New Tory Leader Will Have Limited Cabinet Experience to Work With

The next leader of the Conservative Party will have relatively little Cabinet experience to draw upon when they appoint their senior team to oppose the Labour Government from the opposition benches, new research shows.

Analysis by the Institute for Government think tank, shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, sets out how the current Shadow Cabinet led by outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak contains less Cabinet experience than shadow teams assembled in recent years. It also illustrates that the Conservatives have limited ministerial experience on the bench benches.

The IfG has compared the composition of the Sunak Shadow Cabinet with the two Labour shadow teams put together after the party's defeat to the Tories in 2010, first by caretaker leader Harriet Harman and then by Ed Miliband. The research is part of the think tank's new Ministers Database, which is set to be launched in early September.

The research suggests that whoever becomes the next leader of the Tories in early November will not have a great deal of Cabinet experience at their disposal when deciding which Tory MPs should sit on the shadow front benches.

Less than half of the current Shadow Cabinet have been Cabinet ministers, which is a lower proportion than in either Harman or Miliband’s teams, the IfG research shows.

The data excludes those who attended Cabinet but were not Cabinet ministers such as Tom Tugendhat, who served as security minister for two years in the Sunak government.

Moreover, the 13 Conservative MPs in Sunak's interim team who are former Cabinet ministers have served for fewer than three years. This compares to 4.5 years for the 21 former Cabinet ministers in Harman’s team and 3.5 years for the 14 in Miliband’s.

Added to this, the level of