The Secretary of State for Justice is a senior position in the cabinet of the United Kingdom. It was created in 2007 replacing the abolished Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, which was originally intended to fulfil those functions of the office of Lord Chancellor which related to the Lord Chancellor's Department. On 9 May 2007, the Department for Constitutional Affairs was abolished, and a Ministry of Justice was created in its place. The Ministry of Justice is also responsible for certain functions transferred from the Home Office.
The then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, was appointed to the post of Secretary of State for Justice on the abolition of his position as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. The Home Secretary, John Reid, told Parliament that future Secretaries of State for Justice would be MPs rather than peers. Jack Straw took over this department on 28 June 2007, following the selection of Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister and left office after the resignation of Gordon Brown on 11 May 2010. He was replaced by Conservative MP Ken Clarke. Ken Clarke was replaced by Chris Grayling in August 2012.
Famous quotes containing the words secretary of state, secretary of, secretary, state and/or justice:
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“... the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the boss’s moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.”
—Anne Bogan, U.S. executive secretary. As quoted in Working, book 1, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)