On Thursday, Boris Johnson is set to conduct his post-election reshuffle. It’s one of the more brutally visceral demonstrations of where authority lies in politics. The truth is, with no actual department at his disposal, the prime minister’s power derives principally from two things. Firstly, the ability to make the political weather by dint of saying things in the media (the delivery comes later, and is done by other people). And secondly – probably more importantly – by exercising the power of patronage in deciding who holds government office. That allows a PM to put their personal stamp on an administration, ensuring that the day-to-day decisions reflect overall priorities.
This particular reshuffle has long been planned. That’s not always the case. Some of the reshuffles in Theresa May’s time as PM were conducted in what might charitably be deemed a brisk manner.
I vividly remember having to tell her that the now home secretary, Priti Patel, had held rather more undisclosed meetings when on holiday in Israel than she had initially mentioned. (It was a call from this newspaper that first informed me of that fact, as it happens.) Now, May never succumbed to foul language even under the greatest of stress. However, the news I had just delivered – that ultimately saw Penny Mordaunt appointed international development secretary – led to probably the fruitiest expression I ever heard her say.
But how does a reshuffle actually work? The pressure of governing means there will be lots of what we’ll call strongly held views in No 10 about the relative merits of the existing cabinet ministers. The chief whip will be offering thoughts, in terms of who should be rewarded for good behaviour. There’s also a role for the Cabinet Office’s scary sounding propriety and ethics team, who will be reminding ministers of their responsibilities.
Those competing views, through a series of meetings, result in the proposed shape of the new cabinet. That gets physical form in a whiteboard that will make its way into the PM’s office (if it isn’t already there). Nametags for the senior people are held on by magnets against the various departments.
Then the Downing Street switchboard – always from a withheld number – will start to place calls asking ministers to take the nervy walk up Downing Street. Sometimes the conversations with those who aren’t continuing in post happen in the PM’s office in the Commons – in part because TV cameras aren’t allowed outside there.
It’s when something unexpected happens that the whiteboard really makes itself useful. Under May, there was a plan to swap Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark at the departments for health and business respectively. Hunt wasn’t particularly keen on that idea – so I was dispatched, as his former adviser, to persuade him of the merits of the move. Suffice to say, it emerged both quickly and fairly robustly that he didn’t think there were any, so we had a talk about the weather and his family before I reported my abject failure back to the PM.
It seems an obvious point, but once you’ve started a reshuffle there’s no way of stopping until every position on the whiteboard is actually filled – and the further into the day you get, the less room for manoeuvre there is with available positions.
So while the team attempts to put the odd square peg in the odd round hole, other ministers will be bottlenecked inside No 10 without their phones or any idea of what’s happening. Useful as ever, I was once pressed into service to keep Damian Hinds company. In the process of being made education secretary, he had to spend several hours drinking tea in what used to be Margaret Thatcher’s study. He did discover one of the small mercies of reshuffle day, though – which is that, generally, a far better selection of biscuits appears.
We also learned through bitter experience the consequences of the inadvertent cock-up. A decision had very firmly been made in 2018 not to make Chris Grayling Conservative party chairman, as we tried to project vigour and dynamism. Sadly, that had not been communicated to Tory HQ, which inadvertently tweeted congratulations for an appointment Grayling wasn’t supposed to have had.
What have we learned? Well, Boris Johnson will never be more powerful as prime minister than he is now. But by the end of the day, and amid all the flattery he will be repaid with from those in post, he will have new enemies too.
• Paul Harrison was Downing Street press secretary from 2017 to 2019 and is senior counsel at Lexington Communications
