History of The Cabinet of The United Kingdom - Composition

Composition

Cabinet ministers, like all ministers, are appointed and may be dismissed by the monarch at pleasure (that is, they may be dismissed without notice or reason given, although normally they are given a courteous option to resign), on the advice of the Prime Minister. The allocation and transfer of responsibilities between ministers and departments is also generally at the Prime Minister's discretion. The Cabinet has always been led by the Prime Minister, whose unpaid office as such was traditionally described as merely primus inter pares (first among equals), but today the Prime Minister is clearly the preeminent head of government, with the power to appoint and dismiss Cabinet ministers and to control the Cabinet's agenda. The extent to which the Government is collegial presumably varies with political conditions and individual personalities.

Any change to the composition of the Cabinet involving more than one appointment is customarily referred to as a reshuffle; a routine reshuffle normally occurs every summer. The total number of ministers allowed to be paid as "Cabinet ministers" is limited by the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975, and this has caused successive Prime Ministers problems, and accounts for some of the unusual regular attendees at Cabinet, who are not paid as Cabinet ministers. The number in addition to the Prime Minister, currently 22, fluctuates between 21 and 23.

The Cabinet Secretary is neither a Secretary of State or other minister, nor a member of the Cabinet, but is the professional Head of Her Majesty's Civil Service. (The Cabinet Secretaries of the devolved Scottish Government are Scottish Ministers, unrelated to the U.K. Cabinet).

In formal constitutional terms, the Cabinet is a committee of the Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council. All Cabinet members are created Privy Counsellors on appointment (if they are not already Privy Counsellors), but only selected Privy Counsellors are appointed to the Cabinet or invited to attend. MPs in the Cabinet therefore use the style "The Right Honourable"; Privy Counsellors in the House of Lords place the letters "PC" after their names to distinguish themselves, since all peers are "The Right Honourable" or hold a higher style as of right.

Recently the Cabinet has been made up almost entirely of members of the House of Commons. The Leader of the House of Lords is necessarily a member of the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor was, until recently, always a member of the House of Lords, though the current holder is a member of the House of Commons. Otherwise it is now rare for a peer to sit in the Cabinet. Until the re-appointment to the cabinet of Lord Mandelson on 3 October 2008, the former Leader of the Lords, Lady Amos, was the last peer to sit in any other Cabinet post, as Secretary of State for International Development from May to October 2003. Before then, the last Secretary of State for a major department drawn from the Lords was Lord Young of Graffham, serving between 1985 and 1989 as Secretary of State for Employment until 1987 and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry until 1989. The number of junior ministers who are peers has increased since 1997.

Occasionally cabinet members are selected from outside the Houses of Parliament and if necessary granted a peerage. Harold Wilson appointed Frank Cousins and Patrick Gordon Walker to the 1964 cabinet despite their not being MPs at the time. On 3 October 2008 Peter Mandelson, at the time of appointment not a member of either House, became Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and was immediately made a life peer. During the First World War, the South African politician Jan Smuts served in Lloyd George's War Cabinet without ever becoming a member of either house of the British parliament.

There are some 100 junior members of the Government who are not members of the Cabinet, including Ministers of State and Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State; and unpaid Parliamentary Private Secretaries are in practice apprentice ministers on the payroll vote. Some of them may be Privy Counsellors, or may be appointed to the Privy Council as a mark of distinction, without becoming Cabinet ministers. Equally, some junior ministers below Cabinet level may be invited to all Cabinet meetings as a matter of course. The Attorney General for England and Wales together with the chair of the governing political party, are customarily included, and other members of the Government can be invited at the Prime Minister's discretion, either regularly or ad-hoc.

In recent years, more non-members of Her Majesty's Government have been permitted by the Prime Minister to attend Cabinet meetings on a regular basis, notably Alastair Campbell in his capacity as Director of Communications and Strategy between 1997 and 2003, and Jonathan Powell the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister under Tony Blair, with a distinctly separate role from the Cabinet Secretary/Head of the Civil Service.