The latest drama in Westminster has played out with all the excitement of a rain-soaked village fête.
Angela Rayner departs in a cloud of tax-tinged ignominy, and Keir Starmer, ever the grey technocrat, responds not with dynamism but with his favourite pastime: reshuffling.
Twelve ministers up, two ministers down, and the result? Not a dazzling new cabinet of statesmen and visionaries, but the same tired faces… a ministry of mediocrities rotated through the same wheel of jobs.
And into the most luminous of roles, Deputy Prime Minister, steps David Lammy. One might think the second office of the land demands the intellectual wattage of a Newton or at least a Nye Bevan. Instead, this is the man who once took his turn on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and, in half an hour of excruciating television, managed to stumble or pass on more questions than the average twelve-year-old. The performance was a showcase of comic ignorance, preserved forever in the amber of YouTube.
Now, let me be clear: there is no shame in lacking the natural sparkle of a genius. But when it comes to the office of Deputy Prime Minister, one expects a mind operating north of 140 on the IQ scale, not hovering somewhere around room temperature.
This is the chap now to sit at the Prime Minister’s right hand. One almost pities the civil servants tasked with briefing him… armed with flowcharts, flashcards, and perhaps a pub quiz host to keep things moving.
Elsewhere, the cast is shuffled like a deck of bent cards in a seaside arcade. Shabana Mahmood moves from Justice to the Home Office, Yvette Cooper is packed off to the Foreign Office, Pat McFadden is handed Work and Pensions (again), Peter Kyle becomes Business Secretary, Liz Kendall is dispatched to Science, Emma Reynolds to Environment. It is as if Two-Tier Keir has taken the Cabinet list, thrown it in the air, and picked up the pieces at random.
And yet, for all this movement, nothing really moves. It seems Rachel Reeves stays at the Treasury, Ed Miliband clings on at Net Zero, and Pat McFadden, that stalwart fixer, is given a “super-charged” growth brief which sounds less like economic dynamism and more like a clumsy Marvel reboot.
What is missing, and fatally so, are the heavyweights. Where are the orators, the visionaries, the figures of commanding intellect? Starmer himself reads his lines with all the swagger of a malfunctioning Dalek, unable to string together a sentence without the safety net of a script. His ministers, meanwhile, range from quiz-show punchlines at worst to middling administrators at best.
The reshuffle has been billed as a reboot. It looks instead like the panic rearrangement of a provincial amateur dramatics troupe after the lead actress has stormed off in the middle of rehearsals. Britain deserves better than this Ministry of Mediocrities.
