ABSTRACT
The Report of the 1918 Haldane Committee in the United Kingdom must certainly be allowed some parental rights over the term ‘machinery of government’. The influence of this Report created a notion of a mystery to which there was one key. W. J. M. Mackenzie’s own survey of the machinery of government indicated to him the role of politics and accident in what had happened, and this was, he thought, ‘on the whole’ outside administrative planning. Mackenzie also wanted to know more about what was then being done about the machinery of government. The ostensible nature of D. N. Chester and F. M. G. Willson’s discussion is primarily an elucidation of what the factors of change in the machinery of government have actually been. In the UK, then, interdepartmental relations, or, rather, the creation and maintenance of the machinery and relations to and within it, have been a factor of increasing importance.
