Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

Ah the dignity of state - it's raining so they're having to move the podium into Downing Street and Truss' motorcade is stuck in traffic in Shepherd's Bush, so she's about an hour late to her own speech

Edit: Before they moved the podium inside:


And I feel like Prime Minister bin bag couldn't do worse than Johnson or (probably) Truss

This guy definitely ranks amongst the top post war pms.

[Sheilbh]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

[crazy canuck]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

It gets worse as you get older.  Sorry.

[Tamas]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

It gets worse as you get older.  Sorry.

In professional football terms, I have been dead for years.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I live in dread of a new pope being younger than me 

[Josquius]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

I have big trouble grasping how people younger than me could possibly have become MPs.


I do hope it could be a sign the UK is becoming more normal.

But more likely its just our corruption at work and trying to look trendy.

[The Larch]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

I have big trouble grasping how people younger than me could possibly have become MPs.


I do hope it could be a sign the UK is becoming more normal.

But more likely its just our corruption at work and trying to look trendy.

You know, it's been a while since I stopped trying to make sense of a lot of the stuff you post, but every once in a while you bring out something that still manages to make me scratch my head in bewilderment.

[Josquius]

I'm older than a new cabinet minister (by a few months)

I have big trouble grasping how people younger than me could possibly have become MPs.


I do hope it could be a sign the UK is becoming more normal.

But more likely its just our corruption at work and trying to look trendy.

You know, it's been a while since I stopped trying to make sense of a lot of the stuff you post, but every once in a while you bring out something that still manages to make me scratch my head in bewilderment.

In democratic countries young MPs, PMs even (ah Finland) are far more common.
The enhanced democracy provides more opportunities for a variety of people to stand a chance.
In the UK spots on the ballot for the major parties are limited and its rare to see someone under 40 getting anywhere near them. It usually requires years of work at lower levels to be given that nod.
Thus I am suspicious when you do get 20-something candidates. It smells a bit off.

[Zanza]

Former Brexit opportunities minister becomes business and energy secretary in Liz Truss's first cabinet

[...]

Rees-Mogg has claimed that "climate alarmism" is responsible for high energy prices and that it is unrealistic for scientists to project future changes to the climate because meteorologists struggle to correctly predict the weather.

The new business secretary said in April that the government wanted "every last drop" of oil and gas to be extracted from the North Sea as he dismissed warnings that a renewed push for fossil fuels would ruin the UK's chances of achieving net zero by 2050.

The cabinet minister also described the idea of reopening shale gas sites as "quite an interesting opportunity", comparing the fracking threat to "a rock fall in a disused coalmine".

[...]

There were also indications that Truss's new No 10 could play down tackling the climate crisis as a priority with Matthew Sinclair, her new chief economic adviser, having a history of arguing against taxation to pay for environmental policies.

Sinclair is the author of a book called Let Them Eat Carbon, which challenges whether policies to address climate change are worth the cost to living standards, and papers including The Case Against Further Green Taxes.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/06/jacob-rees-mogg-climate-alarmism-uk-energy-brief

Rees-Mogg responsibile for energy.  The UK has the opportunity to become a green energy leader with off-shore wind and hydrolysis, but probably not with this government...

[Josquius]

At a time when we should be doing the sensible thing and renationalising the energy sector we appoint a disaster capitalist neo lib.
If the tories aren't wiped out at the next election I am shifting up my my disdain for this country towards enmity.

[Tamas]

Wow, appointing Rees-Mogg in charge of energy is hard to read other than a big FU to the country's expectations of tackling the crisis.

[garbon]

Wow, appointing Rees-Mogg in charge of energy is hard to read other than a big FU to the country's expectations of tackling the crisis.

Guardian had analysis suggesting she had struggled to get someone to want it. Seems like it'd be better to leave the position vacant...

[Tamas]

Makes sense.

In general, my impression from the Guardian is that the only selection criteria was loyalty to her.

Which I think is a terrible sign. Maybe she is a very well hidden great talent, but I shudder at the thought of people who thought their best bet at advancement is standing behind Liz Truss now lead the country. Just what the hell.

[Sheilbh]

In general, my impression from the Guardian is that the only selection criteria was loyalty to her.

It's always the choice of do you reward your loyalists and have a cabinet that will support you, or do you try to build party unions by appeasing various factions at the risk of having a cabinet that is fractious and possibly leaky/ineffective.

