President Emmanuel Macron and his freshly installed Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, appointed a new French cabinet this week. It is little more than a reshuffle – and unlikely to lead to sunlit uplands for Macron’s beleaguered presidency. Of particular significance are the two centre-right ministers whose appointment testifies to the continuing rightward drift of the Macronist project in search of that elusive parliamentary working majority. At the same time, and despite all denials, policy is also being drawn rightwards towards the agenda set by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National on immigration, crime and policing. But the desired effects of the fresh cabinet are already proving vain (as I wrote earlier this week).

The new government has been dubbed Sarkozy IV (after the centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy, who left office in 2012) for including two of his former ministers: Rachida Dati, who will oversee culture, and Catherine Vautrin, who is charged with leading the mega-ministry of health and work (which has already upset trade unions). Their inclusion was to curry favour with the centre-right Les Républicains in the hope of gaining some of their 62 votes in the National Assembly to allow Macron to press on with his manifesto. However, no sooner had Dati’s name been announced than the leader of Les Républicains excluded her from the party, ensuring that the first test of Attal’s cabinet to attract centre-right votes is a failure. Dati had been serving as the mayor of Paris’s 7th arrondissement for Les Républicains when she was added to Attal’s cabinet.

To make matters worse, media focus has concentrated on the ongoing corruption investigation into the culture minister. Macron, who is no newcomer to political blunders, clearly allowed his zeal for ‘disruptive’ politics to cloud basic common sense. Minister, Prime Minister and President will be forced to exhaust considerable political capital and time defending this rash decision.