- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
"On their first day in office new Prime Ministers must make snap judgements with enormous long-term consequences. High on victory and utterly exhausted, new leaders are at their strongest and weakest. Kendrick, having settled on most of her choices for cabinet appointments months before, was determined to only show strength. One of her election promises was to reduce the size of the cabinet; under Caro and Gardner it had become increasingly bloated and unwieldy, derided by Radicals as "jobs for the boys". Kendrick quickly moved to merge and abolish several departments, cut the number of cabinet posts from thirty to twenty-two, restored full cabinet as a space for decision-making. This made the task of forming the new, smaller cabinet easier and harder at the same time.(The Cabinet, as composed under the Ministry of The Rt. Hon. Helen Kendrick MP, June 2013)
She started with her main rivals. Nancy Dewar had been long-promised the Foreign Office but had spent her time since her defeat expecting the woman who upset her to renege on her promise. She regularly complained to friends that Kendrick was going to "send me off to deal with fucking farmers". The Prime Minister had no such plans, fearful of a potential challenge. Dewar was overjoyed by the appointment, and could barely conceal her grin as she left Downing Street as Foreign Secretary. Her low expectations meant that she barely objected to Kendrick's choice for Minister for Europe.
Meanwhile Imran Rais, who had started off the flashy frontrunner for the Radical leadership and finished a distant third, was appointed to head the new Department of Industry, Trade and Economic Development. Known as DITE within Whitehall, Rais led a beefed-up body for joined-up economic policy and planning, which soon challenging the hegemony of the hegemony of the Treasury. Rais, still seeing himself as a future Prime Minister, declared himself "back from the dead" and was happy to throw his weight around. He was not the only one.
Another of these departmental mergers served a more important rival. When Charles Beck withdrew from the leadership contest, he demanded the Treasury and dominance over social policy. Kendrick played hardline, horrified at the prospect of her government as a dual monarchy. She relied on the calculation that he wanted power and honorifics - Deputy Prime Minister went a long way to soothing his temper. But she knew that she had to give him more the the role of standing in for her when she was out of the country. His ambitions were satisfied with the creation of the Department of Intergovernmental Affairs, a department merged five ministries that had existed under Gardner. His sprawling portfolio, which included relations with Home Rule Administrations, government bureaucracies, housing policy and Britain's Overseas Territories, guaranteed him a role in almost every aspect of policy making. The media dubbed him "Minister for Everything." Beck embraced a Unionist MP's taunt of "Minister for Meddling". Kendrick loyalists nicknamed him "Minister for Everything Else."
Dr. Paul Falae was the only choice Kendrick had considered for Chancellor, having been impressed by his grasp of economics in Anne-Marie Bertram's cabinet and reassured by his lack of ambition. Tall, accent-less and soft-spoken, the former academic considered himself a loyalist to the party as opposed to any single faction, seeing his position as being to but a leash on the spendthrift ambitions of other ministers, while preparing to implement the wealth taxes that Bertram had vetoed. While greatly reassuring to the money markets and the civil servants, he provoked disappointment from more left-wing Radicals who wanted a less technocratic and more ideological approach to the economy.
The size of Kendrick's plurality and the underperfomance of the Centrists having scrambled her coalition calculations, Henry Petersen became Home Secretary. The two were not close. Kendrick vetoed all of his choices for Minister of State at the Home Office, giving the job to Sarah Garvey-Whelan, a young Kendrick loyalist. It was an early example of who Kendrick was and wasn't willing to push around.
Roisin Dillon reprising her role as Secretary for Ireland was seen as an olive branch to Dewar, who she had backed during the leadership election. The post of Ireland Secretary was now a sinecure to guarantee an Irish voice in the cabinet, so she was given the additional post of Minister of National Heritage, another super-ministry created from combining several long-neglected junior posts and sidelined departmental units. Setting her sights on securing the 2020 World's Fair for Dublin, she quickly abandoned her previous hostility for Kendrick, lauding her for giving "jobs for the girls."
If it were up to the majority of the new cabinet, Ben Griffin would have been kept out of it. Even many Radicals who backed his attempt to force out Anne-Marie Bertram viewed him as past his prime and not worth the potential blowback. But Kendrick prized his intellect, his experience and his connections; he was a personality strong enough to keep Kendrick’s rivals at bay and intimidate the opposition benches. Griffin himself was conflicted. He saw that his power in large part now flowed from his proximity to the Prime Minister but resented his reliance on her patronage. This mutual dependency was reinforced by his new role: Minister of International Co-Operation, with a brief to act as an ambassador at-large and treaty negotiator. Kendrick had made no secret of her ambition to bring bring into Britain into the Association of European States and hoped Griffin would be able to leverage his connections on the continent to do so. Griffin was ambivalent to membership of the Verband but believed success in Berlin would mean a future portfolio of influence back at home. Another hope of both Kendrick and Griffin was that the latter would be a personality strong enough to counterbalance Dewar and Beck..."
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