Insight: What Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle means for Scotland

While most MPs may have been soaking up the last of summer recess on the August bank holiday, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch used it as an opportunity to reshuffle her frontbench.

Under her leadership, the Tories have slowly begun to pick up support after a record election defeat in 2024 – they want to be seen as the party of ‘fiscal responsibility’, opposed to raising taxes and keen to slash welfare.

However, Badenoch’s party still trails behind both Labour and Reform UK in the polls, and so Monday’s reshuffle was a chance for the Tory leader to push out colleagues she felt were weak contributors.

That included her former shadow chancellor Mel Stride, whose head had been on the chopping block for some time. Badenoch’s onetime competition for the Conservative Party leadership, Priti Patel, has also been relegated to the backbenches from shadow foreign secretary – albeit with a new international role.

Other changes include the promotion of Claire Coutinho from the energy brief to business and trade – a job that will be undertaken by Julia Lopez MP while Coutinho is on maternity leave. And Andrew Griffith – who, Conservative commentators pointed out, has more experience in the private sector than the combined Labour Cabinet – is the new shadow chancellor.

And Badenoch’s new frontbench contains a third (two of six) of the Scottish Tory MPs in the Commons. Andrew Bowie has been promoted to shadow energy security secretary from his Scotland brief. The West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine MP, who backed Badenoch for the Conservative Party leadership contest in 2024, had also held the role of shadow energy minister since the general election, and before that served as energy minister in Rishi Sunak’s government.

Now the Scottish MP will take on the shadow energy brief at a pivotal point: politicians, workers and industry figures alike are still waiting to hear whether the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields have been green-lighted, while questions about how best to protect Britain’s energy security have been placed front and centre after the beginning of the Iran war.

Bowie’s move to head up energy means that the shadow Scotland position was vacant: this will now be filled by Gordon and Buchan’s Harriet Cross, a 2024 intake MP who has been vocal in the Commons on the future of the North Sea, the economy and farming. She grew up in Cork in Ireland before moving to Aberdeenshire with her family, returning to the north of Scotland to work as a chartered rural surveyor after university. Cross won the new seat of Gordon and Buchan seat in July 2024, with the new constituency an amalgamation of Banff and Buchan (held by the Tories) and Gordon (held by the SNP). She was made opposition assistant whip some months later and sits on the Scottish Affairs Committee.

Alongside Bowie, Cross has been a vocal critic of the UK and Scottish government’s energy policies and advocates for more drilling in the North Sea. Both have pressed SNP MPs on when the party’s energy strategy will be published and whether the party supports new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. (“The SNP backs new licences with the normal environmental assessments and everything that goes with that,” Graham Leadbitter MP told Cross during a Westminster Hall debate in July.)

The Conservatives have taken a ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach to domestic energy production – despite being the party to introduce the energy profits levy, a 78% tax on the profits made by energy giants (a move which Bowie has consistently described as ‘wrong’), which the industry has condemned for deterring investment in the area. It’s a welcome sentiment for many oil and gas workers in the north-east, as demonstrated by the Tory victory in Aberdeen South, where Douglas Lumsden won the seat from Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s former Westminster leader, after campaigning on a pro-oil and gas message.

As the subject of the UK’s energy future becomes more pressing, Badenoch’s decision to have both Bowie and Cross in her shadow cabinet is yet another firm signal of intent of where the Conservatives stand on the future of the North Sea.