THE cabinet has become a killing field of political careers. Four senior ministers have left for the backbenches in the past eight months—and if there is any justice then two more, Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, and Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, will soon be following them. But one minister is thriving against the odds. Since becoming secretary of state for the environment last June, Michael Gove has revived his reputation and revitalised his department. Some bookmakers put him as the favourite to replace Theresa May as Tory leader.

The skills that have brought him to this unexpected position were on display in a speech he delivered on June 6th at Policy Exchange, a right-of-centre think-tank, about the state of capitalism. He started off by praising the system as the most successful wealth-creating machine the world has seen, but went on to lament “the failure of our current model of capitalism to deliver the progress we all aspire to”. Productivity growth is sluggish. Wage growth has stagnated. Economic insecurity is rife. A well-connected oligarchy is sucking up a disproportionate share of the proceeds of growth. If Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, had spoken in similar terms, the tabloids would be up in arms.

Mr Gove’s speech is a good example of his ability to identify a change of mood in his party and articulate it for the broader public. For most of the four decades following Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, Conservatives thought it was enough to praise capitalism and demonise the state. Today, with much of the privatised rail system in chaos and some franchises being taken back under public control, sentient Tories are telling a more complicated story. They are making a sharp distinction between good and bad capitalism, and suggesting a much more active role for the state in promoting the first and tackling the second.

Several ministers have echoed Mr Gove’s thoughts, though none has expressed them quite so vigorously. Mrs May has revived Edward Heath’s talk of “the unacceptable face of capitalism”, a phrase which Thatcherites once dismissed as heresy. Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the exchequer, says he wants to curb capitalism’s excesses. Matt Hancock, the culture secretary, promises to tame the “Wild West” of the internet.

Some of the brightest Tory MPs outside the cabinet are also asking hard questions about capitalism. Jesse Norman is about to publish a book arguing that Adam Smith was a much more complicated thinker than many libertarians, including the Adam Smith Institute, believe. Smith worried that markets were prone to being hijacked by rent-seekers and that companies could become tools of oppression. Right-wing think-tanks are producing blueprints for reforming capitalism, just as they once drew up blueprints for unleashing it.

The Tories are making sure that they praise the good version of capitalism. Liz Truss, the chief secretary to the Treasury, often applauds digital disrupters such as Airbnb and Deliveroo. She frequently pitches her argument to young people, who might be attracted to Mr Corbyn for cultural reasons but who are also keen on starting their own companies or, at the very least, picking the fruits of the entrepreneurial economy in the form of home-delivered meals and Uber rides. The Conservatives are determined not to repeat the mistake of last year’s election, when they lacked a positive economic message to sell.

At the same time, they are targeting bad capitalism. Its most egregious form is cronyism. Many of Britain’s privatised industries are much too close to government. This can lead to dismal service, as on the railways. It also encourages a cycle of connection-greased over-investment, followed by collapse, as in the case of Carillion, a giant outsourcer.

Cronyism often goes along with rent-seeking. The government worries that some sectors of the economy, particularly property and utilities, are rife with it. Ministers have threatened to punish developers who “bank” land, rather than building. Greg Clark, the business secretary, has published a green paper on the way that energy companies use their market power to short-change households, particularly the poorest, by making it hard to switch providers and, in effect, charging loyal customers higher prices. Mr Gove broadened the debate by suggesting that large swathes of industry might be affected by rent-seeking. Managers have devoted too much energy to boosting their salaries and not enough to encouraging productive investment, he said.

Another variety of bad capitalism is market dominance. The Social Market Foundation, a centrist think-tank, argues that eight out of ten consumer markets that it examined were dominated by a small number of incumbents. Mr Hammond is pondering whether new regulations are needed to curb the excesses of the internet giants. Backbench Tory MPs routinely complain about the fact that bricks-and-mortar shops are going out of business, turning high streets into mausoleums, while internet-based companies escape from paying taxes.

From each according to his ability

These new Tory critics of capitalism are less successful at providing solutions than they are at diagnosing the problems. In his speech, Mr Gove put forward a series of clever suggestions—such as creating different classes of shares, so that company founders can retain more control when companies go public—without fleshing out how they might work in practice. They are also guilty of underestimating the forces they are up against. The rewards for lobbying and cronyism are huge. Interest groups have an astonishing ability to grind down reformers—look at the way that Mr Clark’s reforms of corporate governance have been reduced to almost nothing. But these are reasons to redouble their efforts to reform the system, rather than retreat in despair. Mr Gove is surely right that if capitalism’s friends don’t reform the system, then capitalism’s enemies will do it for them.