Politics

It is time for Cameron to shape the team that he thinks can chase Brown from office

23 June 2007

Mr Brown is expected to keep a few old hands (Jack Straw is tipped to return to the Home Office, for example) but otherwise surround himself with new ministerial faces. It will be a mix of youth and experience, and the two men at the top of the Tory party — Mr Cameron and George Osborne — have more of the former than the latter. For this reason, a theory doing the rounds is that Mr Osborne, shadow chancellor, would swap jobs with his old boss, William Hague, shadow foreign secretary.

This is highly unlikely. As Mr Cameron has now told several people in private, there will be no such manoeuvre. Mr Osborne has disarmed his critics by repeatedly getting under Mr Brown’s skin, and even outpolling him on economic competence. And Mr Hague has no immediate appetite to move.

There are also rumours that David Davis is growing restless as shadow home secretary after almost four years and is seeking a beefed-up defence role instead. My intelligence is different. I understand he wants to stay put, and would consider any other role a demotion. He’s also keen to keep responsibility for prisons — which the government has moved into a new Justice Ministry. After outlasting four home secretaries, and running perhaps the sharpest media operation in the shadow Cabinet, Mr Davis is in a strong position and is unlikely to be moved.

The future of Liam Fox is another favourite topic of speculation. As shadow defence secretary he is not ‘being the change’, runs the argument — after all, doesn’t he drive a gas-guzzling MG and fly a Union flag in the back garden of his new house in Somerset? Not very Gandhi. But the more trouble Mr Cameron ends up in with his party, the more useful Dr Fox is. He happily volunteered to go and bat for the leadership over grammar schools, while Mr Davis observed strict radio silence.

David Willetts is the hot tip for execution. The shadow education secretary may have two brains, it is argued, but neither of them is political, as the schools fiasco showed. He was warned how badly the party grassroots would react to his attack on grammar schools (‘Don’t frighten the horses, or you’ll get crushed in the stampede,’ one colleague told him) but proceeded anyway, with calamitous results.

Yet this, I am told, may have secured his immediate future. ‘Before all this, Willetts was on his way out,’ one of his shadow Cabinet colleagues tells me. ‘Instead, this whole farrago has saved his career. If he was sacked now, it would look as if we’d given a scalp to the backbenchers and you can bet they’d be back looking for more.’