An innocent at Home

Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary, tells James Forsyth that he won’t ‘resort to soundbites’. But is this a sensible approach for a modern-day politician?

Dominic Grieve’s office answerphone is struggling to keep up with events – the caller has reached ‘the office of the shadow attorney general and the Conservative spokesman on community cohesion,’ it says. No mention of his new role as shadow home secretary.

Some Conservatives wish the answerphone was right. Even normally loyal Cameroons struggle to envisage going into the next election with Grieve as shadow home secretary. They’d rather he was a stopgap measure. Certainly, few would have named Grieve as part of the Tory’s strongest bowling attack a fortnight ago. But this is irrelevant now. Cameron cannot afford to change shadow home secretary again: to lose one looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

The logic behind Grieve’s appointment was simple. David Cameron desperately needed to stop David Davis’s resignation turning into a ‘Tory split’ saga. So to shut the story down, he appointed a friend of Davis who is a determined and principled opponent of 42 days. But replacing Davis with Grieve carries with it its own risks. Despite the two men being close, their political personas are about as different as you can get. As one well-connected Tory fretted to me this week, the party has replaced Action Man with Professor Yaffle.

Much of the rap on Grieve is that he isn’t Davis. There are worries about what the change does to the balance of the shadow cabinet; replacing a man brought up by a single mother on a council estate with a Westminster- and Oxbridge-educated QC does little to make the Tory top table look like modern Britain or help the party reach out to those crucial C2 voters.