Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have reshuffled their top teams. The Labour leader has probably done so for the last time before asking the country if it’d like to make the shadow cabinet less shadowy.
Party leaders rarely love reshuffles (I’ve seen a few upfront). They don’t have the legal constraints other bosses moan about (there’s nothing illegal about unfair dismissals in politics) but they also like to be popular – which firing ambitious colleagues tends to hinder.
Even deciding who to hire isn’t easy. Many a prime minister has never even heard of the MP they appoint parliamentary undersecretary for traffic cones. But in opposition there’s an extra problem: working out who’ll actually be able to run a department should the punters decide it’s your turn to govern.
Success as an opposition MP involves having a talent for gags in the Commons, clips on Sky News and clickbait on social media. None of those is quite the same as overseeing the NHS or the army.
This isn’t a problem just in politics. We’ve all seen people being promoted because they’re good at what they’re doing today, not because they’ll be good at what they’re being asked to do tomorrow. The problem is so common it has a name: the Peter Principle.
The reshuffles reminded me of recent research spelling out this danger. Examining 131 firms’ sales teams, it found top sellers were more often promoted to management rather than those who, you know, might be good at managing. The researchers demonstrate that, if those likely to be good managers were promoted instead of top sellers, sales could have been up to 30% higher.
With our schools collapsing and prisoners escaping, let’s hope the party leaders reshuffled with this in mind.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
