After the reshuffle, Keir Starmer owes Rishi Sunak a thank you

Sunak has done sufficient admin to prepare for a Labour government, writes John Rentoul

A separate energy department has been Labour policy since 2008 (Getty/EPA)

It was considerate of Rishi Sunak to save the incoming Labour government the trouble of reorganising government departments. Not only that, he has ended Ed Miliband’s embarrassment of being a member of the shadow cabinet with nobody to shadow. Now he has Grant Shapps.

A separate energy department has been Labour policy since 2008, when Gordon Brown created it for the younger Miliband. So it is further evidence of social democratic convergence that the government now agrees with the opposition.

However sensible the changes might be, though, they are a distraction from the main purposes of government. Four new departments is a lot of new stationery and brass plates. It was selfless of Sunak to get the bureaucratic tidying up out of the way for Keir Starmer’s government – even giving the changes 18 months to settle in.

Labour presumably also agrees with a new department of science, innovation and technology – although personally I think “science” would have done fine on its own. Starmer likes to invoke the folk-memory of Harold Wilson’s white heat of the scientific revolution (although most people remember it as the “technological revolution”, which only goes to support my point that the words are interchangeable).

And Starmer can hardly object to the abolition of the Department for International Trade, which was a sop to Brexiteers with increasingly little to do now that most of the trade deals we had as a member of the EU have now been copied and pasted.

“Necessary but not sufficient” was the verdict of one recent cabinet minister I spoke to. It wouldn’t do any harm, they said, but it wouldn’t help give the government the clear sense of purpose that it needs.

There was a rather tortured paragraph in the No 10 news release that tried to link the restructuring to the prime minister’s five promises, but it is hardly one of the “people’s priorities” that the civil service director-general for science and growth should be in the new science department rather than in the old Beis – Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I may be pleased to see the end of “industrial strategy” in the name of a department – at best an empty slogan, at worst a bad idea – but it is not what they talk about at bus stops.

The news release said that the new energy department has been tasked with “bringing down bills and halving inflation”, but on the political timescale that matters, namely before the election, that will be decided by the international energy market. Similarly, the claim that the new science department will “drive the innovation that will deliver improved public services, create new and better-paid jobs and grow the economy” is also unlikely to be realised within the next 18 months. Historians might look back on 7 February 2023 as a decisive moment in the economic success of Starmer’s three-term government, but its effect on the outcome of the next election is likely to nugatory.

To be generous, reshuffles are a good way to distract Westminster journalists, and chivvy them on from writing more articles about Dominic Raab’s counter-productive staff management techniques. But Sunak is like a builder who is fixing the foundations of the next house to be built on the site before the existing one has fallen down. There is something admirable about doing things that everyone agrees are sensible while the country is in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and the NHS is being overwhelmed, but it doesn’t look as if he is stretching every sinew to deliver the people’s priorities.

The prime minister is organised, diligent and competent. No one can find any good reason to oppose his reorganisation, and everyone seems to like Greg Hands, the new Conservative Party chair. But the party itself is in flames, consumed by quasi-religious beliefs about the magic of unfunded tax cuts, the supernatural abilities of Boris Johnson, or the mythology of a coup by sinister globalist forces operating through the executive of the 1922 Committee.

Meanwhile, the country seems to have given up on a party that has given up on it. Isaac Levido, the organiser who ran the last election campaign, has given Sunak a script – the five pledges – that is designed to show that the government is unrelentingly devoted to fixing the country’s problems. But today, Sunak seemed to go off script and focused instead on making sure that all the papers on his desk were at right angles.