It looks like Gordon Brown might be finding it a bit hard to persuade people to serve in the Cabinet. But good news for him, there’s plenty of historical precedent of small Cabinets. George Grenville in the mid-eighteenth century had a Cabinet of just nine, whilst the Fox-North coalition of the late eighteenth century managed with only seven. So that’s Gordon, Ed Balls and er…
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Recent Comments
Jonathan Parry
This is an interesting article. One Nation Toryism never got going until the demise of the Liberals in the 1920s (Disraeli certainly never practised it). To t...
Peter Davies
In Latin it may be a gerund but in English it's a noun. If I were to object to the Government's referending of the public, that would be a gerund....
Alex Macfie
Except that "referendum" is not a Latin 2nd Declension Neuter noun. It's a gerundive; as such it is used in English differently from Latin so should take an Eng...
PM
@ PM, It can be either. I do remember from my schooldays that the plural in Latin involved replacing the 'um' of a neuter noun by an 'a'. I must have managed...- Alex Macfie
It's "referendums"....
5 Comments
Tee hee!
Methinks government had a bit less to do in those days, Mark!
Alan Sugar!!!
Terry has a point.
We could return to just four departments (Treasury; Foreign; Home; Defence) and be free of about 20 politicians and around 400,000 civil servants!
From Parkinson’s Law, the chapter named “Directors and Councils”: “Somewhere between the number of three (when a quorum is impossible to collect) and approximately twenty-one (when the whole organism begins to perish), there lies the golden number. The interesting theory has been propounded that this number must be eight. Why? Because it is the only number which all existing states [as of 1961] have agreed to avoid. Attractive as this theory may seem at first sight, it is open to one serious objection. Eight was the number preferred by King Charles I for his Committee of State. And look what happened to him!”
There were 5 members of the WW2 War Cabinet – Churchill, Atlee, Bevin and two others.
Darn my inability to remember political facts at 1am!