Given the recent leadership election I'm not convinced there was any other choice. I don't think Truss could appoint Sunak or his strongest supporters when they were saying her ideas are shit, she's incompetent and, frankly, her plan was "immoral" - and vice versa, if Sunak won, I don't think there'd be much space for Truss or her top supporters. It was not, to nick the Labour leadership phrase, a very "comradely competition".

The other defence is that the key relationship in every government is PM and Chncellor. She is very close to Kwarteng and they are aligned - I think it's the first cabinet we've had since Cameron and Osborne where Number 10 and 11 are that aligned.

I also saw someone moaning about the lack of experience in the cabinet - but there examples were Dominic Raab, Grant Shapps and Matt Hancock languishing on the backbenches. I'm not convinced the country is crying out for their counsel

I think this from Sam Freedman (who worked with Truss when he was a civil servant in the Department for Education and she was a junior minister):

The New Cabinet and What it Tells us About How Truss will Govern
Sam Freedman

On the day that Boris Johnson resigned I wrote: "I don't think any of the prospective candidates will be as bad as Johnson. I really hope no other Prime Minister in my lifetime will be." Liz Truss wouldn't have been my pick of those candidates but I still believe this to be true. Johnson never had any kind of agenda or plan beyond personal aggrandisement. He had little to no interest in policy, and had no compunction about saying whatever it was that he thought people wanted to hear regardless of its relationship to reality.

Truss is different. She will at least try to prioritise, will work ferociously hard, and will take real and detailed interest in policy challenges. She also has her own weaknesses. She's an extremely poor communicator both in formal speeches and interviews. Johnson never communicated anything useful but his bluff, jokey, style got him through most encounters. Her initial statements to the public have been flat, platitudinous and awkward. She's also too taken by the idea of being iconoclastic and outside the consensus, which means she can stick to positions that aren't supported by the evidence. A Times profile of her last week featured an anecdote from David Laws, who was a Lib Dem minister at the education department when she was there:

"Promoted to the role of junior minister in the Department for Education in 2012, Truss continued to push her ideas in government, but she was met with bemusement from civil servants and obstinacy from the Liberal Democrats. On one occasion Truss instructed officials to omit data from a consultation paper that would undermine her central argument about teachers being restricted to care for fewer children because of red tape.

    'The civil servants obviously found her quite a handful,' David Laws, a former schools minister who worked alongside Truss, says. 'Apparently, she told them to delete all the countries that were on the wrong side of the UK and publish a chart that showed us as an outlier to reinforce her argument. She is quite ideological and has a reasonably clear philosophy around competition, free markets and low taxes. The downside of that is she is not always as interested at looking at the evidence.'"

This is indicative and will prove a big problem for her unless she learns to be more open-minded. That said she seems to have been flexible enough with her first big test: the initial announcement on energy bills, which is due tomorrow. From piecing together different briefings it seems that, after exploring and discarding pretty much every other option, she is going to end up adopting a variant of the Labour/Lib Dem plan from the summer – a fixed cap on energy costs paid for by borrowing, for both households and businesses (and the public sector). As Truss still intends to do her promised tax cuts, the costs, as I discussed in my post on what next year might look like, are getting eye-watering, and starting to cause nervousness in the markets. The cost of Government borrowing has been rising all month, which creates a negative loop.

The energy plan will provide much needed reassurance on the cost of living over the winter, and has the benefit of holding down inflation, but it also means there is less incentive for households and businesses to cut use, increasing the risk of rationing. So there will be plenty more thinking to do after the first announcement is out of the way.

While we have to wait for the details of the plan we do now have confirmation of the cabinet. The rest of this post will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the new top team and what it tells us about how Truss intends to govern.

The cabinet

The full list of the new cabinet can be found here. I'm not going to go through the members one by one but rather focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the new team as a collective. First the strengths:
1.      A more coordinated economic team

One of the Johnson administration's many problems was the disconnect between No 10 and the Treasury. The Prime Minister had no real ideological compass at all but was quite happy to spend money if he thought it would be popular. Sunak bought into the Treasury (and Thatcherite) orthodoxy of balanced budgets, and raising taxes if you did want to spend more. This led to an unhappy relationship, and was the reason Sunak gave, rather than Partygate, for quitting. It's not as if Johnson would have had a clear agenda even with a more amenable chancellor but it didn't help.

Truss and the new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng are more closely aligned. He joined her campaign early and has been a prominent spokesman throughout. They agree on a fiscally looser approach, with GDP growth being the main target, even if means pushing the debt much higher in the short term. It is more Reaganite than Thatcherite. Whether or not you agree with the approach, this should give greater strategic clarity to Government. Whether the partnership survives impact with economic reality over the next few months is a different question, as is whether Kwarteng's ambitions for the top job will start to get in the way.

