Individual members of Shinzo Abe’s disaster-prone first cabinet variously fiddled official expenses, de­meaned women as “breeding mach­ines”, committed suicide and turned up to a press conference with a face unaccount­ably covered in bandages. The cabinet he named on Monday can only do better.

Mr Abe, the youngest prime minister since the war, has persuaded some of his party’s most experienced veterans to join his cabinet in an effort to dispel the notion that his administration is doomed. The prime minister refused to resign following last month’s humiliating defeat in upper house elections, which for the first time gave control of the chamber to the opposition Democratic party of Japan.