Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been left reeling following the resignations of chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid. Their resignations mean that 28 ministers have quit from Mr Johnson’s Government since he took office.
Mr Sunak and Mr Javid were swiftly replaced on Tuesday night, with Nadhim Zahawi promoted to be the new Chancellor and Steve Barclay becoming Health Secretary. Meanwhile, Michelle Donelan takes Mr Zahawi's former role as Education Secretary.
Here we profile the new appointees:-
Nadhim Zahawi
Nadhim Zahawi, the new Chancellor, first rose to prominence as the man who helped lead the vaccine roll-out during the coronavirus pandemic. Most recently the Education Secretary, he had early success as the vaccines minister, helping to lead the Government’s vaccine programme following his appointment in November 2020.
Appointed Chancellor hours after the resignation of Rishi Sunak, Mr Zahawi will now take on one of the biggest jobs in Government serving the embattled Prime Minister amid the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. He will also be charged with putting together a crucial autumn Budget as inflation bites.
Born in Iraq to a Kurdish family, Mr Zahawi came to the UK as a nine-year-old when his parents fled the regime of Saddam Hussein. Believed to be one of the richest politicians in the House of Commons, he helped found polling company YouGov after studying chemical engineering at University College London.
He has often said that his own personal backstory has deeply influenced his view of Britain and he recently spoke of the debt he owed poet Philip Larkin as he improved his English as a teenager. Seen as a “safe pair of hands”, he came to the Education Secretary role following the sacking of Gavin Williamson, who had become deeply unpopular with the public over the exams fiasco during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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His tenure in the role has not been without difficulty and in recent weeks he had been attempting to see off potential strike action by teachers, which he has labelled “unforgivable” months after children returned to school following the disruption of the pandemic. Mr Zahawi became a junior education minister under Theresa May, but his loyalty to Boris Johnson has never seriously wavered.
Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who the new Chancellor will face at the dispatch box, said that the country needed leaders who act in the public interest. She said: "It’s clear that the Prime Minister and Chancellor are only acting in theirs."
A Stratford-on-Avon MP since 2010, Mr Zahawi has often made much of his most famous constituent – William Shakespeare. On Tuesday night, in taking the Chancellor role, he had decided to try to save Mr Johnson from a comedy of errors.
Steve Barclay
Boris Johnson has made Steve Barclay his new Health Secretary after Sajid Javid’s dramatic resignation from the role. Mr Johnson’s new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has been his chief of staff and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and has also previously served as a Brexit secretary.
Labour greeted Mr Barclay’s appointment to the helm of the Health Department by congratulating him as “the shortest serving Health Secretary in history”. Mr Barclay was handed the chief of staff role in February as part of a shake-up of No 10 in response to the partygate scandal.
It came as Mr Johnson promised a “reset” in No 10 after he was left wounded following a swathe of resignations from among his aides and longer-term concerns over the cost of living, sleaze allegations and the general running of the Downing Street operation. After a relatively slow start to his ministerial career, Mr Barclay – a Leave supporter – was catapulted to the Cabinet front rank as Brexit Secretary in November 2018.
The son of a trade union official father and a civil servant mother, he has previously described himself as coming from a “working class Northern background” in Lancashire. The youngest of three brothers, he came from the first generation of his family to go to university, reading history at Cambridge and spending a gap year serving in the Army with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.
After training as a lawyer, he worked as regulator for the Financial Services Authority and head of anti-money laundering at Barclays Bank before embarking on a political career. Picked for David Cameron’s “A-list” of favoured candidates, he finally won the seat of North East Cambridgeshire in the 2010 general election having twice stood unsuccessfully for parliament.
Despite his record as a government loyalist, he had to wait until after the following election in 2015 before he made it to the ministerial ranks as a junior whip. Instead he spent the coalition years building a reputation as a tough and effective interrogator of officials as a member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
During the EU referendum in 2016, he supported the official Vote Leave campaign, after ministers were given the freedom to campaign for either side. Following the 2017 election, he was finally promoted out of the whips’ office by then-prime minister Theresa May who made him her new City minister.
His financial background made him an obvious choice at a time when foreign competitors were looking to take advantage of Brexit to take away business from the Square Mile. Nevertheless, he served only six months in the Treasury before he was promoted again to minister of state at the Department of Health and Social Care.
After his first Cabinet role as Brexit Secretary, he moved to become chief secretary to the Treasury in February 2020, and was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in September 2021. Mr Barclay is married with two children.
Michelle Donelan
Michelle Donelan has been confirmed as the new Education Secretary following the move by Nadhim Zahawi to Number 11. Ms Donelan will have a full in-tray as she takes up the post.
2022 is the first year of full public exams following the cancellation of GCSEs and A-levels during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Results released in August will be lower than those seen in 2021, when teacher-assessed grades were awarded, as grading will be set loosely at a midway point between 2019 and 2021.
In a year when the competition for university places has never been more fierce, the disappointment of youngsters who have also lost out heavily in the pandemic could be tricky to smooth over. She will also oversee the passage of the Schools Bill – unfinished business – which Labour’s Bridget Phillipson recently described as having been “left in tatters” following the removal of 18 of its 69 clauses.
Most of these related to increased levels of centralised control over academies and had been fiercely contested in the Lords. A third area of concern is likely to be the cost-of-living crisis and its impact on schools.
Only this week, school catering association Laca reported how more than half of caterers said that school meals quality would get worse if funding is not ring-fenced by Government, with rising costs pushing staples such as beef off the menus. Heads have warned that rising costs, including gas and electricity prices, could push schools into deficit.
As higher and further education minister, Ms Donelan has championed the rights of students to be fully informed about their courses, pledging to crack down on “low quality” degrees through “boots on the ground” investigations.
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She has called for universities to ensure that their drop-out and progression rates are clearly signposted in advertising, and has called for action on grade inflation, with both Universities UK and Guild HE announcing last week that they would be returning to pre-pandemic levels of first and upper second degrees by 2023.
Ms Donelan has introduced measures to help people study at any point in their lives, such as the lifelong loan entitlement, where individuals can access the equivalent of four years of post-18 education.
At times she has clashed with the higher education sector, most notably on the issue of free speech. She recently called on university vice-chancellors to “reflect carefully” over whether their membership of schemes such as Advance HE’s Race and Equality Charter was “conducive” to creating an environment for free speech within universities, which the sector pushed back on with a strongly-worded letter.
Ms Donelan has also spoken passionately on the subject of student safety on campuses, calling on all universities to sign a pledge to end the use of non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual harassment and assault. And she broke with the National Union of Students, calling for their removal from all the Department for Education (DfE) departmental groups over long-standing concerns about antisemitism within the body.
Like her predecessor, she has had an inspiring journey into politics, the first in her family to attend university. The Chippenham MP, just 38, was educated in the state sector in Cheshire, and has said previously that her own background led her to champion better information about university courses for “first in family” students.
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