New Conservative chairman Michael Green (otherwise known as Grant Shapps) insisted this morning that the reshuffle did not represent a “shift to the right” but, displaying an unusual degree of consensus, Fleet Street disagrees. The Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Independent all variously welcome or bemoan the reshuffle as a turn to the right. And it’s not hard to see why. Liberal Tories such as Ken Clarke, George Young and Sayeeda Warsi have been sacked or demoted, while right-wingers such as Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers and Owen Paterson have been promoted. Further down the ministerial ranks, Tory attack-dog-in-chief Michael Fallon, and George Osborne’s representative on earth, Matthew Hancock, have been dispatched to BIS to rein in Vince Cable, the man known among Tories as the “anti-business secretary”.
But, in all likelihood, liberals are wrong to fear and conservatives wrong to hope for a shift to the right in policy. As the Prime Minister’s spokesman said yesterday, “This is a reshuffle, it doesn’t mean a change in government policy. It means different people in different jobs, but the policy remains the same.” The government remains bound by the terms of the Coalition Agreement, so the fact, for instance, that the new Justice Secretay Chris Grayling once resolved to “tear up” the Human Rights Act is of little significance. The presence of the Liberal Democrats means he won’t be able to. It will be as if Ken Clarke never left. Similarly, any new push for radical supply side reform, along the lines of that proposed by the Beecroft Report, will be vetoed by Cable et al. As the Lib Dems are briefing this morning, they won’t allow “a phalanx of new right-wing policies”.
Too many Tory MPs and commentators pretend to forget that this is a coalition government. As one Conservative cabinet minister recently told ConservativeHome: “The Lib Dems may only have one-sixth of the MPs, but without them we have no majority… They own 100% of the majority.” For that reason, this is not now and never will be the full-blooded Conservative government that the right wishes to see. In order to change that, they need to win a majority first, a goal that Cameron, in his refusal to remove George Osborne and reverse direction on the economy (the biggest drag on the Tories’ poll ratings), did little to advance yesterday.
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