British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s latest cabinet reshuffle exposes a crumbling government torn between mindless populism and deadend, unaccountable technocracy, argues Lizzie Finegan.
Another day, another cabinet reshuffle. The primary victim was Home Secretary Suella Braverman, darling of the right-populist wing of Britain’s Conservative Party. The prime beneficiary was ex-prime minister David Cameron. Rising from the political grave as Baron Cameron, Foreign Secretary, he can now continue hiding from democratic scrutiny in the House of Lords. What precipitated Braverman’s sacking, and the reshuffle, was her refusal to tone down – at 10 Downing Street’s explicit instruction – an article published in The Times, attacking the police for their soft approach to pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter protestors, compared to anti-lockdown marches. But the rot goes far deeper..
Populist posturing
Any neutral observer might well question why a political lightweight like Suella Braverman was Home Secretary in the first place. Like many contemporary leading Conservatives, Braverman – who only entered parliament in 2015 – rose from obscurity thanks only to the effects of Brexit.
The party elite under David Cameron had neither expected nor wanted to leave the EU, leaving a sudden dearth of leadership when Remain was defeated. Following her electoral humiliation in 2017, then Prime Minister Theresa May made Braverman a junior minister in the Department for Exiting the EU. This was part of a cabinet reshuffle intended – ironically – to bolster May’s own political authority. Braverman subsequently resigned over May’s ill-fated Chequers deal, a ‘Brexit in name only’ proposal, which endeared her to the Tories’ pro-Brexit base. She returned in yet another reshuffle under Boris Johnson in February 2020 as Attorney-General, remaining quiet throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, partly due to maternity leave. Like many, Braverman turned on Johnson when his position became untenable, standing unsuccessfully to replace him as leader before being appointed Home Secretary by Johnson’s successor Liz Truss.
In short, Braverman’s rise was a product of recurrent chaos in which weak prime ministers scrambled to cultivate support from the party’s Eurosceptic wing. Like most right-wing populists, however, it is in Britain’s tedious culture wars that Braverman really made her name. Having ranted about ‘cultural Marxism’ and proposed to ‘get rid of all this woke rubbish’ by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, Braverman’s signature policy as Home Secretary was halting surging illegal immigration – ‘stopping the boats’ – by establishing an offshore processing centre in Rwanda. This outraged liberals and prompted a prolonged battle with the courts over the scheme’s legality.
The Rwanda scheme is typical of the populist right’s abandonment of serious, accountable policymaking in favour of pointless grandstanding and victimhood-seeking. By the government’s own admission, Rwanda could only accept 200 cross-Channel migrants. 45,755 people crossed the Channel illegally in 2022 alone. Even this number is a tiny fraction of the 1.16m people who migrated to the UK in 2022. Last year, net migration was 557,000 – more than double the figure for 2016, when substantial numbers of people voted for Brexit out of concern that immigration was too high. The Rwanda scheme is clearly not designed to solve the migration problem. At most, its theatrical cruelty might create a small deterrent effect. In reality, it is an attempt to distract from the Conservative government’s persistent failure to enact restrictive immigration policies desired by the majority of British citizens. Such policies would necessitate major changes to Britain’s economic model – a major pivot away from low-value services work – and to training and labour policies to address skills shortages rather than caving to businesses’ demand for lax borders.
For a populist like Braverman, though, the Rwanda scheme was a win-win. If it was enacted, it would show how ‘tough’ she was really being on migration – willing to think the unthinkable, and take nominally radical, dramatic measures to cater to her base. If it was blocked by the courts, it would also show how hard she was fighting for the British people against the ‘tofu-eating wokerati’. Rather than really ‘taking back control’ from the courts, the scheme would only rehearse the right-wing populist playbook, whereby so-called leaders posture as brave truth-tellers against dark forces committed to bring them down. As so many cases now demonstrate, from Trump through Salvini, populists are less interested in delivering real change than in posturing as victims of ‘the system’ which is why, when they are in charge, so little actually changes.
