PM’s reshuffle prizes uselessness above all with new jobs for the likes of Truss, Gove and Dorries
Things were even worse than they seemed. Liz Truss was looking positively chipper on the frontbench ahead of prime minister’s questions. Someone in No 10 had told her she was in line for a promotion in the imminent reshuffle. Uselessness was clearly a highly prized commodity in a Boris Johnson government. No one could cut and paste an existing trade deal and rebrand it as a new one quite like Truss. Not least because she genuinely believed she had achieved something remarkable.
Priti Patel initially wasn’t looking quite so relaxed. But that was because she had taken Boris’s description of the Home Office turning the UK into the “Saudi Arabia of penal policy” as a sign the prime minister thought she was going soft on crime. It had taken some persuading from Rishi Sunak, who was sitting beside her, that Boris had actually intended the remarks as a compliment. “You’ll be fine,” the chancellor had said. “You can’t be any dimmer than the health secretary who thinks you can’t get Covid off your friends and the prime minister really values the fact that you are as vicious as you are useless.”