Shake, rattle the roles: Britain’s cabinet reshuffle

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do. And so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Scientists can learn a lot by rigorously monitoring the public as a virus makes its way around. But it's far more efficient to bring that kind of work into the lab. We examine a first-of-its-kind study that deliberately infects its participants with the coronavirus. And when's the last time you saw the arc of the Milky Way in the night sky? It takes a lot of darkness, a difficult thing to come by these days. We visit one of the rural places aiming to provide those dark skies and hoping that brings an economic boost. But first, Britain's prime minister starts today with a very different cabinet than he had yesterday. One peculiarity of British politics is the cabinet reshuffle, a sudden reordering of who's in charge of what in the government. This one was well telegraphed, and members of Parliament had been pressing Boris Johnson on who shouldn't be in charge of much.

With all the talk of cabinet reshuffle, reshuffle.

Can the Prime Minister guarantee that the Foreign Secretary will finally be sacked in any reshuffle, or does he intend to reward incompetence?

Reshuffles serve many purposes: rewarding loyalty, punishing perceived foolishness, and setting or resetting a political agenda. But they're messy and embarrassingly public. Ministers shuffle past the cameras outside Downing Street toward their new fates.

Sir, what is your new job?

Are you expecting to be sacked? Are you expecting a promotion, sir?

Are you the new Education Secretary, sir? Foreign Secretary, are you pleased?

Are you pleased with your new job?

It might not seem like a great time for such disruption, with the country focused on what the pandemic will bring next and on Britain's role in the crumbling of Afghanistan. But the Prime Minister has plenty of other business still to attend to, and now a new team to tackle it all.

It was expected that Boris Johnson would hold a reshuffle. He has the space to do so now.

Ann McElvoy is a senior editor at The Economist.

Britain is coming out of the pandemic enough to do something like that that wouldn't look like a distraction. He won a tight vote on tax raising last week to fund the NHS and social care. So he feels that he sweeps all before him and this is the time to clear out some deadwood and make some promotions.

And what is the deadwood that's been cleared out?

Well, the most prominent deadwood that went out was Dominic Raab. A Brexiteer, a lawyer. He became Foreign Secretary and went through that role, I think, without great distinction, but he did it. And then got into terrible trouble when the fall of Kabul happened. He was on holiday with his family, and he didn't really appear to respond quickly enough to the urgency. Well, everyone, I think, has been surprised by the scale and the pace at which the Taliban have taken over. In Afghanistan, and that's a lesson that we've all got to learn from.

But the truth is—

and I think Boris Johnson was embarrassed about that. A big blame game ensued, and now he has gone.

And who has he been replaced by?

He's been replaced by Liz Truss. She's a pretty gregarious, on-the-front-foot international trade minister who has stepped up.

My message to business is clear. We are out there negotiating trade deals. Our agenda is about unleashing Britain's full export potential. And I want to see—

She's also a Brexiteer ally, and she's been signing off trade deals that Boris Johnson desperately needs to show that Brexit can work and he can make it work differently from that big relationship with the EU. She's also the first female Conservative foreign secretary, Jason. That's one of the three big offices of state in the UK that is sign of Boris Johnson really trying to rebalance this proposition and show that he's surrounding himself more with prominent women and the rise of ethnic minorities in the Conservative Party.

And aside from simply clearing out deadwood, as you say, what, what were the aims here in, in the reshuffle?

Think of this, Jason, as Brexit Britain reboot. So its aims are to get on the front foot, to come out of the pandemic looking confident with a team that Boris Johnson feels that he can say to voters, this is my team, this will deliver things that I promised you before the pandemic. The big ticket number on that is something called leveling up, which basically means keeping those former Labour voters in the north and in the Midlands who turned Conservative very dramatically at the last election, keeping them on board, offering them something that shows a redistribution of opportunity, of wealth, of jobs. So that's where Boris Johnson's old Oxford frenemy Michael Gove comes in. Michael Gove is seen as intellectually highly competent. He's extremely good in the Commons at putting the Conservative case.

So then how does he help with the leveling up agenda?

He becomes Secretary of State for housing. Housing is very, very important in this intergenerational policy agenda that the government know that they need to push forward. We do urgently need to build more houses for younger voters without annoying older voters, preferably in leafy areas who tend—surprise, surprise—to be Conservative voters. This is an almost impossible task. He also is a native Scot. He is also supposed to put together a strategy for helping Boris Johnson see off Scottish independence, and that's something I think they need to take very seriously.

So if the point here was to shuffle things around and get a more competent government, will it work? Has it worked? Let's see.

But he has, I think, recognized that there were some areas of incompetence that needed to be weeded out, even if they had been loyal to him. In the Brexit referendum. And the big victim of that is Gavin Williamson as Education Secretary, who is seen to have mishandled a lot of issues that affected schools and the state exams in the last year and a half or so. Out went Gavin Williamson. I think not only enemies of the Conservatives would say, yes, that was about time too. He's replaced by Nadhim Zahawi, another of those first appointments of an ethnic minority background person to the role of Education Secretary. It would be hard to say that competence took a beating the day that Gavin Williamson was out of the job.

