What's left of the Tories?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Commons is closing down for the summer, but Kemi Badenoch has treated us to a shadow cabinet reshuffle. At the beginning of the year, Badenoch’s team were keen to stress stability, dismissing talk of an early reshuffle. But, as so often in politics, events have forced her hand. Ed Argar, the shadow health secretary, had a health scare earlier this summer. He has today stepped back from the frontbench to focus on his recovery. Badenoch is therefore using his departure as the chance to make what she calls ‘a few changes to my frontbench.’
The headline is that Sir James Cleverly, former foreign and home secretary, is returning to the front bench as shadow housing secretary. Is his new position designed to take on Angela Rayner? And what's Badenoch planning to do about the Jenrick question? Lucy Dunn speaks to Michael Gove and Tim Shipman.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the many perks of being a spectator subscriber is that you can now register to listen to our podcasts without adverts. |
| 0:05.8 | We know that it all sounds incredibly complicated, so we've made it easy as possible. |
| 0:09.0 | Go to spectator.com.D.K. forward slash ad free, your step-by-step guide. |
| 0:18.3 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn, and today I'm joined by Tim Shipman and Michael Gove. |
| 0:23.5 | There's been much speculation over the last few weeks that Kimmy Badenock has been planning a reshuffle and it seems that today's the day. |
| 0:30.6 | Tim, what do we know so far and are there any big surprises? |
| 0:34.2 | Well, the first thing that was announced was that Ed Arga, who's the Shadow sector of state for health, was leaving the shadow cabinet. In his letter, he talks about a couple of health scares that he's had himself. I think some people, you know, even in some of our reporting, have criticised him for not being very high profile. That may explain why he's not been sort of on the front line |
| 0:54.9 | as much as people would have expected. |
| 0:57.3 | So he's left the shadow cabinet. |
| 0:59.4 | He's been replaced by Stuart Andrew. |
| 1:02.9 | The big move, of course, is that James Cleverly is coming back. |
| 1:06.0 | So former Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, |
| 1:08.4 | has had the period since the general election on the back |
| 1:11.7 | benches. I think he'd had a pretty intensive time. His wife had been ill previously and he was |
| 1:17.8 | keen to spend some time with her. But recently he let Kemi Badernock know that he was interested in |
| 1:24.4 | coming back. Interestingly, a week or so ago, he made a big speech about housing |
| 1:28.9 | to the IPPR think tank saying Tories need to be on the side of building, which is not always |
| 1:34.6 | the place that the Conservative Party finds itself. And interestingly, he's been appointed |
| 1:38.4 | the shadow housing secretary, which means he is the one shadowing Angela Raina. |
| 1:46.3 | So we can expect to see him do the old deputy PMQs, I would have thought, |
| 1:50.3 | though I'm told that role will continue to rotate. |
| 1:52.5 | So it won't just be cleverly taking on Raina when she's at the dispatch box. |
... |
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