Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle reveals the identity crisis at the heart of the Conservative party. Are the Tories the party of tax cuts or of fiscal responsibility? Are they the party of levelling up or the City? Do they want to improve institutions or wreck them? With the sacking of Suella Braverman from the Home Office and the return of David Cameron as foreign secretary, it would be tempting to think Mr Sunak’s shift was a victory for a more recognisable, centre-right politics. But that assessment would be premature.
Mr Sunak has failed to restore trust in his party after the bedlam of the Truss government. The shakeup of his team illustrates how hard it is for the Tories to escape their own chaos.Demoting his health secretary in the middle of negotiations with the doctors’ union to end industrial action spells panic. It is a desperate sign to replace the party chairman a year before an election. No voter thinks a housing emergency of rocketing rents and soaring evictions will be solved by the 16th housing minister since 2010.
To shift the narrative, Mr Sunak needed a big communicator who the public might believe could change the political weather. Enter Mr Cameron. There are good reasons for his appointment. In a moment of geopolitical instability, Mr Cameron knows many world leaders and has experience of global affairs. But his time as prime minister will be both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. There were foreign policy messes – some inherited, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and others of his own patronage: Libya, Syria and, most important, Brexit.
The last grew out of Mr Cameron’s austerity policies, which stoked the pessimism of angry, nostalgic and fearful voters attracted to a Tory party hostile towards immigration, social liberalism and Europe. Out of office, Mr Cameron’s lack of judgment was exposed in his lucrative lobbying for a controversial finance company. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but this role is made awkward by Mr Cameron’s post-Downing Street career promoting Chinese investment funds.
After 13 years of the Conservatives being in office, Mr Sunak will have to fight the next election as both the face of change and an agent of sanity. The latter would have been made harder by keeping Ms Braverman in post. She stoked fear and anger using cruel, racist rhetoric. Her departure from frontline politics is to be welcomed. A reckless, offensive comment article sealed her fate. The right to protest is fundamental to modern Britain, as is an independent police force. The Met was handling the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration ever. Ms Braverman’s language almost certainly provoked rightwing mobs, making the job of police far harder.
The prime minister was right to sack her. Leaving Ms Braverman in place would only have emboldened her to lash out against the supreme court if judges decide on Wednesday to rule, correctly in this newspaper’s view, against the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Ms Braverman was already positioning herself as the rightwinger best placed to lead the post-Sunak Tories. Mr Sunak – and his ministers – attempted to see off this threat by turning themselves into culture warriors, trading conspiracy theories and junking net zero commitments. The result is that the Tories are now polling at their lowest level since Mr Sunak first took over. In 2019 the Conservative party captured the zeitgeist. But the zeitgeist has moved on – and Mr Sunak is struggling to catch up.
