Binaries and smudges

I predicted (to the wife and the birds in the garden) that  P Toynbee would be uspset by the Cabinet reshuffle yesterday-- and she is! 

The removal of Sajid Javid – and anyone who ever queried Boris Johnson’s progress – is a demand for craven cabinet obedience

Not long ago, she was predicting the failure of Johnson's spending plans as the then Chancellor insisted on cuts and further austerity. Now it seems the reverse:

The Treasury, which strove to protect the nation’s finances against the worst damages of Brexit, is a diminished force – for now.  ...This is a revenge reshuffle: off with the head of anyone who ever queried Johnson’s progress, any doubter of his hard Brexit deal-making.

 She remembers her earlier arguments halfway down and now qualifies them:

Resisting Treasury orthodoxy is often the right course of action; more spending is precisely what the country now needs. But there is scant sign that the money will flow to restoring the greatest damage done by almost a decade of austerity.

Johnson’s choice of pipsqueaks and placemen, yes-women and yellow bellies is the most under-brained, third-rate cabinet in living memory...Dominic Raab in the Foreign Office...has proved himself well able to lie like a battalion of troopers on anything connected to Brexit. On Sky he was already laying out his “blame the EU” strategy for the new red tape, tariffs and border checks Johnson’s own obduracy will create....Michael Gove, [is] in control of the Cabinet Office and de facto deputy prime minister. Never forget that behind the suave courtesy is a ferocious ideologue, devilishly effective in driving his projects through government. 

I have no time for Gove's awful education policies, but I do think it is impossible to get any sort of proper grasp with this absurd binary -- yellow bellies/ferocious ideologue

The Grun editorial goes for classic liberal smudge, with lots of conditionals:

It may [also] be that Mr Javid, a protege of George Osborne, was too wedded to fiscal orthodoxy and austerity to permit it. The truth probably lies in a mix of the two readings – centralist control and a difference over spending... it may be premature to see Thursday’s dramatic events as nothing more than a Johnson-Cummings power grab.

Both the Editor and PToynbee are also worried that 

a task as important as chairing the vital Cop26 UN climate change conference in Glasgow falls to the inexperienced new business secretary, Alok Sharma.

The whole thing seems a bit fuhrerprinzip-ish of them -- do Chairpersons dictate the whole thing? Does climate change really depend on who is chairing some meeting?