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The new government, in nine charts

Gavin Freeguard, Adam Boon and Leah Owen summarise Theresa May’s first government appointments.

We’ve been live-blogging the formation of Theresa May’s new government in charts (and with nuggets of insight from our Ministers Reflect project and from across the Institute). The Government published a full list of government ministers on Monday night, which included a few moves that hadn’t previously been announced. We’ve now updated our charts accordingly. So here’s a final summary… This is Theresa May’s Cabinet.

Eleven previous attendees (Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Crabb, Morgan, Villiers, Whittingdale, Harper, Stowell, Letwin and Soubry) have gone. Four previous attendees have accepted junior ministerial positions outside Cabinet (Hancock, Hands, Anelay, Halfon). Amusingly, Patrick McLoughlin appeared to move department yesterday: the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was listed in DCMS yesterday morning (which we thought was odd)…
…but had moved to the Cabinet Office by the end of the day. Which is where we thought he was to start with.
With fewer people attending Cabinet than before the reshuffle, May’s Cabinet is actually the smallest since Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
The lady is for churning – only at the Ministry of Defence did more than half of the ministers remain in post...
Junior ministers matter as well as Secretaries of State. It’s usually the junior ministers who do a lot of the heavy lifting in parliament and in implementing policies. ...and we also have three new government departments.
In the biggest changes to the machinery of government since Gordon Brown’s premiership:

The Government finally gave some further details on the changes in a ministerial statement from the PM late on Monday (Jill Rutter looked more closely at that yesterday). But there are still questions about other changes – e.g. civil society apparently moving from the Cabinet Office to DCMS.

The Cabinet Office ministerial team is actually half of what it was before the reshuffle, while MoJ has also lost three ministerial posts, going from seven ministers to four. The new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has six ministers – fewer than the eight in its predecessor BIS (there were three in DECC). The gender balance hasn’t shifted much, although there’s a slightly higher percentage of women in the Cabinet…
Although a slightly lower percentage of all ministers are female, it’s still higher than the percentage of Conservative MPs who are women.
Looking at individual departments, there are five without a female minister – the Cabinet Office, DCLG and Transport as well as the new Departments for International Trade and Exiting the European Union. In four departments, half or more of the ministers are women and all are headed by a female Secretary of State: DfID (Patel), Defra (Leadsom), DCMS (Bradley) and the Home Office (Rudd). …and a higher percentage of the Cabinet were supporters of Brexit than before.
Representation of leavers has increased at every level of government, but still isn’t quite as high as the percentage of Conservative MPs that supported Brexit.
In four departments, half or more of ministers supported Brexit: Transport, DfID, Defra and the Department for Exiting the European Union.  

Topic
Ministers

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