The winners and losers of the ministerial team changes

Boris Johnson is carrying out the first major reshuffle of his ministers since being elected prime minister in December.

The losers

Sajid Javid

The first chancellor from a Muslim background was a significant appointment for the Conservative party last summer. He has allegedly stood down after being told all his special advisers would be sacked and replaced with No 10 advisers, who would be under the control of Downing Street. He was a home secretary under Theresa May and led the government’s public apology over the Windrush scandal. His time as business secretary under David Cameron was marred by his reaction to the Redcar steel crisis, and, embarrassingly, he was ordered to cut short a holiday to Australia to deal with the issue.

He stood on a joint ticket with Stephen Crabb in 2016 to replace Cameron and the then chancellor, George Osborne, and launched his own bid to lead the party in 2019. He was knocked out of the race halfway through the rounds of voting.

Julian Smith

The Northern Ireland secretary was initially rumoured to be for the chop after being difficult over Johnson’s Brexit strategy in the autumn. However, he was widely thought to have gained a reprieve after securing the return of Stormont. A former chief whip and May ally, it seems he was never quite trusted by Team Johnson. No 10 sources briefed that he had irritated the prime minister over plans to allow soldiers to be prosecuted over actions in the Troubles, even though this was subject to full cabinet agreement. His sacking is likely to be greeted with dismay in Northern Ireland, where he was regarded as a very good secretary of state with a grip on complex problems.

A former businessman, Smith was perhaps best known for demanding the Guardian be prosecuted over the Edward Snowden revelations before May elevated him to the cabinet. He has represented the safe North Yorkshire seat of Skipton and Ripon since 2010 and now returns to the backbenches.

Andrea Leadsom

The former Tory leadership contender has lost her role as business secretary, having served in cabinet jobs since 2016. The former business executive was a significant figure by the end of the May government, becoming leader of the Commons and enjoying fiery exchanges with the then Speaker, John Bercow.

Colleagues have praised her personal drive in rolling out better reporting strategies in cases of bullying and sexual harassment in the Commons. As secretary of state for business and previously environment, however, she has not counted many successes. Preparing companies for Brexit and helping them withstand new customs checks will be a major focus for the government for the next few months and Johnson is expected to install someone he considers to be a “big hitter”.

Esther McVey

The cheerleader of blue-collar Conservatism and Brexiter, who has lost her role as housing minister, has been no stranger to entering and exiting ministerial jobs, or parliament, over the years. The GMTV presenter turned politician was elected in 2010 for Wirral West and lost her seat in 2015 to Labour’s Margaret Greenwood. In that time she enjoyed a high profile for a new MP, serving as a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions working under Iain Duncan Smith as he rolled out the controversial welfare overhaul universal credit.

She won Osborne’s former seat, Tatton, in 2017 and in her comeback to parliament she was promoted to secretary of state for work and pensions under May. She received significant criticism for misleading parliament over universal credit, after telling MPs that the National Audit Office felt the benefit was progressing too slowly and should be rolled out faster. In her apology, she said it had been inadvertent. In 2019 she launched her own bid to be leader of the Conservatives with little success and was knocked out in the first round. Her partner is fellow Tory MP Philip Davies.

Geoffrey Cox

The attorney general with a booming voice and loquacious manner has been relieved of his position. No 10 sources had briefed that he fell out of favour after being condescending in cabinet and was not considered a “team player”. He will not go short of employment, as before taking the job under May he had a lucrative career as a barrister. Formerly the highest-earning MP, he has acted for companies based in the Cayman Islands and attacked plans for tax havens to be subject to more scrutiny.

His most controversial act in government was to refuse to give legal advice saying May’s Brexit deal allowed the UK to exit the Northern Irish backstop. He is also said to have threatened to resign if Johnson had not agreed to write to the EU for an extension to article 50 in the autumn. However, he appears to be still hoping for a government-related role in charge of No 10’s review of the judiciary.

Theresa Villiers

As an MP for 15 years and a prominent Vote Leave campaigner, Villiers is considered one of the most senior female Tory politicians. Yet this wasn’t enough to see her shifted out of cabinet by Boris Johnson after just six months as secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Her predecessor Michael Gove ignited Defra’s significance as a radical area for policy, which she has not matched. New rules on microchipping cats could be her most stand-out moment. She was also criticised for speaking out in support of fracking on taking up the job but has been a long-standing critic of Heathrow expansion.

The former law lecturer spent her first few years as an MP on David Cameron’s front-bench after he appointed her to shadow transport and shadow Treasury briefs. She served as transport minister in the coalition but her most high profile job was as Northern Ireland minister between 2012 and 2016 where she was one of the longest serving ministers, and on leaving office she said Northern Ireland was in a more politically stable state. Within a year Stormont had collapsed.

Nusrat Ghani

The transport minister had been widely tipped for a job overseeing HS2 but was sacked without explanation.

George Freeman

Theresa May’s former policy chief is seen as a moderate. He is also out as a transport minister, tweeting that he was sad to be “on my bike”.

Chris Skidmore

The universities minister is extremely well liked within the party and was tipped for a bigger government job so his sudden sacking was surprising. He tweeted he had been promoted to spend more time with his new baby.

The winners

Rishi Sunak

Sunak’s appointment as chancellor is simultaneously less of a surprise than it might have been, given his meteoric rise under Boris Johnson, and more rapid than expected, only happening because of Sajid Javid’s sudden departure. The former chief secretary to the Treasury has only been an MP since 2015, and a junior minister since 2018. The MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, he began under May at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, before joining the Treasury in July last year, when Johnson, who he backed as Tory leader, took over.

The former hedge fund manager has since forged a reputation as a media favourite for No 10, sent out on difficult broadcast rounds on a regular basis, where he has the much-coveted ability to talk fluently without ever wandering off message or creating news. An early sign of his rising status was when Sunak was sent out to represent the government in a mass, seven-way TV debate before December’s election.

There have been repeated briefings that Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, wanted Sunak as chancellor, but it was felt that Javid could not be removed. Cummings has seemingly got his way.

A leave supporter, albeit not a hugely militant one, Sunak is seen as hardworking and efficient, and popular in the Treasury, even if he is an occasionally wooden media and parliamentary performer. But above all he is a loyalist, and will not resist the moves to bring the Treasury’s work into the orbit of No 10. The son of a GP and a pharmacist, Sunak went to Winchester public school and Oxford, then won a Fulbright scholarship to Stanford University in the US. At Stanford he met his wife, Akshata Murthy. She is the daughter of Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co-founder of Indian technology and consulting corporation Infosys. They have two children.

Brandon Lewis

The former party chair and current security minister will take over as Northern Ireland secretary just as government proposals for the region’s post-Brexit border will come under intense scrutiny. This significant job and promotion comes after Lewis has spent more than eight years at a ministerial level, covering a range of briefs, from housing to policing.

There were rumblings that his call for Johnson to apologise for the comments he made about women wearing burqas back in 2018 might count against him. Clearly not. Nor is the fact that under his watch as party chair, there was a major data breach of ministers’ personal contact details through an app developed for party’s autumn conference.

Alok Sharma

The former international development secretary’s promotion to business secretary and president of the the Cop26 climate talks has proved he is considered a key player in Johnson’s cabinet. As housing minister he took significant criticism for the government’s handling of the Grenfell Tower fire, including a televised meeting with furious residents.

Yet his humanity and warmth in the wake of the blaze contrasted sharply with May’s handling of the incident. The former accountant was also an employment minister and foreign minister and served on the Treasury select committee. He worked as a Tory vice-chairman showing the breadth of his work within the party. In 2016 he was appointed infrastructure envoy to India, which is where he lived with his parents until he was five. They moved to Reading in the 1970s.

Oliver Dowden

The former paymaster general, nicknamed Olive, gets one of the most loved jobs in government in normal times: secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. However this is not going to be a whirlwind of arts policy, theatre, broadband and sports announcements.

Instead he is most likely being sent into battle with the BBC, with Cummings a known critic of the corporation. His immediate predecessor, Nicky Morgan, has already said the government is “open-minded” about replacing the licence fee. Dowden was David Cameron’s deputy chief of staff.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Trevelyan was only appointed as a defence minister eight weeks ago before getting a major upgrade to the cabinet position of secretary of state for international development. The Berwick-upon-Tweed MP is a Johnson loyalist and a member of the Eurosceptic European Research Group.

However the long-term future of the Department for International Development (Dfid) is said to be uncertain with speculation rife it will be moved into the Foreign Office as part of a wider Whitehall shake-up in the coming months.

George Eustice

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs minister George Eustice is promoted to lead the entire department. He is a long-time ally of former environment secretary Michael Gove and an expert on the UK fishing industry and how EU legislation interplays with UK law.

He has been an MP since 2010, previously working as campaign director for the “no” campaign to the euro, and was head of press for the Tories under Michael Howard. He also served as David Cameron’s press secretary when he was leader of the opposition. Coming from a farming background, his family still run a fruit farm, restaurant and farm shop in Cornwall where they also have a herd of South Devon cattle.

Suella Braverman

The former chair of the European Research Group is an ardent Brexiter and voted against Theresa May’s deal three times. Her legal background includes a Cambridge law degree and a master’s in European and French law from Pantheon-Sorbonne University, in Paris. She was a barrister between 2005 and 2015, specialising in judicial review and immigration cases.

Her expertise in judicial review may fit in well with the government’s intended overhaul of the process after a number of court rulings it disagreed with, including the legal fight over the prime minister’s prorogation of parliament and the recent deportation flight of foreign criminals to Jamaica. She was a Brexit minister for 11 months in 2018 and has recently returned to parliament after having her first child last July.

Stephen Barclay

He is likely to be a last-minute insert into the cabinet with his appointment as chief secretary to the Treasury, taking over from Sunak following his appointment as chancellor. Barclay took on the role of Brexit secretary under Theresa May after the current foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, quit and has been seen as a dedicated advocate for post-Brexit Britain. Last month his department, Dexeu, was scrapped as Britain left the bloc on 31 January and he had been tipped to go to Defra. After a career in finance and banking he became the MP for North East Cambridgeshire in 2010.

(Source: The Guardian)

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