Yesterday’s cabinet culling has put even Harold MacMillan’s Night of the Long Knives’ in the shade. That infamous mass sacking in 1962 saw seven cabinet members lose their jobs, which pales compared to the 17 who exited government yesterday.
Amidst this turmoil, the energy world will at least be dealing with a known quantity with its new secretary of state.
Andrea Leadsom, who replaces Greg Clark in the top job at the BEIS (business, energy and industrial strategy) department, held the energy portfolio during the dying days of David Cameron’s government.
The Northamptonshire MP was minister of state for energy in DECC (Department for Energy and Climate Change) for just over a year before the ministry was dismembered when Theresa May became Prime Minister.
Her successor Boris Johnson has avoided the temptation to embark on any such overhaul of the government machine, leaving existing departments intact.
While the instinctively small state supporting Johnson is likely to have little sympathy with a corporatist idea like an industrial strategy, a departmental revamp probably felt like an unnecessary distraction from the government’s central task of delivering Brexit by the end of October.
BEIS therefore lives to fight another day, unlike Clark who has returned to the backbenches after three years overseeing business and energy policy.
Leadsom’s previous track record offers mixed signals about how she will approach the energy part of her new portfolio.
When she first entered Parliament, the former banker struck a sceptical tone on climate change issues. During the 2016 Brexit referendum, Leadsom’s Fresh Start group called for the scrapping of EU renewable energy targets.
Her tenure as energy minister saw the government scale back its subsidies for renewable energy, including the support for mainly solar projects through the Feed in Tariffs (FiT) scheme.
On the other hand, the FiT scheme wasn’t culled entirely, which was a live concern amongst campaigners at the time, on Leadsom’s watch.
Then during her albeit short-lived campaign to become Tory leader this year, Leadsom struck a noticeably warmer tone on tackling climate change. In a column for the Conservative Home website, she said that one of her first acts as prime minister would be to declare a climate emergency.
And she described the steps that the government has taken to tackle climate changes as amongst her “proudest” achievements, adding that she backed setting up a cabinet level committee to co-ordinate action across government on the issue.
Leadsom has therefore been on a journey over the last few years, mirroring that undertaken by many in her party.
But she has a lot else on her plate to ensure that business is as prepared as possible for a potential No Deal Brexit.
And while there is growing agreement that tackling climate change is an emergency, it is a less immediately pressing issue than Brexit. Nevertheless, as anyone sweltering today will realise, the need to act on global warming is becoming more urgent.
Climate change can’t be left on Leadsom’s post-Brexit to do list.