(The Cabinet, as composed under the Ministry of The Rt. Hon. Helen Kendrick MP, June 2013)
"In their first hours and days 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 in the five days between her election victory and the formal swearing-in of her Ministry at St. James's Palace.
The size of Kendrick's plurality and the underperformance of the Centrists scrambled her coalition calculations – she had expected four members of the liberal party to join her cabinet. Kendrick liked Isadore Porter, once describing him as “the best cabinet minister who never was”. She respected his intellect and his strong stands against corruption and authoritarianism even when they failed to generate votes. But she did not like him enough to go to war with half her party. Charles Beck, Nancy Dewar and several emissaries from the backbenches made clear that they would not tolerate an unnecessary olive branch to the party that had kept Thomas Caro in power for fifteen years. Instead, the barely-known Henry Peterson became Home Secretary. A seemingly permanently middle-aged former police officer who had supported Dewar in the leadership election, he was not close to the new Prime Minister. She appointed him for his credentials on crime (a longstanding weakness for the Radicals) and his experience in a slew of junior posts in the Bertram ministry. 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…
…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 by a third and restored full cabinet as a space for decision-making. How Whitehall Ministries were reshaped showed her immediate priorities: the verbosely-titled Department of Ecology, Energy and Natural Resources brought focus environmental ambitions and policymaking while taking immigration policy out of the Home Office and into a new Department of Employment and Immigration was less successful in meeting Kendrick’s stated ambition of building consensus on the issue of migration.
The new prime minister used this reshaped Whitehall to dispatch and satisfy her allies and rivals. Imran Rais had been seen as political deadwood after losing the London Mayoralty and then coming a distant third in the Radical leadership after entering as the frontrunner. But since then he had quietly rebuilt his standing, and he retained a sense of glamour and a not-insignificant following in London. He was appointed to head the new Department of Industry and Economic Development. Known as “DOE” or “DIED” within Whitehall, Rais led a strengthen department with a remit of joined-up economic policy and planning, a purpose that soon caught the negative attention of officials at the Treasury. Rais, not seeing being Mayor of London as the peak of his career, declared himself "back for good" and openly talked about succeeding Kendrick. He was not the only one.
Within 24 hours of becoming Radical leader, Helen Kendrick had promised her second-place opponent the Foreign Office. But Nancy Dewar had spent the two years 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 was sworn in as Foreign Secretary. Her low expectations meant that it took a while for the Prime Minister’s other ministerial choices to sink in.
Meanwhile, Jon Blasdel was the only choice Kendrick had considered for Chancellor. She was impressed by his grasp of economics in and reassured by his advanced age and lack of ambition even as some in the party saw the appointment as a “blockage” for a younger and more ambitious figure. Blasdel 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.
Another early appointment was Roisin Dillon, reprising her role as Secretary for Ireland. This was seen as an olive branch to Nancy 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"…
Charles Beck was happy with all these choices. Still assuming that he was the next Prime Minister, he viewed Kendrick’s choices for Great Offices of State positively, seeing Blasdel, Peterson as competent but unambitious and Dewar as too politically defective to do well in a future contest. His own ministerial appointment was more fraught. When he withdrew from the leadership contest he demanded that the new leader make him Chancellor and give him 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 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. Beck embraced the media's nickname of "Minister for Everything". Kendrick loyalists called him the "Minister for Everything Else."
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. 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, only in parliament and cabinet because Kendrick had appointed him to the House of Councillors. This dependency was reinforced by his new role: Minister for International Co-operation, a non-departmental post designed especially for the man. His brief was to act as an ambassador at-large and all-purpose treaty negotiator. Kendrick had made no secret of her ambition to 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.
But when his appointment was announced just hours before the swearing-in ceremony, there was immediate blowback: from backbenchers, from soon-to-be opposition benches and peace groups alike. Charles Beck in particular “blew his gasket”. The position of those close to Beck was that the new Deputy Prime Minister viewed Griffin as everything wrong with the Radical Party: having been in politics long enough to serve in the government of Bertram and his daughter, having made unpopular and ruthless decisions at the helm of a string of international agencies and having indulged in the worst forms of factionalism and backbiting in his role in the botched May Day Putsch. Beck, a long-standing sceptic of membership of the
Verband, was also not thrilled Griffin’s role in negotiating entry to the Association. People less favourable to Beck have suggested that the Londoner blamed the elderly Scotsman for the collapse of his leadership bid before it even began – “he fucking poached my people!” in the words of Beck himself.
Dewar was equally livid, viewing the appointment as a power-grab by Downing Street that would ensure that she would have no real autonomy over foreign policy. Many of the civil servants at her new department shared this view, but there was remarkably little briefing or public dissent from Radical ranks. The party was still basking from a decisive victory, and Beck and Dewar’s private anger was in contrast to the statements of satisfaction and support they’d given to the press mere hours before Griffin’s appointment was announced. Nancy Dewar told reporters that she was excited to work with “one of the greats” even as she privately, and presciently, began speculating on how long it would be until Griffin started another war…
Thusly by the time Helen Kendrick sat down with her new cabinet to pose for the official photograph in St. James's Palace, it was all smiles. Some of those smiles were more sincere than others. In the four days between the election and the swearing-in ceremony, most of the next eight years had already been decided…”