The meteoric rise of Claire Coutinho – but will she crash and burn?

Moderate Conservative MPs welcomed the promotion of Claire Coutinho to the cabinet in Rishi Sunak’s very mini-reshuffle.

They regard the new energy and net zero secretary as “one of us”, pointing to her membership of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) before she was a minister. But I suspect liberal Tories are clutching at straws.

Coutinho is thankfully not a net zero sceptic but, as a former special adviser and parliamentary aide to Sunak, is schooled in Treasury thinking, which includes an unhealthy scepticism about spending money on combating climate change.

More importantly, Coutinho is one of Sunak’s closest allies and will do his bidding on climate. That will mean diluting measures that cost households money in an attempt to put Labour on the wrong side of voters, while formally sticking to the target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Tories are convinced there are votes in such an approach after their surprise victory in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, which became a referendum on the extension of London’s ultra-low-emission zone.

But Coutinho will not be batting on an easy wicket. Labour is preparing its defences; Keir Starmer does want to be seen as anti-motorist or imposing more financial pain during a cost of living crisis. Labour will portray the Tories as out of touch with public support for action on climate, even if people are wary about individual measures that hit their pockets. As one green Tory MP told me: “There’s a risk we, not Labour, are seen as on the wrong side of public opinion.”

Coutinho’s meteoric rise has been even faster than Sunak’s. At 38, she is the first member of the Commons’ 2019 intake to reach the cabinet, soaring to it from being junior minister for children without the usual stop in the middle ranks.

Inevitably, she is already being tipped as a future Tory leader and, if Sunak somehow avoids a general election defeat next year, as Britain’s first female chancellor, which would deny Rachel Reeves that prize.

Coutinho knows such unwanted predictions can become a curse. In the snakes and ladders game of politics, her dramatic rise will provoke jealousy from older rivals who have been overlooked – even among her cabinet “colleagues”. She is now ranked eighth in the ministerial pecking order, ahead of more experienced figures such as Michael Gove, Steve Barclay, Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch.

Although largely unknown to the public, Coutinho is well-regarded at Westminster, where she is seen as cut from the same cloth as Sunak – a big brain who worked in finance before the Treasury.

But she will not find it easy to live up to her billing. She will have to hold the ring in an increasingly nasty fight between rival Tory factions over net zero. The green wing, the CEN, claims the backing of 133 backbenchers. The Net Zero Scrutiny Group claims 58, but its noise is amplified by Tory-supporting newspapers, who like Sunak’s recent sceptical vibes on climate measures and will demand more.

Coutinho faces a baptism of fire: the two factions will join battle when the energy bill returns to the Commons next Tuesday, with clashes expected over wind farms, aviation fuel and remote rural areas. Some Tory insiders fear net zero will be the party’s “new Brexit”, providing it with something else to argue about now the heat has gone out of the EU issue.

Coutinho, the only member of the cabinet to have cooked for Nigella Lawson (on Channel 4’s The Taste), will find plenty of heat in her new kitchen. She will have the same problem as Sunak – too many cooks. The prime minister feels he must appease the Tory factions pulling him in different directions rather than stand up to them.

True, he showed he wants to reshape his cabinet in his own image by promoting Coutinho and Grant Shapps, the new defence secretary (who will follow in the tradition of his predecessors Michael Heseltine and Michael Fallon by using the post to bash Labour).

Yet Sunak is moving at a snail’s pace even though his time is running out. It’s an open secret at Westminster that he wanted to make more wide-ranging cabinet changes now, but postponed them until after next month’s Tory conference in the hope of limiting trouble there. He’s deploying the old trick of using an imminent reshuffle to keep the troops in line.

When his real shake-up finally comes, probably in November, the real test will be whether he has the courage to oust Suella Braverman as home secretary, or keeps her there to appease the noisy right. Probably she will stay, in which case a reshuffle to install his election team designed to show strength would again advertise the PM’s weakness.