It’s hard not to see Braverman’s eventual defenestration in the same light. She willingly provoked a confrontation with Number 10 over an article intended to wage a culture war with London’s Metropolitan Police. She must have anticipated the consequences – and did it anyway. This conveniently reinforces her victim identity and positions her for another leadership bid once, as is widely expected, Rishi Sunak is defeated at the next general election.
David Cameron: Back to the Technocratic Future
Rebutting the idea that history repeats itself, Heraclitus famously said that no man steps in the same river twice. But as Rishi Sunak has demonstrated, it is possible to step in the same puddle. David Cameron’s return to government demonstrates the shallow pool of talent from which the decaying Conservative Party can now draw, as well as the continued allure for them of technocratic rule and evasion of democratic accountability.
Cameron resigned from government and parliament in the wake of his defeat in the 2016 Brexit referendum. He has spent his time in a £25,000 shed, writing his memoirs, hawking the wares of the discredited financier Lex Greensill, and promoting Chinese investment. Cameron is not a member of either house of Parliament and had to be appointed to the Lords to allow him to take up a ministerial role. The clear implication is that there was no one in the parliamentary Conservative Party to whom the UK’s foreign relations could be safely entrusted.
Cameron’s appeal for Sunak is obviously that he will be a ‘safe pair of hands’ who will make ‘sensible’ decisions at a perilous time for the UK, embroiled as it is in a proxy war with Russia, tense relations with China, and a mounting regional crisis in the Middle East. His appointment is a throwback to the pre-Brexit era of smooth, Blairite, technocratic government, before the troublesome voters made everything so much more difficult. The same approach is apparent in less spectacular aspects of the reshuffle, like the appointment of Treasury bean-counter Victoria Atkins as Health Secretary, presumably to help Sunak with his spreadsheets as he grapples with NHS waiting lists.
But the idea that Cameron is a safe pair of hands with respect to foreign policy may also surprise anyone with a memory span longer than that of a goldfish. His key foreign policy ‘achievement’ as prime minister was his strong-arming of the US into overthrowing Colonel Qadaffi, plunging Libya into a chaotic maelstrom from which it has never recovered. Cameron was never held accountable for the cosmopolitan dystopia he brought about, much like his predecessor and fellow warmonger Tony Blair, who certain deluded individuals also seem to think is capable of bringing about peace in the Middle East.
Cameron’s appointment will only further weaken democratic scrutiny of foreign policy, which is practically absent in an increasingly authoritarian and intolerant climate. As a member of the Lords, Cameron will be unable to appear in the Commons to answer questions; an elected minister will have to appear instead, despite not having real authority over foreign policy. Any scrutiny of Cameron himself will have to occur in the Lords – deeply unlikely in a chamber stuffed full of establishment cronies. But the Commons has also largely given up any challenging of UK foreign policy, a mindless groupthink having settled over our elected representatives on the key question of Ukraine – bolstered by threats of expulsion for anyone daring to question the mainstream narrative, and opposition leader Keir Starmer likewise struggling to remove any distance between the Labour Party and the government line on Israel/ Palestine.
Although Sunak likely saw the reshuffle as a chance to reassert his authority, even the most dim-witted MPs saw that it did the exact opposite. Just six weeks ago, at the Conservative Party conference, Sunak was desperately trying to position himself as the ‘change’ candidate after 13 years of Tory rule, deriding ‘30 years of a political system that incentivises the easy decision, not the right one’ and bashing Starmer as ‘the walking definition of the 30-year political status quo I am here to end’. Sunak’s rehabilitation of Cameron – who was prime minister for six of those 30 years – is a direct repudiation of any talk of ‘change’.
The reshuffle signals that, aside from a lightweight populist tendency devoted to vacuous culture war posturing rather than improving Britain, the Brexit years have left no lasting legacy in the Conservative Party. The Tories were never a meaningful vehicle for ‘taking control’. By hammering the final nail in the coffin, Sunak has at least done us the favour of laying that bare. His technopopulist zombie party is shuffling towards a cliff-edge. The risk is that it takes the rest of us down with it.
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