Tories in Red Wall seats are in a mixed mood after Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle. They are pleased that Lee Anderson has been made deputy chair of the party, though this is in part to counterbalance the appointment of a south-west London MP as party chairman.
There are also some wry smiles from Conservatives who had been planning a rebellion to force Rishi Sunak’s hand on the European Convention on Human Rights: Anderson would have been a key figure in this revolt, which is presumably a good reason for giving him a government job.
The Conservative party is adopting a defensive crouch to stem losses in its heartlands at the next election
Sunak has, though, ignored the plea of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs to bring back the Minister for the North job at cabinet level. They reminded the PM hours before his reshuffle that he had signed a pledge to that effect during the first Conservative leadership contest. No such appointment has been made, and the group’s chair John Stevenson tells Coffee House:
‘I’m very supportive of what Rishi has done, I think he has been a really solid prime minister so far but this has been a missed opportunity. It has worked well in the past and we think having a northern minister would be a good voice for our constituents.’
What has aerated other MPs more is the decision not to go ahead with what’s known as ‘Voxbridge’ – vocational colleges in the north of England which were supposed to rival Oxbridge. Even though Robert Halfon, the minister responsible, made clear that Sunak wouldn’t be going ahead with these elite colleges in the autumn,
Michael Gove alluded to the pledge again at a meeting with the NRG in December. The message that there will be no Voxbridge because of Sunak and Halfon’s preference for Institutes of Technology seems only to have got through to certain MPs, which has compounded the sense that they aren’t getting what they expected from Sunak.
On top of the briefing that Gove was offered the science brief because it was ‘more senior’ than his current levelling up role, the messaging from this reshuffle suggests the Conservative party is adopting a defensive crouch to stem losses in its heartlands at the next election, rather than trying to retain large sections of the Red Wall. That may well be wise, but it is also a bitter reality for the MPs in those seats to start to come to terms with.
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