So, we have a new Prime Minister in the form of Liz Truss and a brand new Cabinet. The new Cabinet is in my view a bit of a ‘curate’s egg’, good but only in parts.
The good parts are keeping Ben Wallace at Defence as at least this minister appears to be on top of his brief, two relatively bright people in the form of Kwasi Kwarteng and James Cleverly as Chancellor and Foreign Secretary respectively and Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. There have also been people who should have been given much more high profile and bigger jobs who got positions that seem a wrong fit for them. One very obvious example is Kemi Badenoch who has got the job of Trade Secretary when many people, including myself, would have preferred to see her in the Education department where she could have helped to deal with the problem of woke indoctrination in our schools.
Then there are those whose appointment makes me uneasy. One such appointment is that of Theresa Coffey as Health and Social Care Secretary. Dr Coffey, who was during the pandemic very supportive of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, does not look to me to be the sort of person who can repair the damage that the promotion of these policies did to public confidence in the way healthcare is managed in the UK. Another appointment that looks decidedly odd is the elevation of Penny Mordaunt as Leader of the House of Commons. Ms Mordaunt took a hell of a battering during the leadership campaign and much attention was paid to her claims that she defended women’s rights against the trans lobby, claims that turned out to be not sufficiently based on reality. I suspect that she has been appointed on the grounds that it is better to have her pissing out of the tent from inside rather than the other way around.
Yes there are a healthy number of Brexit supporters in Ms Truss’s Cabinet and it’s good to see that slippery and untrustworthy ‘big beasts’ like Michael Gove are nowhere to be found, but this doesn’t look like the radical reforming Cabinet that we should have seen. It’s right of course that these are early days and we haven’t yet seen all of Ms Truss’s policies, but time will tell whether or not this new Cabinet and the new Prime Minister will be a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’.
You are right of course and time will tell. I doubt if this government and the Tory party have that much time left, it looks to me as if this government is facing a terrible defeat is the not to distance general election. It’s possible the new PM might be able to work miracles of course but nothing short of miracles is going to save the Tory party.
I don’t see them losing unless a new sane party emerges. Every cock up that the government has made, and there have been many, the opposition parties have loudly proclaimed that they would have been even worse. I’m not sure if it is even going to be worth my time to turn out and spoil the ballot paper next time.