This is no way to run a whelk stall, let alone a government

Rishi Sunak wanted a minimal reshuffle to replace Ben Wallace without fuss, so that he could project an image of competence into the new political season. Instead, by appointing Grant Shapps to his fifth cabinet role in a year, he gives the impression of the government as a TV reality show called Cabinet Musical Chairs.

Shapps was transport secretary until September last year when Liz Truss sacked him for being a Sunak supporter. Forty-three days later, she fell out with Suella Braverman and needed a home secretary to plug the gap, so she brought Shapps back into government. Shapps enjoyed the great office of state for six days before Sunak became prime minister and restored Braverman to the Home Office in a cynical operation to buy off the anti-immigration Conservative right.

Shapps was business secretary until February this year when Sunak broke up his department and gave him one of the smaller bits, the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Now he is defence secretary. It looks like a consolation prize for previous slights. What is worse, it looks like yet another attempt by Sunak to manage his chronically divided party. Boris Johnson tweeted his support for Shapps’s appointment suspiciously quickly, making it look as if the promotion of a Ukraine-war enthusiast was designed to keep Boris on board the pre-election Tory bus.

This is no way to run a whelk stall, let alone a government. Instead of spreading the reassuring balm of competence, this shuffle reminds people of the chaos of last year when the Conservative Party provided a game show rather than a government, with three prime ministers and a succession of stopgap cabinet ministers – some of them, such as Shapps, holding office for only a few days in the turmoil.

There was nothing Sunak could do about Wallace’s departure. The defence secretary obviously wanted to get out, having pre-announced his desire to leave after saying he wouldn’t be standing again as an MP. Something about wanting to “invest in the parts of life that I have neglected”, he said in his resignation letter. But he had been defence secretary for four years, which is a long stint in a revolving-door government, and he looked the part of an old soldier, which is what he is – captain of the Scots Guards, mentioned in despatches (Belfast).

And you can see the case for Shapps as his replacement. One of the government’s best communicators, he was highly effective during the pandemic in explaining some of the trade-offs in lockdown decisions in plain language. Wallace has done the hard negotiating over the defence budget, with Sunak when Sunak was chancellor, and it is not unreasonable for the prime minister to appoint someone totally committed to support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Just because Boris Johnson is pleased doesn’t mean it is a bad idea to underline Britain’s resolute position, at a time when people might suspect Sunak’s rationalist Treasury brain to be wondering how much it is all going to cost.

But the trouble is that Shapps looks like a winner of a tombola of trivialisation.

It turned out that it was indeed a minimalist shuffle: Shapps to defence, Claire Coutinho to energy, and David Johnston, an unknown backbencher of the 2019 intake, to her post as a junior minister in the education department.

Coutinho’s promotion is a striking one – the shock of it concealed somewhat by the Shapps merry-go-round. She, too, only came into parliament in 2019, making hers an even faster promotion to cabinet than Sunak’s own. Resentment will be generated. Even more than the usual problem with which Abraham Lincoln was familiar: “To remove a man is very easy, but when I go to fill his place, there are 20 applicants, and of these I must make 19 enemies.”

Perhaps Sunak decided that if he were going to make enemies, he might as well go all out. Coutinho has been plucked, as he was, from the lowest level of ministerial life, parliamentary under secretary of state, and put straight into the cabinet, leapfrogging middle-ranking ministers. She is also close to Sunak politically, having been his special adviser when he was chief secretary to the Treasury, and then she was, as an MP, his unpaid ministerial aide when he was chancellor.

Sunak must have a high opinion of her ability because the energy brief is a difficult one in normal times – and a make-or-break one over the next year. Sunak is trying to scare the voters by presenting Labour’s climate-change policies as “eco-zealotry”, contrasting them with his own “proportionate and pragmatic” approach to net zero.

Yet Sunak and Coutinho will struggle to get that message across against the impression, accentuated by this reshuffle, of a dying government in which cabinet jobs related to national security – defence, the Home Office – are traded for reasons of party management and election propaganda.