Boris Johnson has signalled his ruthless determination to deliver Brexit and stoked speculation about an early general election by sacking more than half of Theresa May’s cabinet and packing his team with Vote Leave veterans and rightwing free marketers.
Despite the new prime minister’s repeated insistence that he is a one-nation Conservative, he handed the job of home secretary to Priti Patel, who advocated the return of capital punishment as recently as 2011, and the Treasury to Thatcher devotee Sajid Javid.
Dominic Raab, who made headlines during his own leadership campaign when he said he would not call himself a feminist, is the new foreign secretary, and will be Johnson’s stand-in at prime minister’s questions.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, chair of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, which led calls for May to be deposed, is the new leader of the House of Commons.
Johnson’s rival for the leadership, Jeremy Hunt, and his supporters fell victim to a merciless purge. Hunt himself turned down a demotion from foreign secretary to defence secretary and instead chose to return to the backbenches.
Johnson had already sparked consternation among some colleagues by announcing that Dominic Cummings, the controversial director of the Vote Leave campaign, would be a senior adviser in his Downing Street team.
Cummings is a seasoned campaigner, and his arrival at Johnson’s side increased expectations among MPs that a general election will be triggered within months.
As Johnson prepared to enter No 10 for the first time after returning from Buckingham Palace on Wednesday, where the Queen had confirmed his appointment, he promised to defy “the doubters, the doomsters and the gloomsters”.
He insisted he would strike a “new deal” with the EU27, without the “anti-democratic backstop” and complete Brexit before the Halloween deadline. “The buck stops here,” he said.
“We are going to fulfil the repeated promises of parliament to the people and come out of the EU on 31 October, no ifs or buts,” he said.
“I have every confidence that in 99 days’ time we will have cracked it. But you know what, we aren’t going to wait 99 days, because the British people have had enough of waiting. The time has come to act, to take decisions, to give strong leadership and to change this country for the better.”
Johnson also made a series of one nation-style policy pledges. He promised to recruit another 20,000 police officers, stop people having to wait three weeks to see their GP, begin 20 new hospital upgrades, and boost schools spending per pupil.
But the new prime minister then crossed to his office in the Commons, where he carried out a comprehensive cull of cabinet ministers who had backed Hunt, or criticised his approach or policies.
Other victims of the clearout included Scottish secretary David Mundell, education secretary Damian Hinds and defence secretary Penny Mordaunt.
In assembling his new top team, Johnson turned to trusted Vote Leave colleagues, including Raab, Patel, Theresa Villiers, who is the new environment secretary, and Andrea Leadsom, who will be business secretary.
Former defence secretary Gavin Williamson will be education secretary, despite having been sacked by May less than three months ago on suspicion of leaking security secrets. Patel was also fired by May, for organising private meetings in Israel without informing officials.
As recently as 2011, Patel said, “I do think that when we have a criminal justice system that continuously fails in the country and where we have seen murderers and rapists … reoffend and do those crimes again and again, I think that’s appalling. On that basis alone I would support the reintroduction of capital punishment to serve as a deterrent.” By 2016 she had changed her mind, however.
Critics swiftly labelled Johnson’s new administration the most rightwing since the 1980s. SNP MP Pete Wishart said, “Boris Johnson’s nightmare Tory government is shaping up to be the worst since Thatcher – packed full of extreme Brexiteers and rabid rightwingers who want to drag us back to a bygone era.”
Former Tory MP Nick Boles, who quit the party over his colleagues’ failure to compromise on Brexit, tweeted: “The hard right has taken over the Conservative Party. Thatcherites, libertarians and No Deal Brexiters control it top to bottom.”
Nick Boles MP (@NickBoles)The hard right has taken over the Conservative Party. Thatcherites, libertarians and No Deal Brexiters control it top to bottom. Liberal One Nation Conservatives have been ruthlessly culled. Only a few neutered captives are being kept on as window dressing. 1/
July 24, 2019
Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general who has led the battle against a no-deal Brexit, was cutting about Johnson in an interview on Sky News, saying: “I don’t share his optimism about his opinion of himself.”
Asked how he would describe him, the Conservative MP said: “He’s a charlatan. That is the clear evidence of his career and the way he has operated politically.”
He added: “Those of us who have worked alongside him and had a chance of watching him can see for ourselves his modus operandi and his capacity both for deception and self-deception and those are the two ingredients of charlatanism.”
Ian Lavery, the Labour party chair, said: “Boris Johnson’s first act as PM has been to appoint a cabinet of hardline conservatives who will only represent the privileged few.”
Johnson will hold his first cabinet meeting at No 10 on Thursday morning, before making a statement to the Commons, where he is likely to receive a foretaste of the challenges that await him if he is to secure a majority for any new Brexit deal.
Several cabinet veterans, including Greg Clark, David Gauke and Philip Hammond, have made clear they intend to continue making the case against a no-deal Brexit from the backbenches – and using every parliamentary device they can to tie their new leader’s hands.
Asked about the prospect of an autumn poll, Rees-Mogg told ITV’s Robert Peston: “It is clearly not the policy of the government to bring about a general election.” But he added: “It’s impossible to rule out, looking at the parliamentary arithmetic.”
Earlier, Johnson was joined outside Downing Street by his partner, Carrie Symonds, who has stayed away from the limelight in recent weeks following the furore over their late-night row.
Members of his new staff also lined up to hear him, including Andrew Griffith, a Sky executive who lent him a £9.5m townhouse to plan his campaign and will become his business adviser, and Munira Mirza, one of his deputies as London mayor, who will become No 10 policy chief.
Matt Hancock, who threw his weight behind Johnson after abandoning his own tilt at the top job, and has been a key public face of his campaign, will remain as health secretary.
Hancock had said on Wednesday morning that, “uniting the party, and through that then uniting the country, is a really important part of what Boris is talking about”.
But Johnson’s picks for the top table pointed to a decision to assemble an ideologically coherent top team, rather than placating fretful remainers.
Allies said that as the new prime minister had indicated during his leadership campaign, every member of his hand-picked cabinet is fully committed to delivering Brexit, come what may, on 31 October.
Cummings’s old boss, Michael Gove, another Vote Leave veteran, will be chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster – the ceremonial title previously held by May’s cabinet fixer, David Lidington, who resigned on Wednesday rather than serve in a Johnson administration.
Gove has been handed the task of overseeing preparations for a no-deal Brexit, a job that previously fell to the Department for Exiting the EU. Brexiters have long claimed the government was not doing enough to get ready for the possibility of leaving.
Gove warned in January that if Britain left the EU without a deal in place, “winter is coming”.