Silly season shuffle.

Cameron is going to reshuffle his government today. There will be no great changes. The Big Beasts will stay.

 

But the media is saying that various Ministers are refusing to budge.

 

Eh?

 

I know that I am just a simple old country boy but I always understood during my 75 years of undiscovered crime that the real authority of the PM was his exclusive right  to hire and fire Ministers.

 

But now we have the Party Chairwoman, the Justice Secretary, the Transport Secretary, and the Business Secretary  all chanting ‘Hell, no; we won’t go!’

 

If all this is true then our form of government has already undergone a stealthy change for the worse; perhaps leaving us without a coherent form of government at all. One certainty; if Dave doesn’t put his foot down he’s toast. David Davis is already positioning himself to come back to the forefront of Tory politics as leader of the Resentful Right.  He was impressive and authoritative on ‘Jeff Randall Live’ last night, and did a pretty good job of demolishing the Government’s economic policy. Looking and sounding Prime Ministerial, he’s the man to watch.

 

The changes that ought to come are:

 

·        Shifting little George Osborne to be party chairman so as to plan for what will be a very tough election. He has been doing that job anyway when he should have been running the economy;

 

·        Sending Clarke to the Lords. He was a first-class Chancellor years ago, but he is 72  and showing definite signs of having lost his marbles.

 

·        And sending off for an early bath the  ludicrous Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary who was irredeemably tainted over the Murdoch take-over scandal.

 

What ought to happen but will not is getting rid of the increasingly laughable Clegg. Yet. But it is obvious that his own party is frantically briefing against him, and trailing Vince Cable to displace him.

 

His latest daft idea is a ‘wealth tax’, although he doesn’t say who he would class as wealthy; maybe somebody who is richer than him, which would set the bar pretty high. Yes, I know that the politics of envy are pretty sterile, but they are also shamefully attractive.

 

So why not a wealth tax on all those fat cats?

 

Because to a large extent we already have one. Nearly 50% of tax and NI receipts come from 5% of the population. How much more should they give before taking themselves off to more relaxed tax regimes?

 

Get rid of tax concessions for non-doms? They would  simply go, so we would be worse off.

 

A mansion’ tax? What is a ‘mansion’? OK, a large house, but how large? Bigger than Clegg’s three? Not too good for the already-depressed property market, in which values are governed by the top end of the market. And Swedish experience suggests its effects are negative; it raised £420 million a year before it was abolished but led to £142 billion fleeing the country.

 

And the reshuffle itself?

 

Yawn!