The Prime Minister’s Aides

Abstract

The British system of government cannot really be called prime ministerial government, nor can it be called cabinet government. The right term is ministerial government, because legally powers are given in Acts of parliament to ministers. No powers are given to the prime minister or cabinet: they do not exist legally; they are conventions. And administratively ministers have to support and sustain them in the carrying out of their tasks large executive bureaucracies, and these bureaucracies are very much concerned with particular functions and services. The bureaucracies are functionally oriented, and clustering around them, further strengthening centrifugal tendencies, are pressure groups, concerned again with particular services and functions. Politically ministers themselves have made their own reputations in parliament. They are ministers because of their own work in winning political credit. They are not there simply because the prime minister appointed them, or because he did not dismiss them. Most are ministers because they have made themselves indispensable to the prime minister so that he cannot help but appoint them and dare not sack them.

G. W. Jones, The Prime Minister’s Aides, Hull Papers in Politics No. 6 (Hull: Department of Politics, University of Hull, 1980).