No 10 criticised as Frost cabinet role amplifies gender imbalance

She added: “We simply shouldn’t be going backwards on equality. The prime minister has committed to supporting a 50/50 parliament; appointing a 50/50 cabinet would show how serious he is about achieving this.”

Grilled by fellow Conservatives on equality in the cabinet during a tense liaison committee hearing last year, Johnson was unable to say how many women in top jobs would be “enough” to secure proper gender representation.

While his first cabinet was hailed as the most ethnically diverse, with six ministers from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, there are now just four BAME full members, making up 17.4%.

The cabinet compares unfavourably on gender with the numbers of women in senior ministerial posts in the devolved nations. In Scotland, seven out of 12 cabinet secretaries are female. Of nine ministers in Wales, five are women. The Northern Ireland executive has six women among 12 executive ministers.

In a January 2020 Women in Politics report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which ranked countries according to the percentages of women they had in ministerial positions, Spain topped the league with 66% – 10 female ministers out of 15 – with Finland in second place, according to publicly available information. It ranked the UK in 49th position, trailing countries including Rwanda, Ethiopia and South Korea.

Frost will replace Michael Gove as the UK chair of the partnership council, the body set up to settle disputes resulting from the trade agreement, and will take Gove’s role chairing the withdrawal agreement joint committee.

Labour’s Emily Thornberry, the shadow international trade secretary, has criticised the fact that the person charged with managing the UK’s post-Brexit trading relationships with Europe is “someone who has never been elected by anyone in this country, and won’t be accountable in the House of Commons to any of us who have”.