“I will unite our country, not with words, but with action,” Rishi Sunak tweeted, an hour before he began officially naming his first cabinet. And at first glance the 31-strong cabinet does appear to make concessions to his rival candidates for party leader (notwithstanding the fact that one of them, Boris Johnson, never officially entered the race). Four of this intake, all them full members, made public declarations for Johnson before he declared that he would not run. Suella Braverman, James Cleverly and Nadhim Zahawi all supported Liz Truss in the first round of the July leadership contest. And although none of those who came out in support of Penny Mordaunt in the past week made it to cabinet, she herself did. But is Sunak’s cabinet representative of the nation it governs? Just one in five ministers are women The second-to-last prime minister was once accused of running a boys’ club, an accusation that Sunak may also now face given that his cabinet is distinctively male in makeup: more than three-quarters of those sitting around the table are men. However, all seven of the female ministers are in senior ministerial roles – including the new attorney general, Victoria Prentis – meaning they will attend as “full” cabinet members.
Sunak follows Truss’s lead on diversity Many of Liz Truss’s first cabinet picks have been obscured by the events that followed, but one thing her brief reign may yet be remembered for is that, for the first time, none of the four great offices of state (prime minister, chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary) were held by a white male. Rishi Sunak made history on Tuesday by becoming the first prime minister of colour, and three of these four positions are now held by people of a BAME background – the exception being Jeremy Hunt, who remains as chancellor after replacing Kwasi Kwarteng in Truss’s original lineup. With 16% of Sunak’s cabinet of a minority background, this means the representation is greater than the 13.7% in the broader population (based on ONS estimates).
Schooling is out of step with public’s Government ministers are eight times more likely to have been privately educated than the general population. More than half of the new cabinet (58%), including Sunak himself, attended private schools, compared with only 7% of the British population. That figure is similar to that for the new prime minister’s two immediate predecessors: 60% of Liz Truss’s cabinet were privately educated, as was the case for about two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s first cabinet and those following his 2021 and 2020 reshuffles. The proportion of privately educated ministers has increased compared with that in Theresa May’s 2016 cabinet (30%) and David Cameron’s in 2015 (50%).
More than half are Oxbridge graduates The new prime minister studied at Oxford, as did another seven members of his cabinet. In total, more than half of the 31-strong cabinet appointed by Sunak are graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge. This is far higher than the 1% of the population who studied at one of the two universities. The proportion of Oxbridge alumni is higher than the one-third in Liz Truss’s first cabinet. The representation is closer to that in Boris Johnson’s cabinets: 45% of the members in his first went to Oxford or Cambridge, increasing to 50% after his first reshuffle in 2020 and 47% after the 2021 reshuffle.
Southern regions over-represented, but not London One of the low points in Sunak’s summer leadership bid was a widely circulated clip in which he admitted taking money from deprived urban areas in order to give it to other parts of the country. Speaking in Tunbridge Wells in the south-east, the then chancellor said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserved.” The constituency was part of the Tory-strong south-east, a region which has nine ministers in the cabinet – 29% of the total – meaning the region is more than twice as well-represented than its proportion of the UK population (13.7%). The east of England, which has six cabinet members, and the south-west (five) are over-represented by similar margins.
Londoners, many of whom live in just such urban deprived areas, will not be represented in Sunak’s new cabinet: not one of the 31 members represents a constituency in the capital. The north-east is also without a minister representing them. Nor is a single “red wall” constituency represented after yesterday’s announcements. • This article was amended on 28 October 2022 to clarify the comparative representation of those from a minority background in Sunak’s cabinet as against the figure in the broader population.