RISHI Sunak has been forced to reshuffle his ministerial team after a shock resignation on Tuesday.
The Prime Minister lost two ministers in one day after Robert Halfon joined James Heappy in leaving government.
Heappy’s departure as armed forces minister had been announced earlier in the month, but former education minister Halfon’s decision to join him came as a surprise.
In the wake of the double-resignation, here are the changes to the Tories’ top team that Sunak has made:
- Nus Ghani had been working a dual role as a minister in both the Department for Business and Trade and the Cabinet Office. She is now the Minister for Europe in the Foreign Office.
- Leo Docherty MP, who was serving as a parliamentary under secretary of state at the Foreign Office, has been promoted. He has taken on Heappy’s former role as Minister for Armed Forces.
- Kevin Hollinrake MP was serving as a parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department for Business and Trade. He has been promoted to minister, filling one of Ghani’s former roles.
- Luke Hall, who has not served in government since Boris Johnson was prime minister, has been brought in as an Education Minister, filling Halfon’s role.
- Alan Mak, an MP who has not served in government before, is now a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State jointly in both the Department for Business and Trade and the Cabinet Office.
Elsewhere, MPs Jonathan Gullis and Angela Richardson have been made deputy chairs of the Conservative Party.
Gullis, a controversial figure in a similar vein to the now-Reform UK MP Lee Anderson, said he was “ready to take the fight” to Labour.
The scale of the challenge facing Sunak was underlined in a Savanta poll for the Telegraph which put the Tories on their lowest vote share since the aftermath of Liz Truss’s mini-budget fiasco.
Labour had a 20-point lead, with 44% backing Keir Starmer’s party and 24% saying they would vote Conservative, with Reform UK on 11% ahead of the Liberal Democrats on 10%, according to the survey of “216 UK adults carried out on March 22-24.
As of Tuesday, 63 Conservative MPs have said publicly they are either standing down from Parliament or not contesting their current seat at the general election.
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