New Tory Leader Will Have Limited Cabinet Experience to Work With

4 min read28 August

The next leader of the Conservative Party will have relatively little Cabinet experience to draw upon when they appoint their senior team to oppose the Labour Government from the opposition benches, new research shows.

Analysis by the Institute for Government think tank, shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, sets out how the current Shadow Cabinet led by outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak contains less Cabinet experience than shadow teams assembled in recent years. It also illustrates that the Conservatives have limited ministerial experience on the back benches.

The IfG has compared the composition of the Sunak Shadow Cabinet with the two Labour shadow teams put together after the party's defeat to the Tories in 2010, first by caretaker leader Harriet Harman and then by Ed Miliband. The research is part of the think tank's new Ministers Database, which is set to be launched in early September.

The research suggests that whoever becomes the next leader of the Tories in early November will not have a great deal of Cabinet experience at their disposal when deciding which Tory MPs should sit on the shadow front benches.

Less than half of the current Shadow Cabinet have been Cabinet ministers, which is a lower proportion than in either Harman or Miliband’s teams, the IfG research shows.

The data excludes those who attended Cabinet but were not Cabinet ministers such as Tom Tugendhat, who served as security minister for two years in the Sunak government.

Moreover, the 13 Conservative MPs in Sunak's interim team who are former Cabinet ministers have served for fewer than three years. This compares to 4.5 years for the 21 former Cabinet ministers in Harman’s team and 3.5 years for the 14 in Miliband’s.

Added to this, the level of ministerial churn during Tory rule, combined with the scale of their defeat to Labour on 4 July, means there are fewer experienced former Cabinet ministers on the Conservative benches than might have been the case at previous changes of regime.

Eight members of the former Sunak Cabinet lost their seats at the 2024 election, including Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt, who were defence secretary and House of Commons leader respectively. None were defeated in 2010, however, meaning was a larger pool of former senior ministers for Harman and Miliband to choose from when Labour became the official opposition.

Ed Miliband, who was chosen to succeed Gordon Brown, had a larger and more experienced party to pick from than the next Tory leader

Harriet Harman, who served as interim opposition leader before Miliband took over, had a team which had served an average of 4.5 years in the Cabinet

The six Conservative MPs who are campaigning to succeed Sunak and became the Leader of the Opposition have all served in Cabinet. They are Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tugendhat.

The winner, who will be chosen by Tory party members, will manage a party of 121 MPs — the smallest cohort any Conservative party leader will have managed in more than two centuries. More than 20 per cent of that figure are new MPs with no parliamentary experience.

PoliticsHome understands some Tory figures have urged the party to make sure members of the parliamentary party with ministerial experience are put in high-profile positions to challenge the Keir Starmer Government – particularly Labour ministers who lack experience themselves. Of all the new ministers appointed by Prime Minister Starmer, almost 7 per cent of them are new MPs, according to the IfG.

“Experience should be a key factor, both parliamentary experience and relevant external,” a former Tory Cabinet minister told PoliticsHome. "As we have seen in recent years, experience was too often left on the back benches.”

There are 13 former Cabinet members who have been excluded from Sunak's interim Shadow Cabinet. Four of them — Kit Malthouse, Julian Smith, Richard Holden and Esther McVey — spent less than a year as full members of the Cabinet.

Another Tory MP agreed, saying it was an "obvious" strategy especially as members of the next Tory leader’s top team will have no civil service support, unlike government ministers.

But not all MPs and candidates who fought the last election for the Conservatives agree. “It is the dead wood which floated to the top of the last government which landed us in this mess,” one Tory candidate, who failed to win their seat, told PoliticsHome.

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