In the end, nothing in Chris Grayling’s chairmanship of the Tory party became him like the leaving of it. It was a dignified departure after a controversial start. While others speculated in an over-excited fashion, Grayling just got on with the job, quietly, for almost twenty minutes.
Did Grayling achieve enough in post? History will be the judge. The Tories have epic demographic and organisational problems that could never be dealt with fully in twenty minutes. But Grayling made a start. He defined and established the scale of the challenge. The experiment conducted by the Grayling CCHQ – which put up an erroneous tweet for 27 seconds before deleting it – demonstrated that there is a lot of work to be done if the Tory party is not to disappear down the toilet.
Meanwhile, Sam Coates of The Times on Twitter has the best description of how a classic post-modern Westminster media farce unfolded. Number 10 never announced Grayling, the Transport Secretary (at the time of writing), and a series of misunderstandings followed from hacks being briefed and rumours running out of control.
“Apparent sequence of events 1. Some cab mins thought Grayling to CCHQ & hacks tipped off. 2. Hacks tweeted but CCHQ not told either way. 3. CCHQ operative assume reports correct and tweets and WhatsApps announcement. 4. Complaints pour into No10. 5. Tweet deleted, ferret reversed.”
The rest of the reshuffle is now underway. Brandon Lewis is the new Tory party chairman (for now) and James Cleverly is his deputy.
We should reserve judgment on the overall picture until the final list is out, but I do find the whole notion of the broken May operation summoning people and trying to set the agenda somewhat difficult to take seriously. It seems like a tall order to reorganise and re-energise this exhausted government, but the Prime Minister is resilient and we’ll see.
