Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
In the forgotten days between the election of Kemi Badenoch and the re-election of Donald Trump, our new leader appointed a Shadow Cabinet.
Given events elsewhere, this may have slipped your mind — but nevertheless Badenoch’s first reshuffle does merit our attention. If nothing else it tells us something about the Conservative Party’s inability to hold onto its top people.
Just compare Rishi Sunak’s first Cabinet with the current line-up. Of the 31 cabinet ministers appointed just two years ago (including the PM and those “attending Cabinet”) just four are in Kemi Badenoch’s first Shadow Cabinet — Mel Stride, Robert Jenrick, Lord True and Badenoch herself.
That, of course, has very little to do with her choices — most of our Cabinet ministers either lost their seats at the general election or stood down before it. If the party ever decides to value experience over novelty again, the first lesson to learn is not to suffer a landslide defeat.
Of course, what’s done is done. But that being the case — and with so few MPs left to choose from — why have ex-ministers like Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly returned to the backbenches?
One can understand why someone with a CV as long as Hunt’s might wish to retire from the frontline, but Cleverly and Tugendhat were running for leader just a few weeks ago — and surely have much more to give. I’m not apportioning blame here, but given the obsessively advertised united front of the leadership race something doesn’t add up.
Then there’s the matter of Rishi Sunak. Of the UK’s eight living ex-Prime Ministers, he’s the only one left in the House of Commons. He’s even pledged to remain an MP for the whole of this parliament, so why not do it from within the Shadow Cabinet? At just 44 years of age he could and should have a long political career ahead of him. Indeed, there’s a plausible counterfactual in which after five years as a well-regarded junior minister, he’s just been promoted to (shadow) cabinet rank and is being quietly spoken of as a future leader.
However, because of an implicit policy of “up or out” it’s blithely assumed that he’s now done with frontline politics (or, rather, it is done with him). This is an absurdly wasteful approach to the party’s human resources. Let’s not forget that he only became an MP in 2015, meaning that the system has chewed-him-up and spat-him-out in the space just 9 years. Compare that to the 54 years between Winston Churchill becoming an MP for the first time in 1900 and leaving Downing Street for the last time in 1955.
Those are the two post-war extremes, but for the Prime Ministers between Churchill and Sunak there’s been a bumpy downward trend in the new-MP to ex-PM interval. By my count, it was 28 years (plus change) for Attlee, 33 for Eden, 38 for Macmillan, 32 for Douglas-Home, 30 for Wilson, 24 for Heath and 31 for Thatcher. Major was the first post-war Prime Minister to complete his Commons career track in less than twenty years (17 to be precise). The long New Labour era allowed Blair to rack up 24 years and Brown 26, but Cameron was in-and-out in the space of 15 years. May and Johnson took slightly longer at 22 and 21 years respectively, but for Truss it was 12 years and for Sunak, as mentioned, just 9. If Starmer makes it through as Prime Minister to 2029 but no further, he’ll have clocked-out after 14 years.
It could be argued that we can do without anymore of Sunak and his demonstrably poor political judgement. Then again, given the extraordinarily rapid pace of his rise through the ranks, when did he have the time to acquire and hone the necessary instincts? I’m not suggesting that we insist that every future PM spends as long on the back-benches as Harold Macmillan did, but we should put an end to the accelerated promotion that ruined Rishi. We need to renormalise party leaders with at least a decade or two of front-bench experience.
The problem with over-promoting the rising stars isn’t just their personal unreadiness, it’s also the knock-on effect it has on the people they appoint to ministerial and staff positions. The temptation for a too-young leader is to surround themselves with colleagues of their own age or younger. The greybeards, meanwhile, are put out to grass — or they quit on the assumption that their time has been-and-gone. The result is that we don’t just have under-cooked leaders, but an entire culture of politics in which experience is routinely undervalued and continually lost.
It’s telling that four of the last five Conservative Prime Ministers were undone by failings characteristic of immaturity. For instance, there was the essay crisis government of the Cameron years — finally bodied by the impetuous promise of a Brexit referendum. For his part, Boris Johnson was not un-rich in years, but during his tenure Downing Street became a frat house that incubated Partygate and precipitated his downfall. Next came the reckless ideological fervour of the Truss experiment — followed by the naiveté of the Sunak years, which culminated in a general election campaign composed of rookie errors.
Let’s hope that opposition gives Kemi Badenoch the breathing space to break this cycle, but the danger is of an endless cascade of inexperience, with one unready leader and her team giving way to another because anyone with gravitas is long gone.
I realise that by this point I’m sounding like an old grouch. So let me make it clear that young people — twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings — are needed at the top alongside their elders. Just look at the much maligned Special Advisors, who work anti-social hours for mediocre pay and are all that stand between ministers and the massed ranks of the civil service. They have a unique perspective on how Whitehall works and doesn’t work — and if ever we want to engineer our way to effective government, we need to draw upon what the SpAds have learned the hard way.
It might be a good idea, then, if we could hold on their experience, but we’re even worse at doing this with backroom staff then we are with our elected politicians. Working for the Conservative cause in any policy-facing position is more like a gap year than a career. If you’ve ever wondered why the civil service, quangos and other vested interests run rings around us, it’s because they have continuity and we don’t.
There are solutions. The American political system has a serious network of think tanks in which talent can be nurtured and also “warehoused” between periods in office. The British equivalent is puny by comparison. SpAds, policy advisors and speechwriters therefore come-and-go with the elected politicians they work for. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party’s institutional memory only lasts the span of a leader’s tenure, if that.
If-and-when we regain power there’ll be barely anyone left who remembers what happened over the last five years, let alone the last fourteen. We’ll therefore be condemned to go round in much the same circles.
Perhaps we should get rid of our tree logo and replace it with a goldfish.
