by Richard A » Sat Nov 18, 2023 12:29 pm
Late to the party after a busy week. I'm not as outraged about this as some. Whatever we may think of David Cameron - and I think we're all agreed on that one - we also know full well what the Tory right think of him. So to sack their darling Suella Braverman and bring back Cameron into a senior Cabinet role within a matter of hours is, as Heid once put it, fucking them with a big fucky thing. In public. And for me, the Schadenfreude at that outweighs quite a lot else.
Plus, unlike Germany, say, we don't have a coalition (not that the last one we had worked out particularly well). So Cleverly was always going to be replaced as Foreign Secretary by a Tory and therefore by definition not someone ideal. There were better options, though - if you're going to look to the House of Lords rather than parachuting someone into it, they could have had Ken Clarke or even Sayeeda Warsi. (Although she's been too vocal a critic of her party for too long - not sure why she hasn't left by now.) Dominic Grieve of course got kicked out of the party completely (having already been purged) for standing as an independent in the 2019 election when they replaced him as Tory candidate - there's no coming back from that. But realistically, Sunak was never going to go for any of them. (Though it would have made for a really interesting Cabinet if he had gone for Warsi!)
But still, overall, as confirmed by the outrage they've expressed this week, what Cameron is said to have done to a pig, Sunak unquestionably did to the Tory right! And that's worthy of a glass.