ABSTRACT
A vast amount has been written on the character of the political and administrative processes conventionally subsumed under the rubric of ‘Cabinet Government’. Walter Bagehot observed in his classic book on the subject that the constant evolution of constitutional practice made it almost impossible to set down in definitive terms the way in which the British constitution operated at any given moment in time.1 Ivor Jennings similarly acknowledged in the original version of his book on Cabinet Government, first published three-quarters of a century later in 1936, that The British Constitution is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to keep pace with it’.2 Jennings was, however, still convinced that The Cabinet is the core of the British constitutional system… It integrates what would otherwise be a heterogeneous collection of authorities exercising a vast array of functions. It provides unity to the British system of government’.3 Thirty years later, by contrast, observers of the British political scene such as Richard Crossman increasingly took the view that Cabinet government had given way to Prime Ministerial government.4 Great attention was also paid by leading students of post-war politics to the changing role of officials in the policy-making process. It became widely accepted that there was something unreal about the formal position laid down by Sir Warren Fisher in 1929, when he told a Royal Commission that ‘Determination of policy is the function of ministers, and once a policy is determined it is the unquestioned and unquestionable business of the civil servant to strive to carry out the policy with precisely the same good will whether he agrees with it or not’.5 Scholarly debates about Prime Ministerial power and minister-civil servant relations continue to this day, of course, but over the past fifteen years or so new attempts have been made to reframe the discussion by focusing on the concept of the ‘core executive’, identified in the introductory chapter as ‘all those organisations and procedures which co-ordinate central government policies, and act as final arbiters between different parts of the government machine’.6 Although such a definition creates its own problems when used as a tool to analyse the politicaladministrative process, it does at least have the virtue of facilitating recognition of the lack of clear boundaries and procedures that characterise the modern political system. Any serious attempt to understand the policy-making process must always be sensitive to its inherent ‘messiness’ and complexity.
