Small earthquake in Cameron's cabinet - not many dead

'David Cameron's night of the long knives' is the headline I expect to see in tomorrow's papers.  But is this what his Cabinet reshuffle is all about?

I have long argued that Cameron and Osborne are not strategists.  Osborne, the most political Chancellor since, well Gordon Brown, although nowhere near as clever or moody!

Everything they do reeks of politics.  Osborne cannot make a budget announcement without including an elephant trap for the opposition.  It's what he does.

Today's reshuffle shows Cameron the tactician for what he is.

For four years, he has been criticised for not having enough women in his Cabinet but with 10 months left to the General Election he decides to promote some women.   On the face of it, I would support that - except that I can barely bring myself to support the Tories on anything - but if the likes of Esther McVey and Nicky Morgan are that good, why weren't they promoted before?

The all male, all white government front bench plainly doesn't look like Britain and it seems to me that the PM has just noticed and made what some might call token changes.  I am not saying they are token changes because I have no idea of the abilities of the women who have joined the Cabinet.  The men plainly aren't up to much so maybe Cameron has concluded they couldn't do any worse.

Owen Patterson, the Environment Secretary who doesn't believe in climate change (I am not making this up), gets the sack, Michael Gove, the most loathed Education Secretary ever (and for good reasons) gets moved aside and William Hague is leaving to spend more time with his dray horses (I may have made up the last bit).

Window-dressing, shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic - call it what you will - this has nothing but the whiff of political opportunism and raw tactics about it.

The one change Cameron should have made would have been to have sacked Iain Duncan Smith.  Duncan Smith has cost the taxpayer a large fortune with the disastrous roll out of the Universal Credit and the new PIP benefit and caused misery to tens of thousands of sick and disabled people, not to mention terminally ill people some of whom died before their special rules payments were administered.

But the man is a flag-bearer for the right of the Tory Party, the even more right than the usual Tory right, which is saying something. He's unsackable, as well as being useless, and there the true weakness of Cameron is ruthlessly exposed of being a man of no substance and not much style but plenty of tactics.