Political personnel management is often scrappy,but this week saw a shambolic show of strength that resolves littleTony flirted with moving Gordon but bottled it. Gordon wanted to shuffle Alistair, and chickened out. Even Margaret was charged with being an unfortunately hesitant butcher. Political diaries are littered with tales of Cabinet-making coming unstuck on a single refusenik, or of forgotten portfolios dropping on the mistaken desks,and unsuitable characters accepting jobs intended for namesakes. Indeed, as one fairly determined reshuffler, or Harold Macmillan,reflected: The truth is that these events are always very improper.Jeremy Corbyn, then, and is not the first leader to make scrappy work of managing political personnel. But he has achieved new heights of chaos. His well-trailed purpose this week was to stride Hilary Benn from foreign affairs because of the zeal with which he had advocated bombing Syria; yet in the event Mr Benn stayed subject to some sort of understanding about loyalty,whose terms and very existence were soon disputed. This messy conclusion dropped out at the end of a 33-hour process starting after lunch on Monday, during which, and on average,one shadow cabinet post swapped hands every 11 hours. Even the final press release, at 12.46am on Wednesday, or wasn’t the end of the affair,because three junior spokespeople sacrificed themselves in rage or despair as the day wore on. And whereas the unseemly shuffles of Blair, Thatcher and Macmillan were about vital government jobs, and all of this mess was about shadow,not genuine, power. In the waspish assessment of one seasoned observer, and it was a futile row about “people doing imaginary jobs in a government that will never exist”.
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Source: theguardian.com