Here’s how much of an insiders’ cabal the latest Bush cabinet is. The new education secretary, Margaret Spellings, began her political career in the mid-1980s, when Karl Rove, the president’s election strategist, asked her out on a date. Somehow, he got over the rejection.

Two decades of complete political subservience later and Ms Spellings gets a job enforcing her boss’s takeover of American education, hitherto the preserve of the 50 states.

Spellings helped to run George W Bush’s 1994 campaign for Texas governor and has been working long hours below the radar in the White House for the past four years.

Is she a radical? Not exactly. She hasn’t pushed for the conservative policy of school vouchers and, as a former single mother now on her second marriage, has distanced herself from the religious right. Is she a toady? Well, that’s a loaded term. Let’s just recall that, outside of the Bush orbit, Spellings has virtually no record and no career. She is his creature.

Now look at Alberto Gonzales, the new attorney-general. If you were to look for any real Gonzales career outside of doing whatever Bush wanted, your search would be fruitless. Gonzales is from the president’s tiny court in Austin, Texas. He was Bush’s chief legal adviser when Bush was governor, a role he reprised in the first White House term.

Gonzales didn’t trouble the governor with any legal qualms about the scores of inmates Bush had executed: the process was as swift and as pain-free (for the governor) as Bush wanted it. And when the White House was looking for a way to justify the “almost torture” of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, Gonzales provided official legal cover for ignoring the “quaint” Geneva conventions.

And who replaced Gonzales as chief White House lawyer? One Harriet Miers, another under-the-radar flunky of the first term. Where did she get her start? You beat me to it. She was one of Bush’s closest confidantes and friends when he was running for office or governing Texas.

Many presidents have a kitchen cabinet or a coterie of White House confidants who balance out a broader selection of official cabinet appointees.

But Bush, in his second-term reshuffle, has conflated the two. In his first term, he was praised for bringing in heavyweights who clearly had more experience or clout than he did. That doesn’t seem to be happening again.

Fierce loyalty is a prerequisite for serving Bush, as Colin Powell found out. Loyalty matters far more than being right or being competent. That’s why Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, is staying and Powell, the secretary of state, is leaving. And that’s why the paradox of Bush’s new mandate is that his renewed confidence has led him not to reach out, but to coil ever tightly within.

Condoleezza Rice is the chief example of this. Like Miers, she is unmarried. At a Georgetown dinner party, she made the Freudian slip of referring to the president as her “husband”.

Although she was groomed as a disciple of Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and old-style, balance-of-power realist, she quickly adapted to 9/11 and “mind-melded” with Bush in revamping US foreign policy on neoconservative lines.

Within the inner circle, she became the president’s proxy in foreign policy debates, navigating — mostly unsuccessfully — between the warring troika of Dick Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld. Unlike other Bush flunkies, she did have a real career outside his orbit, as provost of Stanford University. But her public life has been Bush’s public life. The notion that she would ever say, even in private, anything that might displease or contradict her boss is unthinkable.

Are these people capable? The answer is that they are capable in exactly the way the president wants them to be: in enforcing his view over the bureaucracy. Is this exercise of presidential control a danger? In some respects, it obviously is.

It is not a sign of real strength that you banish alternative views from your internal deliberations or surround yourself with people who owe their entire careers to your patronage. But it isn’t a sign of strength to appoint or acquiesce in appointments that do not carry out your policy preferences effectively.

Bush regards his re-election as a vindication of almost everything he has done in the past four years, and so feels confident enough to have servants, rather than peers, to pursue the same course in the future. That’s his prerogative.

That’s also why he has imposed Porter Goss on the CIA, an agency that for much of the past year was almost an adjunct of the John Kerry campaign. Senior dissidents are quitting, internal debate is subsiding and the revamping, begun by former director George Tenet, is continuing.

There’s a practical purpose to this. There is no doubt that internal dissent in the Bush administration was a factor in, for example, the execrable post-war planning in Iraq. It’s good to teach the saboteurs that they won’t be tolerated in future.

At the same time, enforcing orthodoxy only works if the orthodoxy is clearly right. You’d be hard put to argue that the foreign policy of the past four years has been an uncomplicated success, or that it would have benefited from less internal debate, rather than more. But Bush believes otherwise and, ultimately, that’s all that matters.

And then there’s politics. The appointment of high-profile Hispanics and blacks is not accidental. Bush squeezed his share of the African-American vote from 9% in 2000 to 11% earlier this month. By appealing to anti-gay attitudes of many older blacks, he is hoping to peel off some more in the future. The same goes for the Latino vote.

Karl Rove knows that symbols matter, that if the Republicans maintain their grip on white born-agains and chip away at the Democrats’ ethnic bases, a true realignment is possible.

But you can always be surprised. The rumour last week was that Bush was going to ask a Democrat to be his agriculture secretary. Senator Ben Nelson has apparently been offered the job. After a brief buzz about a possibly bipartisan tilt to further appointments, a reality check was in order.

Nelson is from Nebraska. Were he to resign, the Republicans would have a good chance of picking up another Senate seat and inching toward a filibuster-proof Senate. What looked like an attempt to reach out was, in fact, a bid to seize even greater control. The vice tightens. And the path narrows.