Theresa May has finalised her new government with dozens of junior ministerial appointments, one of which was to make Alan Duncan a deputy to Boris Johnson weeks after he mocked the new foreign secretary as “Silvio Borisconi”.
Of the 69 junior government and whips jobs announced on Sunday morning, 15 went to women, a slightly lower proportion than the near third of female appointments in the cabinet.
It followed another, smaller set of announcements on Saturday evening, which saw Dominic Raab, a strong supporter of May’s vanquished opponent Michael Gove, sacked as justice minister, and Anna Soubry, a prominent remain backer, lose her role as business minister.
The larger-scale Sunday reshuffle kept a number of Tories in their posts, among them the sports minister Tracey Crouch, the welfare reform minister Lord Freud, and the schools minister Lord Nash.
Among the more prominent appointments was the return to government of Duncan, removed in 2014 as junior international development minister. The veteran Tory MP was a remain supporter, and shortly after the EU referendum he ridiculed Johnson’s capabilities at prime minister’s questions.
Duncan, referencing the disgraced former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, asked David Cameron: “Would you educate the house from your experience as prime minister on how in terms of their country’s reputation and success he would compare the undemonstrative competence and dignity of Angela Merkel with the theatrical and comical antics of Silvio Borisconi?”
At the time Johnson was seen as Cameron’s most likely successor, only to exit the Tory leadership race when Gove, his key ally, stood against him. Now Duncan and Johnson will work together at the Foreign Office.
Amid the chaos in Nice and Turkey during his first days in office, Johnson found time to write a column for the Sunday Telegraph in which he argued that Brexit did not mean a withdrawn global role for the UK, but a country “more outward-looking, more engaged and more active on the world stage than ever before”.
He wrote: “We cannot leave Europe in the proper sense of that word – that is geographically, emotionally, culturally impossible; and we will remain key players in all kinds of intergovernmental cooperation with our European friends and partners. But we can and must respect the people’s will, and extricate ourselves from the EU.
“And that gives us a chance not just to do new trade deals, but to think of ourselves once again as a truly global Britain using our unique voice – humane, compassionate, principled – to do good around the world, and to exploit growth markets to the full.”
