ABSTRACT
One other aspect of departmental life that crops up in all ministerial memoirs is the private office. Each minister’s private secretary leads a team of between six and a dozen junior officials (fewer for a junior minister). They are the conduit linking him to the department and the outside world. They sift out from the hundreds of documents and people clamouring for his attention the most important and most relevant. They arrange his meetings and unobtrusively attend to take notes. They fix his attendance at outside functions and beforehand commission from within the department a briefing on whom he will meet, what he should say and-equally important-not say. Theirs is a high pressure life, in which the mobile phone and the fax machine play a large part, and in which adrenaline and the interest of the work are expected to compensate for the ludicrously long hours of work.
