It might have been useful to have rearranged the deckchairs on the Titanic if one were to try to ensure the unimpeded progress of panic-stricken passengers toward the lifeboats.

The troubled leader of the UK's ailing Conservative Party had no such useful purpose ahead of her when she reshuffled her Shadow Cabinet earlier this month.

The world's oldest political party – as it like to style itself – is certainly showing its years, creaking at the seams worse than the overstuffed armchairs that have sat, unrearranged for centuries, in the gentlemen's clubs once brimming with its port-swilling, portly grandees, before they were all replaced by bland corporate types whose wilful incompetence and blind, baseless faith in their own talents led them to wreck the United Kingdom's public services, economy and civil society.

Kemi Badenoch's attempt at parliamentary feng-shui is merely the latest act in her agonisingly drawn-out process of political hara-kiri, a car crash in motion so slow that it feels like a testudinal version of one of the later Matrix films, or a Samuel Beckett play performed by a troupe of snails on diazepam.

Her decision to restore a former Foreign Secretary and former Home Secretary, the inaptly named Sir James Cleverly, to her frontbench team hardly set the ears of the Westminster commentariat alight.

Her choice to give him the Housing portfolio can only possibly be explained by the fact that it had previously been held, apparently, by someone called Kevin Hollinrake – who will now move to become party chair, a position currently about as desirable as that of a wedding planner attached to a euthanasia clinic.

What Mr. Cleverly lacks in wit he makes up for with a lack of charisma, and it will be interesting to see him face up to his opposite number, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in parliament – but only interesting in the same way that it might be interesting, very briefly, to see a well-meaning, enthusiastic, and incongruously bespectacled bunny rabbit set against a rampaging rhinoceros on steroids in an underground cage-fighting club.

Related News

News from Nowhere: Flagging things up

News from Nowhere: Whiter than White

Meanwhile, the Shadow Culture Secretary is to be someone called Nigel Huddleston, a former junior Treasury Minister whose very name screams out, or at least mutters, mediocrity, and who oozes the charmless smarm of a former mid-ranking management consultant from a posher part of the West Midlands. (which is pretty much what he is.)

And Shadow Culture Secretary Stewart Andrew has been promoted to Health, following the departure of his predecessor who has stepped down as a result of a "health scare", which may or may not have included the sudden shock of the revelation that 14 years of his own party's austere and inept rule had devastated the UK's national healthcare system.

A man who served as minister without portfolio in Rishi Sunak’s doomed administration has been given the shadow transport brief, so at least he’ll now have something not to do. 

Further pointlessness attaches to a new role called ‘shadow minister for policy renewal and development’ which appears to have been created to give its unfortunate incumbent a nebulous lack of purpose previously known only to the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, none of this seems likely to do any good. However much the Tory leader may seek to populate her insubstantial fiefdom with an impressive-sounding set of shadow puppets, they remain just that.

Ms. Badenoch's failure to secure a place of respect or fondness in the public imagination may in part relate to her unprepossessing manner and her perennially lacklustre performance at the despatch box – where (like a geriatric terrier) she has repeatedly stuck to a pre-prepared script rather than seeking to hold the prime minister to account for his latest actions or his least convincing arguments and excuses. 

Her ability to improvise or innovate rivals that of an ageing soap star who has played the same part for the last century and who now has no hope of escaping their typecast rut.

But her biggest problem is of course that her attempt to shift her party toward the Radical Right – in a bid to appeal to fans of Nigel Farage's Reform UK (to whom the Conservatives have been haemorrhaging votes with the sanguine paralysis of Count Dracula's mesmerised bride), is unlikely to be enough to persuade a bunch of racist, xenophobic chauvinists to vote a black woman of immigrant stock into Downing Street.

And so, despite the political woes of the government against which she’s supposed to mount an effective opposition, however much she tries (and however much she reshuffles her deck of losing cards, aces low and jokers all), she can only sit and watch as her party's supporters and her own MPs desert the sinking ship that the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain has today become.