ABSTRACT
One of the CPRS’s difficulties was its remoteness from the Cabinet ministers it served. An alternative, more personal mechanism for briefing ministers on matters outside their departments is the network of ministerial special advisers (sometimes called political advisers). These were first appointed piecemeal by a few Labour ministers in the 1960s, and later by some of Heath’s ministers, almost exclusively to advise on their departmental work. In 1974 Wilson regularised and expanded the practice, allowing Cabinet ministers to appoint two advisers each. Mrs Thatcher in opposition castigated his experiment, but in office continued it. While she initially restricted numbers to one per Cabinet minister, in time her confidence in special advisers grew, particularly when they briefed her for the 1983 election press conferences (Shepherd 1983, Butler 1986), and their numbers expanded again to two per departmentalthough the second adviser was, in theory, assigned to support the ministers of state.
