You know what it’s time for? A reshuffle

Go on, lads. You know you want to. Once you’re done with the bank holiday BBQ, get the big board out and get to work, writes Marie Le Conte

They are united in one way: both the Labour party and the Conservatives should be reshuffling their top teams sooner rather than later (ParliamentTV)

It is a sunny bank holiday in happy England and party leaders, like the rest of the country, are enjoying some well-earnt time off. There is, however, no rest for columnists, or indeed the newspapers they write for. The news never sleeps and so we cannot stop filing.

Well, this is only partially true: the news has, in the case of this weekend, more or less stopped altogether. Parliament is in recess and everyone is focusing on the Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby drama over at ITV. Westminster is eerily quiet.

It feels like a good excuse to turn to the near future, and wonder what our politicians ought to be doing in the coming weeks and months. There is little that Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have in common and, due to their respective jobs, there are few pieces of advice that can feasibly apply to the both of them.

Still, they are united in one way: both the Labour party and the Conservatives should be reshuffling their top teams sooner rather than later. In the opposition’s corner, the pitch is pretty straightforward.

Unless something dramatic happens over the next year or so, Starmer will be our next prime minister by early 2025 – at the latest. This means that the party needs to get itself in shape for government. As anyone with even half an eye on the news will know, current relations between ministers and the civil service are at an all-time low.

If Labour wants to be able to come in and hit the ground running, it will need to have a smooth relationship with its mandarins. One efficient way to do this would be to put all its future secretaries of state in place now, so they can get ready for the job ahead, and so Whitehall can see what’s coming. Civil servants, quite famously, do not like surprises.

It also seems fair to say that the current frontbench has some, shall we say, dead wood floating around. There is no need to name names (a lady never tells) but if even the nerdier among us can struggle to reel off the names of everyone in the shadow cabinet, then you know there is a problem.

Starmer is in a position to have a team that is all killer and no filler, and should be sharpening his top team as soon as possible. As for the other side… well, Sunak is probably dreaming of a world in which his frontbench is all inoffensive filler, but that is sadly not the case.

The current Conservative cabinet was built at a time when the party looked like it could split, and needed to be brought back together by any means necessary. It has arguably fulfilled its purpose, but remains as unsteady as cheap, flat-pack furniture.

The government, as it stands, pulls in all ideological directions and is full of people who not only could but seemingly want to make Sunak’s life difficult. It’d take a braver man than me to explicitly name them.

Perhaps more importantly, the parliamentary party at large is full of MPs who obviously do not respect Sunak, and feel they can do as they please. Again, because of the circumstances of Sunak’s coronation, he clearly didn’t feel he could take them on at the beginning of his premiership. This should change now.

All polling points to the fact that the prime minister is an asset to his party, not the other way around. It is unlikely that he will be able to win the Conservatives the next election, but there is a world of difference between losing and getting wiped out altogether. In order to avoid the latter, Sunak will need to rein his party in.

He does not have many weapons in his arsenal, but one of them is reshuffles. Building a stronger team and shamelessly sending the troublemakers packing would send a clear message to his benches: that he knows what he’s doing and should not be messed with.

Will he do it? Well, there are whispers of an autumn reshuffle doing the rounds in Tory circles, just as there have been rumours of an impending Labour reshuffle for some time. Why shouldn’t they happen now?

Go on, lads. You know you want to. Once you’re done with the bank holiday BBQ, get the big board out and get to work.