This weeks Cabinet reshuffle took place just over a year since David Cameron’s first reshuffle and according to various reports, a year before his final reshuffle which will be the one when he delivers on his 2010 election promise on gender balance just in time for the General Election 2015. So much for Cameron believing in stable leadership. Like all reshuffles it provides commentators with a chance to speculate and those who have been promoted or moved with a chance to learn about new areas of responsibility. The BBC webpage that shows the new cabinet here allows browsers to identify the age, gender and party implications of the change. Changes to the Cabinet could have a profound impact on our lives, yet we are mere observers to the process. These men and the small number of women have won their new roles or sustained the existing one as a result of pleasing the Prime Minister and his small coterie of advisers, or in the case of the Lib Dems their link to Nick Clegg. A small number of our Ministers have skills and experience that would suggest they are suited to their roles, the majority do not. In a society where an insignificantly small number of residents are members of any political party, the link between electors and the decisions being taken are limited to the hackneyed concept of accountability through the 5 yearly ballot box. Because this accountability is so flimsy, and gives us so little opportunity to decide on anything more than which of the candidates should represent us locally, the decision by 35% of us not to vote is very understandable.

We all know that in the real world, selection for a job usually involves matching candidates against a job description which frequently demands some paper qualifications, some previous relevant experience and certain skills. The choice that the interviewers make is then to a large extent subjective, no matter how scrupulous the interview process is. To be a Cabinet Minister rather than being as opposed to a faithful and skilled back bencher appears in many cases to demand no more than having caught the PMs eye. One of the junior movers in this weeks reshuffle was Norman Baker, who was widely recognised of having a good grasp of his Transport brief, from bikes to trains and buses. He demonstrates no particular  understanding of the work of the Home Office, apart from his criticism of the department in the past and his book on Dr David Kelly. His place in the Department for Transport has been taken by Susan Kramer who as a previous London Mayoral candidate and a London MP may be a great deal less likely to challenge the London centric nature of UK transport strategy than Norman has been. She like many colleagues has nothing on her CV to suggest she is an expert in transportation issues.

Whilst any Prime Minister needs to be able to select or block the appointment of Government Ministers that they do not wish to include, the interests of the 62M people who pay the wages of these Ministers and who ultimately are subject to their decisions in a manner that few Ministers will ever understand also needs to be considered. We need some scrutiny on these choices and some sense of challenge where someone is appointed without any tangible link to the job in hand. It is telling that the biographies for most of our Ministerial teams on the .Gov websites show no previous experience in the brief concerned, yet long lists of previous government posts that are usually totally irrelevant to the subject. If our Government Ministers are the best in class when it comes to delighting the current Prime Minister, they will almost certainly be of limited value to the rest of us. Some of the pronouncements from Central Government can be frustrating to the real experts in the fields concerns, in large part because people who specialise in party political careers, often do so at the expense of other skills and experience. It is clear that the Government and opposition are not going to change this system without external pressure, we must find ways of exerting this pressure.