Starmer faces his third Tory PM after Sunak appoints his ‘unity cabinet’

Sign up to LabourList’s morning email for everything Labour, every weekday morning.

After apologising for the “mistakes” made by his predecessor Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak pledged to “fix them”. He then set about appointing what has been described as a ‘unity cabinet’. Jeremy Hunt – the veteran minister under David Cameron and Theresa May who starved the NHS of cash for six years and was brought in to clean up the mess made by Kwasi Kwarteng – remained as Chancellor. James Cleverly, who backed Boris Johnson before supporting Truss and was appointed Foreign Secretary by Sunak’s predecessor, also remained in place. Sunak also retained his former leadership rival Penny Mordaunt along with Truss-ally Therese Coffey.

Perhaps most controversially, the new Prime Minister brought back Suella Braverman as Home Secretary – a week after she resigned from the same role for a breach of the ministerial code. It emerged last Wednesday that Braverman sent confidential papers to her private email account and then forwarded them on to Conservative backbencher John Hayes. How has she ended up back in cabinet so quickly? Well, the darling of the right of the Tory Party – who served as attorney general under Johnson – effectively ended her former boss’s leadership bid by backing Sunak on Sunday, delivering a big blow to the Johnson campaign. Appearing on Times Radio this morning, Labour’s Bridget Phillipson came to the inescapable conclusion that the appointment was the result of a “grubby deal”.

Sunak will face Keir Starmer in his first Prime Minister’s Questions session this afternoon. He is the third Tory Prime Minister, and the second in a month, to do so. I am old enough to remember when Truss declared (last week) that she is “a fighter and not a quitter” – shortly before she quit. The jokes almost write themselves. Starmer told his shadow cabinet on Tuesday that the party has a stock of attack lines ready to go as he warned that Sunak is likely to get a “poll bounce” thanks to the departure of Truss. Labour will focus over the next few weeks on how the Conservatives have prioritised their party’s interests over those of the country – a case in point will be Braverman’s appointment.

We can also expect the Labour leader to blame much of the economic mismanagement of recent years on Sunak. Starmer told the then Prime Minister Johnson in November 2020: “The British people are paying the price for the mistakes of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.” Labour repeatedly made clear that the country’s troubles were as much to do with Sunak as Johnson as the opposition party eyed-up the then Chancellor as a potential successor. Sunak’s premiership, and the fate of his party and Labour’s, will rest upon the extent to which he is able to extricate himself from not just the mess of the past few months, but the Tory rule of the past few years. Labour’s job is to make sure that he cannot do that.

Sign up to LabourList’s morning email for everything Labour, every weekday morning.