home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to the very glamorous but electorally less significant Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has all the hallmarks of an attempt to complete a political Rubik’s cube by force.
Simon Hart was government chief whip from 2022 to 2024, and is the author of Ungovernable, out in paperback 11 September
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