The way to judge reshuffles isn’t by the headlines that greet the first big moves, but by those loose ends left hanging at the finish. Ask yourself: did Theresa May set out to make Karen Bradley, a chartered accountant turned low-profile Home Office minister, the new secretary of state for culture, media and sport? Perhaps. Or perhaps Damian Green, once a business editor at Channel 4, might have got the job if something else (say Stephen Crabb’s decision to spend more time with his family) hadn’t happened as the pawns padded up and down Downing Street.
But, at least in media world, the arrival of a political boss with no relevant backstory makes the essential point. We may be only five months away from sealing the BBC’s next royal charter (with some crucial issues yet to resolve). We may be wondering what, if anything, will become of those privatisation plans for C4. But now – at a stroke – everything has changed.
David Cameron’s one real non-politics job was wheeling and dealing in TV. As PM, he remained interested in his old patch. He had his views, his solutions, his favourites.
Theresa May, by contrast, starts from zero. She’s never shown any interest in pushing media buttons or courting journalists. She was damnably difficult to get to speak at a big journalism event. (I know, because I tried.) The amazed cries and botched commentaries that accompanied her reshuffle speak for themselves. There was no easy, familiar access to her life or ambitions. The “usual suspects” didn’t know what was going on, as Jeremy Hunt – doomed but then saved – can testify.
Cameron’s concerns, moreover, were part of a pattern. It was his pal next door at No 11 who – as No 10 had done in 2010 – brushed aside protocol and moved one-on-one to do a deal with the BBC. It was George Osborne who passed the parcel of free licences for the over-75s to the corporation and gave long-range promises about fee revenue to come.
It was John Whittingdale, arriving at the DCMS after a protracted life of select committee expertise, who felt collars and screwed down arrangements as the BBC prepares for regulation by Ofcom, National Audit Office and a new unitary board with six government appointees, led until 2018 by the head of the defunct BBC Trust.
But pause: Cameron, Osborne and Whittingdale are all history now. Their words and bonds are promises past. Their favourite candidates for the BBC boardroom, to be levered into place by a more compliant appointments system, may not know Ms Bradley or Ms May from Ms Adam. The puppet masters have been sent home. The old show has closed.
In one short-term sense, that may work out pretty well. A deal is in place. Bradley can endorse it and give way gracefully on the vital details of HMG governors on that unitary board. She can retreat at speed from corporation squeezing. She may, quite naturally, look askance at the threats to C4 (though Green would have seen them off). Whittingdale, in his way, was an enemy because he knew too much. Bradley may be a friend because at this stage she knows so little (like Maria Miller and Sajid Javid, short-lived DCMS ministers before her).
But there’s a pretty profound question as the deckchairs are shifted again. We talk of royal charters as though they were some superior, sanctified protection. We hail licence-fee settlements, done on the back of an envelope, as though they were a great way of doing business. We stand back and let individual prime ministers with individual terms of trade ask individual favourites to sit on boards to rig the entire process. Yet three weeks of drama, start to finish, blows all that out of the water.
It will be good for a while if May isn’t much interested, if she thinks the broadcasting brief a distraction from bigger things. But it would be remarkable if, over the next four years, that didn’t change. Elections go and come; Chilcot rang down the curtain on sofa governance in times of war and peace. But were all those moving vans outside Downing Street last week taking away the sofas for ever?
■ The Westminster bubble? It’s squads of camera operators and presenters thronging Downing Street for day after day as though No 10 were the centre of the universe – especially when the only people the big news anchors can find to interview are their own parliamentary staffers. But nobody could quite compete with Sky News as Adam Boulton, who used to be political editor, chatted along with Faisal Islam, his successor, whilst Faisal’s deputy, Sophy Ridge, constantly chipped in with snippets from behind the great closed door. You half expected to see Adam’s old deputy, Joey Jones – who jumped Sky ship a couple of months ago to become Home Office press secretary to Theresa May – wander in with mic in hand. What comes around goes around, in ever more tiny circles.
