Truss is in a stronger position than Thatcher – for now

People used to understand that they were ageing when they noticed police officers in their neighbourhood looking unfeasibly young. Given that nobody ever sees a police officer on foot patrol these days, a new benchmark for startling youthfulness needs to be identified. After Liz Truss unveiled her top ministerial team yesterday perhaps ex-cabinet members could serve the purpose.

Because Dominic Raab (48), George Eustice (50), Grant Shapps (53) and Priti Patel (50) have just joined the bulging ranks of former cabinet ministers to have moved from young thrusters to backbench elders with, in one or two cases, no discernible period of achievement in between.

At least nobody can say that the line-up chosen by Truss is 'male, pale and stale'. In fact, she is the only surviving member of David Cameron’s cabinet of just six years ago.

Truss must have heard advice from assorted pundits and Tory grandees that she should assemble a top team of all the talents, representing every wing of the parliamentary party and including high-profile supporters of her rival Rishi Sunak and one or two greybeards from former regimes: heard it and then completely ignored it.

Instead, she chose to reward her own supporters with a clean sweep of plum roles and cast out those who had crossed her, either in the leadership contest or at any point before it. Of the other leadership candidates, only Suella Braverman, whose support for Truss upon being eliminated from the contest herself proved so crucial in getting her to the final two, was spectacularly rewarded (by becoming Home Secretary).

Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt were given full cabinet roles, but only mid-ranking ones, while Nadhim Zahawi was moved from being Chancellor of the Exchequer to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which might sound posher to the wholly uninitiated but obviously isn’t.

Truss’s political best friend and karaoke partner Therese Coffey gets to be Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary, while her political second-best friend Kwasi Kwarteng takes over at the Treasury and will soon deliver an emergency Budget which will set the context of politics this autumn.

Pundits such as the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason are surely right to observe that taking such a factional approach risks storing up trouble for Truss on the backbenches further down the line. On the other hand, by handing out fiefdoms to allies in the manner of a latter-day William the Conqueror she has also just incentivised loyalty and disincentivised disloyalty among younger MPs who could jump either way.

Ability-wise, her line-up is surely no worse than that of Johnson, who also chose to reward his chums and freeze-out those among the Tory former establishment who had taken an opposing view on the main issue of the day – in his case, Brexit.

The main issue now is the state of the economy. And the latest Tory former establishment is clustered around Rishi Sunak, leaving the likes of Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt as ancient relics of the former Tory establishment but one. They do go through them quickly these days.

If we are to compare Truss with her heroine Margaret Thatcher at this juncture then we must conclude that she is in a far stronger position. Thatcher’s early cabinets saw her almost completely surrounded by troublesome ideological opponents who briefed against her economic policy and put her under enormous pressure. Not until her September 1981 'purge of the wets' was she able to tilt the balance in her favour.

Truss, who is about to embark on an economic strategy at least as radical and risky as was Thatcher’s, begins her tenure with a cabinet in which a large majority of ministers pass the 'one of us' test with flying colours.

Right now the Tory grassroots, sick of disloyalty among MPs towards the party leadership and fretful about the price to be paid for disunity, will surely act as an effective deterrent against trouble-makers on the back benches.

But if a year down the line Truss’s courageous economic policy (copyright Sir Humphrey Appleby) has not borne fruit do not be surprised to see a disorderly queue forming of ex-cabinet ministers outside the Today programme studios.