Imagine the captain of the Titanic spotting the iceberg and deciding to ram through it. Now turn to the British news to discover that Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, has reshuffled his cabinet in, uh, interesting ways, as what looks like a catastrophic general election draws ever closer (it has to be held no later than January 2025).

The biggest (and totally unexpected) news is that Sunak has appointed former prime minister David Cameron as foreign secretary (foreign minister). Inconveniently, Cameron is no longer an MP, but Sunak got around that problem by giving Cameron a peerage. He will now be able to speak from the House of Lords (the upper chamber of the British legislature). There will be someone to speak for him in the House of Commons. This sort of arrangement is far from unprecedented but in recent times has involved junior ministers. The last senior minister to do his or her job from the Lords was Lord Carrington in the early 1980s.

It’s also not unknown for a former prime minister to accept a more junior role in government. In 1970, Ted Heath, the incoming Conservative prime minister, made Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the last Tory to hold that job before him, his foreign secretary. Douglas-Home, an amiable and underrated figure who had been prime minister in 1963–64, had already been foreign secretary in the early 1960s. His appointment was seen as a logical move. Cameron’s looks like a desperate throw of the dice.

Douglas-Home, who first came to prominence as a parliamentary aide to Neville Chamberlain (reportedly counseling him that “peace in our time” was not a phrase he should use), came with little baggage. Cameron, on the other hand, will forever be tainted in the eyes of both opponents and supporters of Brexit for his handling of Britain’s relationship with the EU. He is also blamed by the Conservative Party’s right for initiating the Tories’ drift to the left. If this shift had been a matter of cynical short-term political positioning, it might have been forgiven, but it turned out that Cameron actually believed in rather too much of what he said. He encouraged the Tory rebranding for far longer than could be justified on grounds of simple political opportunism. The result was neither good for Britain nor for the Conservatives. Since scuttling from office after the Brexit referendum, Cameron also found himself embroiled in a financial scandal and is widely considered to be too close to China.

Cameron replaces James Cleverley as foreign secretary. Cleverly moves to the Home Office, replacing Suella Braverman, a controversial, sometimes clumsy, not always diplomatic (#understatement) politician. She has no time for Britain’s liberal establishment, and it has no time for her. She is, however, popular with the increasingly disaffected right of the Conservative party, making her dismissal dangerous at a time when the Tories, far behind in the polls, need to be uniting their tribe.

The proximate cause of Braverman’s dismissal was an article she wrote for the London Times, about the recent wave of demonstrations in London.

Here’s an extract:

I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza. They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups — particularly Islamists — of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland. Also disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster are the reports that some of Saturday’s march group organisers have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas.

There will be time for proper discussion about how we got to this point. For now, the issue is how do we as a society police groups that insist that their agenda trumps any notion of the broader public good — as defined by the public, not by activists.

The answer must be: even-handedly. Unfortunately, there is a perception that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protesters. During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matters demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee?

Right-wing and nationalist protesters who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law? I have spoken to serving and former police officers who have noted this double standard. . . .

Cabinet ministers are expected to run articles through 10 Downing Street, and, according to the Daily Telegraph, Braverman did that, but did not go far enough in accepting Downing Street’s proposed amendments:

Four sources have confirmed to The Telegraph that some changes demanded by Downing Street in the Home Secretary’s article in The Times — in which she accused the police of “playing favourites” with Left-wing protesters — were not incorporated in the final version.

If Braverman had been a less controversial figure, this might not have been a fireable offense, but she is and so it was. Making her position more tenuous still was that her broad argument about the increasing politicization of the police has much to say for it. To be in breach of convention and to have a point was clearly unacceptable.

There is much more to this story than can be contained in a (relatively) brief note, but, as a matter of simple electoral calculation, it is hard to see Braverman’s firing as a winning move for Sunak. It seems likely to further disenchant already disillusioned Tory loyalists, as well as many of those voters (many of them traditional Labour supporters) who gave the Conservatives a chance in the 2019 election. They will have looked at the scenes in British streets in recent weeks and seen them as further symptoms of a wider unraveling that the Conservatives have failed to tackle. They will be likely to regard Braverman’s firing as a signal that that failure is of no great concern to the Tory leadership. They then will ask themselves what the point of a vote for the Conservative Party really is. The rational response is that Labour would be even worse. But that’s not likely to be an argument that will persuade them to give the Tories another shot.

And will the return of Cameron encourage liberal(ish), formerly Conservative, voters in southern England back into the fold? I doubt it.