He is one of the more interesting members of the new cabinet. As Johnson's Business and Energy Secretary he was one seen as one of the more competent members of a weak team. His plans for expansion of renewables and nuclear were welcomed by the sector, though he also didn't push hard enough for a proper short-term energy management strategy of the type we've seen in other European countries. His history books, particularly Ghosts of Empire are genuinely good, very rare for a politician, and go against the grain of the simplistic culture war arguments about Empire beloved by some of his colleagues.

2.      Competent ministers in key positions

I appreciate this is damning with faint praise. Competence should be the basic minimum for any cabinet job but it hasn't been in recent years (and isn't in some posts this time – more of which in the "weaknesses" section).

But given the particular challenges Truss faces she has filled most of the really important roles with people who are able to work well with officials and manage crises. New Health Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Thérèse Coffey is not a popular politician, and I disagree with plenty of decisions she made at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), but she is seen as a capable minister by officials. She's quick to understand briefs, makes decisions, and listens to advice, all of which will be essential if she is to get any kind of grip on the omnicrisis facing the NHS this winter.

Chloe Smith, who has replaced Coffey at the DWP, is in a similar mould. She was promoted far too fast by Cameron, and got famously mauled by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, after which she left Government for a while. But she's been slowly working her way back since and gained a reputation as a quietly effective minister.

In the same vein Ben Wallace, one of the few bright spots of the Johnson cabinet, is staying at Defence. This clear indication of policy continuity towards Ukraine will be welcomed in Kyiv. Moving Nadhim Zahawi to the cabinet office is also a shrewd appointment, as long as his tax affairs don't force an early resignation. He did well as vaccines minister but struggled at education, which is a much less delivery-oriented job. He likes operational roles and the cabinet office should suit him.

Now for the weaknesses:

1.      Loyalty appointments

The whole "team of rivals" thing can be overdone. As Robert Shrimsley perceptively wrote in the FT successful leaders don't tend to worry about party unity and "the skittish and rebellious Tory party does not respect weakness or token efforts to find consensus." There would be little value in Truss trying to find roles for Rishi Sunak and Dominic Raab, for instance, after everything they've said about her plans, and their obvious disdain for her. 

On the other hand appointing people solely because they've been supportive, even if they are hopelessly out of their depth is not a good recipe for successful government. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a prime example. Giving him the Business and Energy brief in the midst of an energy crisis is profoundly unserious, and not just because it means putting one of the most grotesquely absurd caricatures of Tory-ism on TV all the time.

Whenever I criticise Rees-Mogg someone will pop and say I'm being terribly unfair because, despite his mannerisms and eccentricities he's actually very clever. If he is I have seen no evidence. While Kwarteng's history books are thoughtful and well written, Rees-Mogg's on eminent Victorians is turgid beyond belief and exceptionally poor history. AN Wilson in The Times called it "anathema.... To anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense." Dominic Sandbrook, after noting how much he'd have loved to annoy liberals by praising the book sadly reflected he could not because it is "terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly banal that if it had been written by anybody else it would never have been published."

Rees-Mogg is the purest example I've ever seen of people mistaking affected poshness, and an expensive education, for intelligence. He will be, as he always is in every role, a disaster. And giving him such an important one is deeply foolish. His colleagues know it too, apparently several turned down junior minister roles under him. It also indicates Truss's government will deprioritise climate change compared to previous administrations.

Suella Braverman is similarly unsuited for the role of Home Secretary, or indeed any cabinet position. She repeatedly demeaned the position of attorney-general in Johnson's administration and has given some of the most baffling Parliamentary performances in living memory. She also proposed, during her campaign to become leader, that we should leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which quite apart from being terrible policy is also contrary to the Government position. If the Rwanda judicial review, that started this week, goes against the Government and she is asked if she still supports leaving the ECHR, what will she say?

2.      Experience

For the leader of a party that has been in power twelve years Truss has put together a remarkably inexperienced cabinet. Of those given "great offices of state" Kwarteng has been at Business since 2019, but Braverman has never been a full cabinet minister and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly only since July. Coffey's also done three years but Smith is new to the cabinet, as is Kemi Badenoch at the Department of International Trade. Penny Mordaunt, the new Leader of the Commons, is the only member of the Cabinet, apart from Truss herself, who spent any time in the cabinet before 2019 (as International Development Secretary from 2017 and then briefly as Defence Secretary).

