The lights are dimmed, the Scotch is poured and the chips are down. It's time to reshuffle the Cabinet. The Prime Minister is the cigar smoking dealer. Less the professionalism of Caesars Palace more a waffling philanderer in a cheaper private member's club. So what hand has the country been dealt?
Well the bad news is the pack had very few aces in to begin with. The twos of clubs behave as if they are Kings and the Queen is staring at a Corgi wondering if it would make a better education secretary.
Speculation before a reshuffle is always high. The Westminster rumour mill will kickstart into overdrive as soon as a commentator or a spad thinks it might be tactically smart. With more Tory manifesto pledges broken on tax rises and pensions non-increases, the threat of demotion or promotion is a good way to ensure loyalty.
But no one really knows what is happening or when the croupier will play the first card, no matter what they claim. As for who gets dealt into the nation's hand, no one knows that either. With rumors, gossip and the PM's office privately briefing every journalist, the poker face isn't straight but home to so many eyebrow twitches, the hand is anyone's guess.
If you do want a quick rundown of recent gossip. No one in government likes Defence Secretary Ben Wallace so he's definitely going. Except he seemed to handle the Afghan evac better than Foreign Sec, Raab so Wallace stays and Raab goes. To be replaced by Trade Sec Liz Truss, Priti Patel or Michael Gove. But Carrie doesn't like Gove so he stays as Cabinet Sec. Now that Ian Botham is a trade envoy, Emma Raducanu will become Housing Minister. Dominic Cummings will not return to government but a successfully engineered clone will. And I heard that Sharron got off with Brad at the club last night or somethink...
And then it happens. The first minister is called into Downing Street. They exit with a smile on their face. "Have you got a promotion minister?” The journalists outside yell. Then the news filters through on twitter, they've been sacked. Others are luckier, “come in, come in”, says the PM and his closest advisers, “listen we were really impressed with how you handled your ministerial brief/controversial vote/ twitter spat with Gary Linekar so how would you like to be Secretary of State of something more important?" "Wow m?”, thinks the Minister, " I might even wave at the cameras on the way out".
But what's this? Dominic Raab going back to Number Ten a second time? A secretary of state who says no to a firing? A card that refuses the discard pile? Who does he think he is? Angela Rayner? Raab reappears as Minister of Justice (deemed a demotion from Foreign Secretary) and Deputy Prime Minister, a title usually reserved for making Nick Clegg feel influential. This is all highly unusual. Maybe he knows where the bodies are buried? Not the ones left in Afghanistan by his incompetence, I meant like he knows how many kids the Prime Minister really has.
As for the rest of the hand: In the discard pile we find the 0.5 of Clubs, Gavin Williamson. Aside from his repeated exam paper palavas, Wiliamson recently confused meeting rugby-physiqued Mario Itoje with England football star and transfer hope for the leader of the opposition, Marcus Rashford. Perhaps Williamson could have taken a leaf out of David Cameron’s book and simply referred to meeting a black man in Plymouth, that went down much better with the commentating classes. Other ca(r)ds cast from the Cabinet hand include Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick. Himself definitely a spade given how many conflicts of interest with property developers he has. The Justice Secretary was shuffled out of the pack so Raab had somewhere to fall.
In the new hand there are a number of rising stars. Liz Truss moves to take over Raab’s role as Foreign Secretary. Her tenure as trade secretary has made her surprisingly popular within the Conservative party but understood by most of the public to be a meme given human form.
Truss has also been a trailblazer for the ‘war on woke’, something of a theme in this Cabinet. Controversial Ministers like Priti Patel continue in their roles. Newbie Nadine Dorries is a gutsy play. Neither the Queen of hearts, nor Queen of the Jungle in her short constituent-abandoning stint on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Critics have been concerned by negative comments about same-sex mariage by her and anti-trans comments by new Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch. Meanwhile, loyal backstabber, Michael Gove moves to Housing Secretary just as a video from a speech he made in his twenties emerges involving racist language, homophobia and stereotypes for the North of England. No wonder the war on woke is so important to the Conservative Party, these Tory politicians have been punished by the metropolitan liberal consensus of political correctness and forced into promotions within Boris Johnson’s Cabinet! Poor bastards.
The war on woke is only one part of the government’s posturing. With its hand reshuffled the government now wants to present a confident vision of delivery ahead of elections in a few years time. This is not a government on holiday. This is not the retreat from Kabul. This is the government of the ‘people’s priorities’. With 60% of the cabinet privately educated, 40% Oxbridge educated, this is the government of Levelling Up! As the reshuffled Housing and Levelling Up Secretary said, “We are at last experiencing a new empire, an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner.”Gove, Dorries, Badenoch, lucky Britain, it’s been dealt three of a kind.
