NEW Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has finalised her top team, seeking to unite her disputatious party around her new shadow cabinet.

Big winners from her reshuffle include new shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, a fervent supporter of Israel who was regarded as extreme when she was home secretary in the last government until being replaced by Suella Braverman.

Shadow chancellor Mel Stride’s appointment was seen as a win for Conservative centrism, although since he is on record, like Ms Badenoch, as attacking maternity rights, it underlines that this is a very relative description.

Ms Badenoch’s main leadership rival, hard-right cynic Robert Jenrick, is to shadow the justice department. 

This decision was made after a prolonged wrangle with Ms Badenoch, who reputedly does not like Mr Jenrick and is incapable of keeping her preferences hidden.

The rest of the shadow cabinet are barely household names in their own homes. 

Several Sunak-era high-fliers, such as former foreign secretary James Cleverly and ex-chancellor Jeremy Hunt, have opted to return to the backbenches.

So Ms Badenoch, with only 121 MPs behind her, and many of them either past their prime or still awaiting it, was drawing on perhaps the shallowest leadership gene pool since the fall of the Habsburg empire.

Nothing daunted, the new Tory leader claimed after leading the first meeting of her shadow cabinet that it “draws on talents from across our party, based on meritocracy and with a breadth of experience and perspective.”

She added: “We will now get to work holding Labour to account and rebuilding our party based on Conservative principles and values.”