Ministers have been warned not to drink during the week if they want to keep their jobs as party bosses impose new “metrics” for success on Theresa May’s team.
Junior ministers were told by the chief whip, Julian Smith, that they would have to do well in five key areas to keep their posts in a year’s time.
Smith and Gavin Barwell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, summoned junior ministers to a meeting after May’s botched reshuffle earlier this month. Smith told them that they would be judged on whether they had ideas, the quality of their “execution and delivery”, “engagement with colleagues”, “teamwork” and “passion”.
One of those present said: “He said we have to have hunger and passion to do a really good job and ‘That means do you really want to be drinking during the week?’ It was all a bit weird.”
Smith told the ministers that he had spent days dealing with disgruntled MPs who had not been promoted and warned the new arrivals: “Count yourselves lucky — there are people who were ministers a year ago who are not ministers today.” He promised to sit down with them in six months to carry out a performance assessment.
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MPs say Smith, who set up his own executive recruitment company, Arq International, in 1999 before he entered parliament, was trying to bring in human resources techniques to improve Tory performance.
Chris Pincher, the deputy chief whip, summoned all the parliamentary private secretaries — Commons bag carriers for ministers — to a similar pep talk last week. His presentation on the 15 metrics that they would be judged against turned into a farce when the overhead projector he was using “conked out”.