It’s now the Tories who don’t get the digital age

With Theresa May’s reshuffle now complete, a consensus is forming that it’s been a rather underwhelming rearranging of the deck chairs. All the big beasts remain in place and some junior ministers appear to have been moved from their briefs just for the sake of moving them. Matters weren’t helped by a shambolic roll out which saw Chris Grayling falsely announced on Twitter as the new party chairman – and reports of disarray with ministers refusing to budge thanks to hacks tweeting the time each had spent in Downing Street.

It’s clear that no-one in No 10 has mastered the art of completing a reshuffle in the digital age. As I write in today’s i paper, although David Cameron once taunted Gordon Brown that he was ‘an analogue politician in a digital age’ who was ‘completely stuck in the past’, it’s now the Tories who don’t get the digital age. Whether it’s cringe-worthy Conservative Instagram posts, fake news dominating social media or self-inflicted Twitter gaffes, the Tories know they are on the back foot online.