ABSTRACT
The Prime Minister also has considerable powers of patronage. Here we must distinguish between honours-life peerages, knighthoods and the like —which are useful in terms of political management, and appointments to public office, which generally have policy overtones. By preferring a candidate of certain opinions to head a Royal Commission or a public body the Prime Minister can indirectly influence an area of policy. Appointments can also be used more crudely as bargaining counters, like the offer in 1976 of an EU commissionership to Roy Jenkins that lessened his appetite for contesting the Labour leadership. The Prime Minister must be consulted on the appointment of Royal Commissions, independent inquiries, chairmen of public corporations, nationalised industry boards, the more important departmental committees, heads of non-ministerial departments, and all politically significant appointments-and ‘Ministers should take a wide view of what constitutes political significance’, although political discretion in such appointments is now restricted to some degree by the requirements for fairness, openness and independent scrutiny policed by the Commissioner for Public Appointments (Cabinet Office 1997a).