And what about the, the point to sort of consolidate being ahead a bit, to set the stage for policy to, uh, to shore up the North? Do you think all of that will come off?

If you think about that red wall that Boris Johnson needs to defend to win another election, but also to leave his mark on the country, to have actually achieved something beyond getting through COVID, then a lot of policy initiatives need to be much better joined up. As for Mr. Johnson, well, it shows that he has that splinter of ice in the soul that makes a leader able to sideline, and in many cases simply get rid of, people who've been loyal to him and helped make him Prime Minister. And he will be judged on whether what they achieve really makes life better for a lot of people in the UK who've had a difficult time behind them and are also very worried about their own economic futures. I think that's really where this argument will go next. What does it feel like to voters? Not so much who got whose job, who's up, who's down, who's in and who's out, much as I love talking to you about it.

And thanks very much for joining us.

Always a pleasure.

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone, the woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety, The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do, and so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.

Scientists have studied the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease that it causes with an intensity that's hard to fathom, tackling questions around how people get infected, how they transmit the virus, which and whether vaccine candidates work. What all those hundreds and hundreds of studies have in common is that they examine what the virus and the infected do in the wild, out in the real world. With enough attention and enough time, that does lead to solid data. But a controversial one-of-a-kind study in Britain aims to learn a lot more, a lot faster.

Earlier this year in March, a student called Jacob Hopkins lay down on a bed in London's Royal Free Hospital, and doctors placed droplets of liquid in his nose and clipped it shut.

Natasha Loder is The Economist's health policy editor.

And on that day, he became one of the first people in the world who was deliberately infected with COVID for a medical trial. But many people in the medical community think that the infection of Mr. Hopkins and the 35 other young people who were on this trial is actually kind of rather controversial, and possibly even quite reckless. And as a result of the controversy of these, what are known as human challenge trials, Britain is now the only country that has allowed them to take place. And there's a second trial underway at the moment at Oxford University.

And what's the source of the controversy here?

Well, the controversy is that you're deliberately infecting someone with a disease, and it's a disease that we don't have a lot of good treatments for. We've done loads of human challenge trials in the past. I think since World War II, we've done them on about 40,000 participants. And, you know, these trials have a kind of excellent safety record. What you're doing is you're giving an absolutely tiny dose to really young, healthy people, and you're studying them. But COVID is still so new, and there are fewer treatments for it, and of course it is something that, as we well know, can be fatal. So I think for the opponents of these trials, they feel that the risks of doing them still outweigh the benefits that could come from them.

And as for this trial, how, how did things go? How did it work?

Well, it went very well. I mean, the volunteers all turned up earlier this year in hospital. They were given COVID and quarantined in their room, and then they were tested every day. And then subsequently, they found that the volunteers were getting very mild infections just in the upper chest with very few symptoms. And then, you know, once the virus obviously has cleared the body and they're no longer infectious, they're discharged. But while they're there, these patients will have been going through a sort of battery of tests, blood and spit and air and samples off the surface and all sorts of stuff like that.

And so what do you learn from these? What's, what's the benefit of doing things in this way?

Well, the key thing about human challenge trials is that it's a very controlled environment to watch infection take place. And if you want to understand, for example, the natural course of the virus, you have to study it in a lot of people and try and figure out when they got infected and what kind of dose did they get. Well, if If you're in a laboratory, you know all those things. You can control all those extra factors.

But in a practical sense, what is it that we're going to learn from this? What's the sort of news you can use that's gonna come out of this?

So one of the first things they wanted to know was like, what is the minimum dose of virus you need to infect someone? So they'll have figured that out, for example. And then they want to know in detail about what they would call the disease profile of the virus. One of the things the researchers said was that they've been quite stunned in this experiment by how consistent the course of the disease was in the laboratory in different volunteers. And so shedding, for example, when you emit viral particles, usually starts within a couple of days of that infection, and then up to day 4 when it then increases very quickly. There's other things as well. They've compared PCR tests versus lateral flow tests, okay, which is a— fascinating thing to look at because it would be really useful to know when the lateral flow tests can be reliably expected to give you a positive result if you are infected. And that's just not something we really understand very well. And there's gonna be lots more besides, but we're gonna just have to wait for these results to be published. You know, I'm particularly looking forward to having a close look at what the immune system is actually doing during the course of an infection. That's another question they're going to address.

And the volume of information that it looks like we stand to learn here, and the fact that there haven't been any sort of tragic stories out of this trial, do you think that will make these kinds of human challenge trials less controversial in the future?

