The Cabinet as The Colleagues

Abstract

Fifty years ago the Government included only about 60 ministers, one third of them in the Cabinet. By contrast, a modern government includes about 110 ministers, ranging from the Prime Minister and 20 or so members of the Cabinet through Ministers of State to the humblest Parliamentary Private Secretaries (unpaid posts of assistant to a minister, much increased in numbers since the 1960s). Thus about one third of the majority party in the House of Commons constitutes the Government, but only one in seventeen or so ministers is in the Cabinet. Every minister is bound by loyalty (‘the payroll vote’), ambition and the convention of ‘collective responsibility’, which enjoins silence or support. Within this large group of ministers are ‘The Colleagues’, the Prime Minister and senior ministers, most of them members of the Cabinet, and amounting to about one-fifth of the total ministerial complement.