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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Lib Dems at the Edinburgh Festival (Caron Lindsay)
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Diversity, standards, and the treatment of Professor Jason Arday (BLAC Liberal Democrats)
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Labour has the promise on business rates – We have the plan (Pawel Urbanski)
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Redirecting the funds to the jobs Britain cannot do without (Edward Marsh)
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Israel and the West Bank (Andy Daer)
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The Joy of Six 1564
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The Highland cows of Much Wenlock
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The Creation: That's How Strong My Love Is
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Reform civil war?
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Right to Roam plans mass trespass in Andy Burnham's Makerfield
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An old canal warehouse at Ellesmere in Shropshire
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Tinderbox
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Horse Nell 'stable' after canal rescue
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The climate change dilemma facing Burnham
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Pawel Urbanski
David, thank you, and I am asking the same question. The opportunity is biggest in the seats where we face the Conservatives, where the economy comes up on the ...
David Raw
@ Nick Baird Well said, Nick, especially in your last paragraph. Some things have changed a fair old bit since I first joined the Liberal Party way back in 196...
Nick Baird
@Peter Martin - the point I tried to make above is that comparison isn't fair or reasonable. If that same individual eligible for £25k to £27.5k of benefits m...
Simon McGrath
This is a tragic event with a terrible outcome for Dr Arday and his family. On the issue about plagiarism in Dr Arday's PhD, people can judge for themselve...
Hywel
It seems to me that a bunch of people with racist intent went looking for a target until they found one with enough question marks that they could turn into a r...
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!