Yes, I think the success of this trial is going to be a very compelling argument for quite a lot of people, not everyone. There are still kind of quite a few dissenting voices. I'm sure there'll be quite a few entrenched opinions, ethicists in particular. But, you know, it certainly seems that these trials can be run safely and that we should move ahead with using them for the other questions that remain to be answered.

Other questions that trials like this could answer?

Well, exactly, yes. And so what we need next are new vaccines. We need to test variant vaccines. We need to test vaccines head-to-head, which one works better. But if you were to rely on field trials, the answers could take months, if not years, to get them all. And then you've got the upcoming antiviral drugs. We're developing a lot of antiviral drugs at the moment. And, you know, we're going to want to test these in combinations. And that again takes time. And so there's great potential for these studies to yield really quick answers to very, very important questions.

Which makes it all the more compelling then, that if there's so much to learn and comparatively speaking, relatively speaking, little risk in learning at all, I wonder where the ethical beef really is.

Well, I suppose until you've done the trials, you don't really know what that risk is. But having done them, we can now say with more confidence that actually there isn't much risk. But even prior to having this outcome, I think it's important to remember that we do allow people in society to take risks for us, sometimes huge ones. Whether you're, you know, sending people up on an ageing space shuttle, or whether you're a virus hunter in the field, there are lots of people who take risks that potentially could harm them, kill them even. And so within that context, it is important to remember that actually, if you have someone who's given fully informed consent, as these volunteers have, and then they understand what they're doing, that you have to allow them to do it. And remember that when a website was put up called One Day Sooner calling for volunteers for these trials, I think they had something like 20,000 people volunteer. So there are huge numbers of people who just want to do this for all the kinds of right reasons, for ethical reasons of their own.

Thanks very much for your time, Natasha.

Thank you too, Jason.

Darkness is increasingly hard to come by. I mean the real pitch blackness of night. Wherever there's industrialization, urbanization, wherever there are people, there's light pollution. That's not much concern for those who are just looking to get around, but it's a real problem for those trying to look up.

This group called the International Dark Sky Association has certified about 130 dark sky places globally in the last 20 years, and 14 of those are in the state of Colorado.

Erin Braun is The Economist's Mountain West correspondent.

And for some of those places, it presents a real opportunity for towns in rural places to kind of reinvent themselves.

And how do they go about doing that?

So I went down to the town of Creed, Colorado, and that's in the southern part of the state in the San Juan Mountains. And Creed is an old silver mining town. For about 100 years, its prosperity was tied to the price of silver. It had a huge boom period in the late 1800s, and then most people left. Only about 300 people live in the town today. These days, environmentalists and residents in the town are kind of looking to the stars rather than silver to revive their local economy. Creed benefits from some tourism. Lots of campers and hikers come through in the summer to hike the beautiful trails and see the Rio Grande National Forest. But the rest of the year is lonelier, and residents down there told me that they wish that they could kind of space tour us out throughout the year. So creating a dark sky reserve in the county surrounding Creed is one idea of a way to attract people to the town and kind of help prop up the town's economy.

And so what actually needs to be done to make Creed one of these dark sky reserves?

A lot of it depends on things like replacing old light bulbs on state or county land and turning off lights at night and things like that. But Creed actually should have an easier time than other towns being certified as a Dark Sky Reserve because 95% of Mineral County, which includes Creed, is public land, and a lot of that is the Rio Grande National Forest. And so the forest is already dark, so a lot of their work is actually done for them.

So the residents of Crete are on board with making those changes in order to get the skywatchers in?

Most of them are. It's kind of a cause that transcends politics, if you will. But there's a difference in talking about creating a dark sky reserve in theory and in practice. And when you start trying to tell people kind of what lights they should buy and what time they should turn them off, you kind of see this libertarian aversion to being told what to do, which exists in a lot of rural places in the West. And more than anything else, I think the idea of creating a dark sky reserve requires residents to get comfortable with the dark, and that can be a scary thing.

And what's a dark sky reserve actually like?

So in order to get a sense of the difference between the night skies in a place like Creed and where I live in Denver, I drove up to a really remote part of the town that is kind of away from all of the buildings and at the verge of the forest and sat on the roof of my car and looked up at the stars, and you realize kind of how much is out there and how small you are. And I didn't quite understand that sentiment, I think, until I was looking up at the stars. And it really is quite a difference to what maybe a lot of us are used to in the big cities that we live in.

And so you think by simply creating the, the situation for being able to get that kind of breathtaking view of the sky will, will create the kind of tourism that the Creed wants?

I think it's going to be really tricky to find a balance between encouraging tourists to come for these natural amenities, but only encouraging tourists to come in limited numbers. The reason that I wanted to go to Creed in particular is because it seemed emblematic of the ways in which the West is changing, you know, moving from one type of economy to another, dealing with massive population growth. And in Creed, at least, it seems like their efforts to create a dark sky reserve to revive their economy will hopefully pay off.

Thanks very much for joining us, Erin.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.