I understand that Helen Grant and Anna Soubry will soon be made members of the government, as David Cameron tries to make up for sacking three of the five female Cabinet members. Liz Truss, head of the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs, is also tipped for promotion. Grant is a former lawyer, a convert to the right. Soubry is a former broadcaster known to us Highlanders as a newsreader in Grampian TV’s North Tonight before retraining as a barrister.
It’s difficult to understate how concerned David Cameron is about his standing with female voters. If he dropped Cheryl Gillan, Caroline Spelman and Sayeeda Warsi from the Cabinet he was always going to get some stick. It was also likely that he would offset this even more women promoted into the government – hence this strange talk of the “next generation being brought forward”. It took Blair seven years to talk about the need to regenerate, it’s taken this lot two years.
It’s interesting that, as this day’s reshuffle leaks out, you start hearing reports that “the women” will soon be announced as if they were all under one subheading in a No10 strategy sheet. But you’d be hard-pushed to see these promotions as tokenistic. Truss has been a one-woman think tank on the back benches, and her Tory Free Enterprise Group was profiled by James Forsyth in a recent Specator cover piece. The intellectual leadership of the party had passed to its back benches. It now looks like it is about to be brought back into government. More follows.
UPDATE 1: James Forsyth is first with the news that Liz Truss has gone to education. One of the (many) subject on which she has written policy pamphlets. The downside is that she’ll have to stand down as chair of the Free Enterprise Group.
UPDATE 2: An hour later , No10 confirms Helen Grant and Anna Soubry:-
PM appoints Helen Grant as joint Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Ministry of Justice and for Women’s & Equality issues
#reshuffle— UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) September 4, 2012
PM appoints Anna Soubry as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Department of Health
@dhgovuk#reshuffle— UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) September 4, 2012
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