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Whitehall's new IT minister, who's it gonna be?

Francis Maude gets top Cabinet Office job

David Cameron has taken on Francis Maude as minister for the Cabinet Office, but the MP set to be handed the ConLib coalition government’s IT brief is yet to be announced.

Oliver Letwin, meanwhile, has become the minister of state in the Cabinet Office, where he will act as the new Prime Minister’s policy advisor.

Maude has been the Conservative's shadow minister for the Cabinet Office for the last few years, and apparently has an outsourcing blueprint for the unit, which oversees the rest of Whitehall.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that David Willets was the minister of state for universities and science.

He will report to Lib Dem Secretary of State Vince Cable, who will head up the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Junior ministerial announcements will continue to trickle through for at least the rest of today.

In the meantime we’ve asked the Cabinet Office to tell us if Grant Shapps would be handed the IT brief, especially following his spectacular pre-election opus on the wonders of Twitter and Apple being an open source company here on El Reg.

“There’s not been an announcement about who will take on that job yet,” said a spokeswoman at the CO.

Apparently Shapps is actually being tipped to join the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Whomever is handed the government’s IT portfolio will, among other duties, be responsible for overseeing the Cabinet Office’s open source and open standards software procurement policy, which the previous Labour administration rejigged under then IT minister Angela Smith in January this year.

Smith, who like Shapps recently got her knickers in a twist about open source technology, lost her seat in last week's General Election that resulted in a hung Parliament. ®

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