The surprise dismissal of Education Minister Randy Horton from Cabinet on Tuesday suggests that all is far from well in the Brown administration. Mr. Horton revealed yesterday that he was fired after refusing to resign, and that the ostensible reason was the slow pace of education reform.

Dr. Brown described education as the centrepiece of his party's programme on Tuesday and said yesterday that he was disappointed with slow progress since early in the summer.

In fairness to Mr. Horton, he was placed in a near-impossible situation, given that he did not have direct control of the implementation of the Hopkins Report recommendations. That instead lay with a separate committee chaired by Philip Butterfield, the chief executive of HSBC Bank of Bermuda and the Premier's brother.

So Mr. Horton may well have found himself in the impossible position of having all of the accountability and little of the responsibility for reform.

It is fair to ask why the implementation committee has not been asked to resign as well. And it can be argued, and has been here in the past, that the fundamental reason for delays in the reforms has been caused by the failure of the committee and the Ministry generally to involve teachers, principals and parents in the process. Instead, they have been left on the outside, and have unsurprisingly pushed back.

Elvin James, who replaces Mr. Horton and was an effective Minister of Environment and Youth and Sport, needs to beware that he does not get between the same rock and hard place, or his tenure may well be equally short.

It is impossible to say whether Mr. Horton would have done better if he had more control over the reform process. In any event, you have to deal with the facts as they are, and not as they might have been.

But Mr. Horton's departure from education – at a critical juncture in the reform process – where he is the seventh Minister in ten years affirms the impression that the only consistent thing in Progressive Labour Party education policy in the last decade has been inconsistency.

While the avowed reason for Mr. Horton's departure was lack of performance, it is impossible to believe that the rumours sweeping the Island prior to the PLP conference that Mr. Horton was mulling a leadership challenge was not a factor.

Mr. Horton denied all and in the end no challenge emerged, but it seems likely – and the rapidity of Mr. Horton's departure seems to confirm this – that Dr. Brown was determined to stamp out any hint of rebellion in the Cabinet. This is a two-edged sword, however. Mr. Horton's dismissal may deter surviving Ministers from mounting a challenge, especially with the golden handcuffs that Ministers' salaries, GP cars and so on create.

However, with every Cabinet shuffle, Dr. Brown runs the risk of adding to the sizeable group of unhappy MPs residing on his backbenches, and he may be storing up trouble for the future. Many of them are former friends and allies of the Premier, none more so than Mr. Horton, who was once Dr. Brown's closest ally, a fellow conspirator in the bid to unseat Dame Jennifer Smith in 2003 and his "running mate" in the 2006 unseating of Alex Scott.

Again, it brings to mind Renee Webb's aphorism that Dr. Brown uses people and then kicks them to the kerb. When will they learn?