Kemi Badenoch breaks her reshuffle promise

“This new frontbench team reflects the rich experience within the party – from the tenacious campaigners fighting for Britain, to the experienced MPs who will keep holding this disastrous Labour government to account,” she insisted.

Asked very specifically whether she would guarantee that Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, would be in his job for the next four years, her spokesman said “Yes,” and confirmed that the same guarantee extended to the whole shadow cabinet.

Questioned about whether that meant there would be no Tory reshuffle until the next election, he replied: “We are very happy with our shadow cabinet as it is, thank you.”

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Rats in a Sack

Now it appears the lady is very much for turning, with Badenoch this week reshuffling her cabinet and – just as Rats in a Sack predicted last week – both Stride and anonymous shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel have been sacked and sent to the backbenches.

As Rats said he would, Stride, an old-school Strand members’ club Tory, has been punished for not spending enough time posting outrageous statements on social media which go viral. Stride is the sort of fusty old brace-wearer The Thick Of It’s Peter Mannion could have been based on. He may well be glad to be out of it.

New shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith is much more a fan of a shameful stunt for the socials. Last year, as Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill progressed through Parliament, Griffith posted an absurd video to YouTube in which he appeared to chop through a copy of the Bill with an Efco chainsaw.

“Politicians like to talk about how they’re gonna cut red tape, but when in government they never do,” said the man who was a politician in government for much of the previous decade, serving as a minister under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, before literally applying a chainsaw to all 300 pages of the bill to the strains of Time To Say Goodbye.

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Rats in a Sack

Alas for Griffith, thought to be one of the wealthiest members of the shadow cabinet with a fortune in the tens of millions, the video was largely met with mirth online. Viewers noted that Griffith appeared to struggle to get through the bill, to the point a second chainsaw of a different brand, Makita, is employed to do the job, and at no point was there a full body shot of him wielding the tool in action, leading some to conclude a stunt double was used.

Meanwhile, as Rats also predicted, Patel’s frontline political career is also effectively at an end, following a period shadowing David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and now Ed Miliband in which nobody can remember her saying anything.

Patel has been bought off with a non-job strengthening “links with sister parties and centre right movements around the world” – links which were pretty good until David Cameron first pulled the Conservatives out of the main centre-right grouping in the European Parliament to sit with an assortment of fruitloops, and which Boris Johnson then sought to destroy altogether by pursuing the hardest form of Brexit. 

She is now expected to spend much of her time in Washington weaning MAGA Republicans off Nigel Farage’s Reform and back towards their once natural bedfellows in the Tory Party. Good luck with that!

Meanwhile, eyebrows continue to be raised with the retention of Chris Philp as shadow home secretary. Some Labour figures regard the perma-furious blowhard as the Tories’ Richard Tice – that is, every time he appears on TV, Labour’s vote improves. What does he have on Kemi Badenoch?