Who cares about Liz Truss’s ‘diverse’ cabinet?

‘Great offices of state set to contain no white men’ was the way one national newspaper reported the formation of the first Truss cabinet. In addition to Liz Truss, the positions of Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary would respectively be held by Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman.

Of course, all this was presented as something incredibly new and exciting: real progress at work. In fact it isn’t remotely new. As Chancellor, Kwarteng follows those two famous white men Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. As Home Secretary, Braverman succeeds Priti Patel and Sajid Javid. And now that Truss is Prime Minister she is the first woman to relieve us from male-dominated rule for a full three years. Also, after Theresa May, thank God a woman is back in charge, eh?

Nevertheless the diversity lobby remains ecstatic at the sheer diverseness of it all. Sunder Katwala, who runs a group called British Future, told the Times:

‘The most striking thing is how ordinary and extraordinary it is at the same time. This is an extraordinary pace of change even in two or three years, never mind a decade.’

And needless to say that is the only way to talk about this. The more the dastardly white man recedes into the background, the more positive change we will be undergoing. It reminds me of Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London once telling me how thrilled he was that something like a third of Londoners were born outside of the UK. You got the distinct impression that he wouldn’t be happy until absolutely everybody in capital was not born in Britain.

All of this, naturally, is laced with false presumptions. For example, there is the notion that being a female leader is in some way better than being a male one.