Steve Barclay has been MP for North East Cambridgeshire since 2010 and has held more senior offices than almost anyone of his time, Brexit Secretary, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Health Secretary twice and Environment Secretary, and is remembered for almost none of them. He is the ultimate utility minister, moved from crisis to crisis and rarely the cause of a solution.

He came to politics with a serious grounding, a short spell in the Army, then a career as a solicitor and in financial regulation at the Financial Services Authority and Barclays, and a Cambridge history degree. He works hard and masters a brief quickly, which is why successive prime ministers kept reaching for him. He was the last Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, in post when the department closed on the night Britain left in January 2020, and he ran the Treasury's spending as Chief Secretary through the pandemic. There is a real competence here that explains the volume of jobs.

What there is not is achievement. As Health Secretary through 2022 and 2023 he inherited the worst wave of NHS industrial action in the service's history and made little headway against it, refusing to negotiate on pay with junior doctors while strike after strike went ahead, and arriving in the job, in the words of the leading health journal, with a worse reputation among NHS leaders than any predecessor. He was caught making a claim about doctors' tax free pensions that the government itself had to admit was wrong. He landed a pay deal with the nursing and other unions, which was something, but he left the doctors' dispute unresolved for his successors.

His move to Environment in late 2023 brought its own difficulty. His wife is a senior executive at Anglian Water, a company under investigation and fined over sewage, while Barclay ran the department responsible for regulating exactly that. He declared the interest, as the rules require, and the rules are the problem as much as he is.

In 2024 he held North East Cambridgeshire by around seven thousand votes with Reform UK in second place, his majority less than half what it had been. Kemi Badenoch did not give him a shadow role, and he now chairs the Commons Finance Committee, an administrative post overseeing the running of Parliament itself.

Barclay is diligent, adaptable and the sort of minister a government leans on when it needs a department steadied rather than reinvented. He is also the embodiment of seniority without legacy, a man who held one great office after another and is associated with no reform, no idea and, in the job where it mattered most, a confrontation he could not bring to an end. The career is long. The record is short.