There is, by contrast, a lot of experience on the backbenches. Recent departures like Michael Gove, Sunak and Raab will join Jeremy Hunt, Theresa May, David Davis and so on. Having your more knowledgeable colleagues outside the tent can make life a lot more difficult as they will know policy areas better than the cabinet and will thus be able to cause problems if they choose to do so. The lack of experience also makes mistakes much more likely as it takes time to learn how to be an effective cabinet minister.

3.      Presentation

Truss is a poor speaker and interviews badly. She won't want to do too much media herself, and yet she has filled her team with other weak performers. They range from utter embarrassments like Rees-Mogg, to the easily flustered like Coffey and Smith, to just dull like most of the rest. Simon Clarke, the new Levelling Up Secretary, and Cleverly are both adequate performers who can play a straight bat, though Cleverly is prone to the occasional gaffe, but that's about it. Johnson's cabinet wasn't packed with charisma but he had Gove, who could always be relied on to say something interesting, and Grant Shapps who was probably the most effective media performer of any of them. And Johnson himself was, at least, able to get people to pay attention. It's going to make it even harder for them to present a favourable case on broadcast media.

Taking all this together what does it tell us about how Liz Truss will govern? Picking such an inexperienced, uncharismatic, but loyal cabinet strongly indicates she intends to rule from the centre. It is telling that Badenoch was not given Education or Culture, the positions she wanted, because according to one source they "would give her too much of a platform". Mordaunt too has been sidelined into a job that will prevent her building public profile. Truss's leadership model is second term Thatcher, once she'd extracted most of the "wets" from Government. Thatcher set a strong central direction but, as set out in Charles Moore's excellent biographies, also involved herself at an astonishing level of detail in every policy area. She worked brutally hard to keep on top of almost everything, working with a group of close advisers. Truss will try do the same and has appointed to No 10 a close knit group of her former SPADs like Ruth Porter and Jason Stein, while clearing out almost everyone who was there before (except John Bew the foreign policy adviser who has been critical to UK policy on Ukraine).

Her advisers are though, on the whole, a much younger and less experienced group than Thatcher had, with little real world experience. Most are in their early 30s or late 20s. Her deputy director of policy graduated in 2017; and her political secretary in 2015. One exception is her chief of staff Mark Fullbrook who is very much an old hand – indeed he was working for Conservative Central Office when Thatcher was Prime Minister. But he is a campaigner not a policy person, until setting up his own firm earlier this year he'd spent over a decade working with Lynton Crosby's practice.

All of this means we can expect a highly centralised operation that should be more able to stick to its priorities – they've only even appointed policy advisers for the three areas Truss mentioned in her speech (economy, health, energy) plus foreign affairs. There should also be a unity of purpose that allows quicker decision making, unlike under Johnson where fierce battles between different sects went on for months while he enjoyed the chaos. The downside, though, of such a tight team, and a cabinet picked on loyalty, is that there will be little diversity of opinion or challenge, which could exacerbate Truss's dogmatic tendencies. Her advisers and senior ministers are all alums of the same group of right-wing think-tanks – the IEA, Taxpayers Alliance, and Adam Smith Institute. There is a poetic irony in their first big announcement being a massive state intervention to fix energy prices. The question is whether it's a one off or shows they have the ideological flexibility to govern successfully. 

Edit: Although my basic view is how Stephen Bush framed it: don't underestimate Truss - she's smarter and wilier than most people think (and I'd add significantly more likely to do things than Johnson because she works); but don't underestimate the UK's problems - they're deeper and worse than most people think too

[Sheilbh]

Also just to flag I'm very pleased to see Tom Tugendhat attending cabinet as Security Minister although not a full Secretary of State (part of the Home Office). He's been campaigning on anti-kleptocracy stuff for years (and a big China hawk) from the backbenches and the committees and been given responsibility for economic crime which is good news.

I think he's already called for the UK to follow the US and ban Chinese surveillance companies that profit from Xinjiang from operating in the UK. One - Hikvision - was providing surveillance systems in the NHS until recently, until last year they were the surveillance provider for the European Parliament while also providing systems used in "re-education camps" in Xinjiang. So it'd strike me as a very sensible move to ban those companies in the UK.

Separately I'd flag there's been a bit of a flurry in my work because someone did analysis of LinkedIn profiles and discovered - to no-one's great surprise - a very large number of employees in TikTok who appear to have previously worked for Chinese state media or intelligence agencies. Not massively surprising as I say but hopefully giving a little bit of pause for media companies going all in on TikTok - particularly because it's algorithms are an absolute black box but we know different content is promoted in different countries.