A new leader of the opposition means a new shadow front bench. Whether or not you define it as a reshuffle (personally, I wouldn’t even call it a shuffle), this was Kemi Badenoch’s first big opportunity to define her leadership by selecting her top team. And she took her time over it, dragging the process out throughout the day on Monday and this morning. So what have we learned so far?
Badenoch promised during the leadership contest that there would be jobs in her shadow cabinet for all the candidates, and that she would draw talent from across the Tory party when appointing her front bench. Partly, this is a necessity of filling up to 120 shadow ministerial roles with a parliamentary cohort of just 121 MPs (some roles will no doubt double up or else be drawn from the Lords). But it’s also critical to try to unite a party so deeply divided – and a marked difference to how Liz Truss went about things, stacking her cabinet with staunch allies.
The headline announcements are Robert Jenrick, Badenoch’s fellow finalist, as shadow justice secretary, with Priti Patel taking the foreign brief and Mel Stride granted his very obvious ambition to be shadow chancellor. It’s a set of moves designed to appease the various warring factions.
Stride, who was Rishi Sunak’s work and pensions secretary and frequent spokesperson, is widely liked across the party and considered a safe pair of hands – valuable in terms of rebuilding the Conservatives’ credibility on the economy. Patel raised more eyebrows. Most familiar as Boris Johnson’s home secretary, her overseas experience comes from her time as Theresa May’s international development secretary – a role she was dramatically sacked from after freelancing on foreign policy while on holiday to Israel, but let’s skip over that. One can imagine her energetically sparring with David Lammy on thorny issues such as reparations or the handover of territories like the Chagos Islands.
Jenrick is the wildcard appointment. There is little affection between him and Badenoch – while the campaign did not turn outwardly vicious (thanks to the “yellow card” system), it’s not hard to imagine what the pair of think of one another. There are whispers that one of the reasons the frontbench appointment process took so long was the difficulty of agreeing on a job for him. Badenoch had to give Jenrick a role significant enough for him to accept (especially after James Cleverly stated he wouldn’t take a job in her team) that wouldn’t cause an immediate policy confrontation. Shadow home secretary might have been the perfect fit given his focus on immigration, but that would risk making Badenoch look like she’s outsourcing a key policy area to the man she just beat.
Shadow justice secretary is a step removed from the front line of immigration, while still allowing Jenrick to attack Labour on ground he is comfortable on (law and order with a populist flavour). But it might still be a recipe for awkwardness. Jenrick is determined for Britain to leave the European Convention of Human Rights, which Badenoch has refused to commit to, saying only that she’ll look into it. The ECHR falls within the remit of the Ministry of Justice, making this very much part of Jenrick’s brief. How long Badenoch will be able to maintain this uneasy tension without either succumbing and making leaving the ECHR official Conservative policy or getting a new shadow justice secretary is anyone’s guess.
There were obviously roles for key Badenoch allies too. One of the first announced was Laura Trott for the education brief – appointed just in time to trade blows with Bridget Phillipson over tuition fees in the Commons on Monday afternoon. Shadow home secretary has gone to former policing minister Chris Philp. And Alex Burghart, one of Badenoch’s most loyal supporters, is shadow secretary of state for the Duchy of Lancaster and the leader of the opposition’s de facto deputy.
Interestingly, Jenrick ally Neil O’Brien has been appointed shadow education minister. His Substack is required reading by Conservative MPs and political journalists alike (here’s a recent piece of his for the New Statesman on fertility rates, in case you missed it). Definitely one to watch.
Cleverly, as mentioned, had already ruled out returning to the front bench – as had other big names from the recent era of Tory politics, such as Jeremy Hunt and Oliver Dowden. Fellow leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat is also missing from the appointments list. In short: while Patel is an unexpected blast from the past, this shadow team has a distinctly fresh flavour.
One final point about this shadow cabinet and the way it was assembled. As usual, Badenoch isn’t one to do something just because that’s how it’s usually done. Rather than start with the biggest jobs and work down, her first appointments were Rebecca Harris as chief whip (an old hand in the whips office), and Nigel Huddleston and Lord Dominic Johnson as joint chairs of the Conservative party (both former ministers Badenoch worked with in her role as business and trade secretary).
This prioritisation reflects an understanding that leading the opposition is a very different job to running the country: Badenoch’s biggest challenges won’t be balancing the books, reducing net migration or negotiating with world leaders (that’s on Labour’s desk now), but keeping a fractured and deeply depleted parliamentary cohort together and revitalising the wider Conservative Party. Both will be crucial to Badenoch’s own survival at the top of a party that has got into the habit of ousting leaders who don’t get results. Despite winning the members’ vote by 56.5 per cent to 43.5 per cent, just a third of Tory MPs backed her. And she’s got just six months before her first big electoral test, the May local elections. If the Tories want the best shot of capitalising on Labour’s waning popularity, they need to start rebuilding the party’s credibility now – from the grassroots up. That matters more than who the shadow home secretary is.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Southport and the rage of England]
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