FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon has questioned whether Liz Truss has appointed a “Cabinet of all the talents”, or simply handed her own supporters top jobs.
The SNP leader took particular aim at the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg as Energy Secretary – apparently in reference to his past statements on climate change.
Rees-Mogg’s new role will see him play a leading role in the response to the climate crisis – but he has previously said he wants to extract “every last drop out of the North Sea” and claimed in 2013 that “climate alarmism” was to blame for high energy bills.
In the same Telegraph article, the Tory MP also questioned whether high levels of carbon dioxide emissions would affect the climate and claimed that meteorologists would struggle to predict long-term climate changes as they didn’t always get the weather right.
Speaking to CapitalScotland News, the First Minister said that Rees-Mogg’s appointment to Cabinet meant there was “a big question mark” over the judgment of the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
Sturgeon said: “It’s not really a new government, it's just a bit of a shuffling of the deck chairs. A couple of things strike me about it.
"Firstly, it seems to be just the Prime Minister’s own supporters that are in her Cabinet. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt to reach out across her party, that’s more for her party to think about, but whether it’s a Cabinet of all the talents I think is open to massive question.
“And then another thing, any Prime Minister who puts Jacob Rees-Mogg in charge of energy and therefore by definition in charge of some of the big decisions that will guide the UK’s response to tackling the climate emergency has to have a big question mark over her judgment.”
“It’s not really a new government, it’s just a shuffling of the deckchairs” FM @NicolaSturgeon says the idea that Liz Truss’ is “a cabinet of all the talents” is “open to massive question”.#CapitalReports pic.twitter.com/qTY31q4Nsq
— CapitalScotland News (@CapitalScotNews) September 7, 2022
Truss will face an uphill battle to unite a divided Tory Party, but seems to have done little to appease her opponents.
Speaking anonymously to the Daily Mail earlier in the week, allies of defeated leadership contender Rishi Sunak suggested that, given Truss’s “very weak position”, she would be naive not to extend an olive branch to her former opponents.
One MP told the Daily Mail that Truss’s relatively precarious position meant it would be “extraordinary” not to put in her Cabinet “at least a few people who were on the other side”.
“That is political naivety and will come back to bite her very, very quickly – as if she hasn’t got enough problems already,” one Sunak supporter said.
Truss managed to win just 57% of the vote against Sunak’s 43% in the final round of the leadership race – a smaller margin than had been expected and below 50% of the party’s total membership.
She also failed to win the support of the most Tory MPs earlier in the contest. In the first round of MP voting, held on July 13, Truss won just 50 votes. Sunak had 88, while Penny Mordaunt won 67.
As the race went on Truss managed to take second place, going into the final two with the backing of 113 Tory MPs – 24 fewer than Sunak’s 137 and only narrowly edging out Mordaunt on 105.
