UK - After months of reshuffle speculation, when the time came, Theresa May’s ministers couldn’t be budged — not the ones that truly matter at least. Far from asserting her authority, the cosmetic changes to the British prime minister’s top team she unveiled on Monday highlight her failure to make her own political weather.
Hamstrung by her inability to move the “big beasts” and constrained by the need to preserve the fragile balance of power over Brexit around her Cabinet table, the UK prime minister largely stuck to the status quo, keeping the figures — or in Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the most beastly figure from the vantage point of 10 Downing Street — who have made her life so difficult these past 18 months in power. “Is that it?” tweeted Nicholas Soames, a long-standing Tory MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson.
In a sign of just how fragile May’s authority has become, an attempt to move her former ally, Justine Greening, from education to work and pensions ended with Greening refusing to take the new job and leaving government altogether. “It was a very big mistake letting Justine go,” said a Tory MP who did not want to be named. “The reshuffle was a farce showing the prime minister is weak.”