There’s no such thing as a ‘low-stakes reshuffle’ – it always has the potential to start a war

There is no such thing as a low-stakes reshuffle. Even if one is done in peacetime, it will always have the potential to start a war. After all, some degree of power is what the majority of MPs seek, and they will not take kindly to being demoted or ignored.

They are also about more than mere individuals; even if a backbencher knows they have no hope of getting promoted, they will still have strong views on what their leadership should be doing. By appointing new faces to their frontbench, said leaders are forced toreveal their hand, and rarely please everyone in doing so.

This may be why Westminster has been home to much smoke and no fire for the past few months; despite persistent rumours of an impending reshuffle, No 10 is yet to take the plunge. It isn’t hard to see why.

For a start – and without wishing to state the obvious – the Conservative party currently has many MPs, and only space to promote some of them. Now they have been around for a year and a half, the most ambitious of the 2019 intake can reasonably start believing that their time in the spotlight has come.

Similarly, MPs elected in 2017 have not been fresh faces for a long time, and some already feel they have spent too long languishing on the backbenches.

Then there are the bigger beasts of previous intakes who, sidelined by Theresa May’s grey supremacy and Johnson’s Vote Leave gang, will cause trouble if they keep being treated like inconvenient ghosts.

Still, this is only one part of the problem. Given that Johnson has only ever been a Prime Minister campaigning for Brexit or dealing with a pandemic, it is still unclear what he wants to achieve in more normal times. Famously light on ideology and grand guiding principles, it isn’t easy to predict what he will be like in his third act in Downing Street. Appointing a new team will go some way towards explaining what he means to achieve, but he isn’t the only one unsure of what should come next.

If you know anything about the recent history of the Conservative Party, you will know that, when it is in government, it loves a split. There were the wets and the dries under Thatcher; the Remainers and Leavers under Cameron and May; the doves and the hawks under Johnson. Not every Conservative MP has to pick a side, and those sides aren’t constantly at war with each other on every issue, but those cleavages are always worth taking into account.

There is one problem, however, and it is that the current split on Covid restrictions will soon come to an end, and it is not obvious what will replace it. A considerable chunk of the parliamentary party were elected after the referendum and so have never known politics as usual; who can tell what they will coalesce around once the pandemic is over? And who knows which people they will coalesce around?

One potential split could come from geography and class, with northern, more working class MPs on one end and more traditional, middle class and above southern MPs on the other. Another could be the economy, and how the government should approach the country’s recovery and wounded finances. Or perhaps it will be something else entirely; British politics has famously been quite unpredictable in recent times.

The point is: if you want to reshuffle your frontbench in a way that will not create more problems than it solves, you need to know what problems to expect. From there, you can promote people to shut them up, or to signal to their supporters that you will lend an ear to the shared cause they care about. You will also be able to get rid of people you no longer need, safe in the knowledge that they will not come back to haunt you.

Reshuffles aren’t an exact science at the best of times, but Johnson and those around him are about to swim into especially dangerous waters. Is it any wonder they are dragging their feet?