ABSTRACT
The late John Mackintosh offered the classic description of the British Cabinet before 1914, which, he wrote, ‘operated in a delightfully simple manner. Including all the chief ministers, it discussed with little predigestion and no secretarial assistance all the issues of any importance and only in the restricted field of defence was the need for co-ordinated action appreciated.’ 1 This paper examines the wartime experience of the Cabinet as the pinnacle of the British administrative hierarchy. Between 1914 and 1919 it was transformed from a political committee into a complex administrative system. This was made possible by the establishment of the Cabinet secretariat and by a measure of devolution to standing committees; but the central feature of wartime Cabinets, which facilitated modernisation without itself surviving long into the peace, was the practice of reserving critical decisions for inner committees. These were the War Council (November 1914 – May 1915), the Dardanelles Committee (June – November 1915) and the War Committee (November 1915 – November 1916), each of which coexisted with the Cabinet; and the War Cabinet (December 1916 – October 1919) which subsumed the powers and functions of both Cabinet and War Committee. Though Lloyd George’s assumption of the premiership in December 1916 occasioned the greatest discontinuity, it is a mistake to assume that his reform of Cabinet structure marked as decisive a break with the past as his multiplication of departments or his split with Asquith. The Cabinet’s form changed to accommodate the changing demands of war, and Lloyd George’s War Cabinet system was neither so different, nor so much better, than Asquith’s as he or his apologists suggest.
