It’s going to be hard for Theresa May to get this Cabinet reshuffle right

The broader concern is that the Tories are ageing in office and sorely need a transfusion of younger talent in the right jobs. Both May and her Chancellor are in their early sixties, so is Sir Patrick McLoughlin, the party chairman. David Davis, currently chief architect of Brexit, will turn 70 at the end of 2018. Nothing wrong with experience: Jeremy Corbyn, for all his enthusiasm for hip-hop New Year videos, is well into his Freedom Pass years. But without determination to engage with the interests and concerns of millennials (the oldest of whom are now well into their thirties), the Conservatives will become the party of the grey. Not in a fetching Agyness Deyn way, either.

That is where May has potential to rejuvenate her ranks and put a more imaginative stamp on her Government early in 2018. She might look to mid-generation sorts like Jo Johnson — the “serious” Johnson — who managed to pilot a tricky bill through parliament and set up the higher education regulator at a time when students (and their co-funding parents) are getting more concerned about the value proposition of many universities.

Johnson junior is an assiduous Remainer; so is Damian Hinds, another overlooked talent tipped for promotion. To balance options on the Leave side, Dominic Raab is astute on terrorism and criminal justice with a talent for “call me Dom” informality.

A new breed of successful Tories will not however simply be copies from the Cameron era. Nor should they be told-you-so Ken Clarke-ites, which is what too many of the leading Remain voices in the party sound like. Ruth Davidson’s more grounded manner feels like a promising answer to that but she is wedded to Scottish politics for the time being.

It is still odd, at a time when women remain only modestly represented in the middle ministerial ranks, that Margot James, a talented, likeable character and close ally of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, should be constrained to tending small business.

None of these changes can have the slightest hope of positive impact without addressing the biggest task of May’s leadership in the New Year: to ensure a more coherent delivery of Brexit. The triumvirate of Boris Johnson, Davis and Liam Fox is a clunky way to run a complex process. Inevitably, time and effort is wasted on turf wars. No 10 has effectively recognised this by sidelining Boris wherever possible from Brexit matters — and diluting the influence of Davis.

That happened in May’s quietly Machiavellian style, in the poaching of the shrewdest of political civil servants, Olly Robbins, just before Christmas, to head her negotiating team (the implication being that the PM now wants a tighter oversight of dealings on the details of Brexit than she is happy to leave to Davis). Simplifying an over-messy organogram ahead of the crunch of trade negotiations delivery is essential.

So an unstable triumvirate of Johnson at the Foreign Office, Davis as Brexit Secretary and Fox, who has clocked up 200,000 miles on an odyssey of touting for trade, needs redress.

It seems quite nutty to me that Antonia Romero, as the energetic permanent secretary loosely in charge of Fox, has little regular access to the Brexit or Foreign Secretaries. So the idea of widening Boris’s remit to more practical liaison may not be a bad way of handling the Cabinet’s most demanding member, even if, like all things to do with the Foreign Secretary, it is risky.

Colleagues often moan that Boris gains credit by preaching Brexit without taking any responsibility for delivering the elusive “deep and special partnership with Europe” after 2019. This might be the time to test his practical rather than rhetorical mettle.

Two other figures matter in this fissile mix. One is Michael Gove, who might be a reshuffle beneficiary, having eaten enough humble pie to work his way into May’s good books and impressed with a forensic approach to Brexit practicalities. “Of all the Leavers in the room, Gove annoys May least,” says a witness to their dealings. “She trusts him more than Boris — and he doesn’t talk down to her like Davis.” (I gather it was May who helped Gove have the last word in a heated debate on trade in pre-Christmas Cabinet). Even without a formal elevation he is now effectively on No 10’s approved Team Brexit.

The final piece of the puzzle is Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who could inherit the First Secretary status vacated by Damian Green in a sign of trust by a PM to whom openness does not come easily. Hunt, says a No 10 source “is one of the few in Cabinet TM believes is really on her side”.

One oddity persists: a lot of this psychodrama could be avoided if the PM and Chancellor could bring themselves to work more fruitfully together and provide a steadier core to the Government. Not much prospect of that, alas. Hammond will stay in post but the permafrost remains intact. Some New Year’s resolutions are just never going to happen.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist