Cabinet ministers, like all ministers, are appointed and may be dismissed by the
monarch without notice or reason, generally on the advice of the prime minister. The allocation and transfer of responsibilities between ministers and departments is also generally at the prime minister's discretion. The Cabinet has always been led by the prime minister, whose originally unpaid office as such is traditionally described as merely (first among equals), but today the prime minister is the preeminent
head of government, with the effective power to appoint and dismiss Cabinet ministers and to control the Cabinet's agenda. The extent to which the Government is collegial varies with political conditions and individual personalities. The Cabinet is the ultimate decision-making body of the
executive within the
Westminster system of government in traditional constitutional theory. This interpretation was originally put across in the work of 19th-century constitutionalists such as
Walter Bagehot, who described the Cabinet as the "efficient secret" of the British political system in his book
The English Constitution. The political and decision-making authority of the cabinet has been gradually reduced over recent decades, with some claiming its role has been usurped by a "prime ministerial" government. In the modern political era, the prime minister releases information concerning the
ministerial ranking in the form of a list detailing the seniority of all Cabinet ministers. The centralisation of the Cabinet in the early 20th century enhanced the
power of the prime minister, who moved from being the
primus inter pares of the
Asquith Cabinets of 1906 onwards, to the dominating figures of David Lloyd George,
Stanley Baldwin, and
Winston Churchill. The
Institute for Government claims that the reduced number of full Cabinet meetings signifies "that the role of Cabinet as a formal decision-making body has been in decline since the war." This view has been contradicted by
Vernon Bogdanor, a British constitutional expert, who claims that "the Cabinet has, in fact, been strengthened by the decline in full meetings, as it allows more matters to be transferred to cabinet committees. Thus, business is done more efficiently." Most prime ministers have had a so-called "kitchen cabinet" consisting of their own trusted advisers who may be Cabinet members but are often non-cabinet trusted personal advisers on their own staff. In recent governments, generally from
Margaret Thatcher, and especially in that of
Tony Blair, it has been reported that many or even all major decisions have been made before cabinet meetings. This suggestion has been made by former ministers including
Clare Short and
Chris Smith, in the media, and was made clear in the
Butler Review, where Blair's style of "sofa government" was censured. The combined effect of the prime minister's ability to control Cabinet by circumventing effective discussion in Cabinet and the executive's ability to dominate parliamentary proceedings places the British prime minister in a position of great power, that has been likened to an
elective dictatorship (a phrase coined by
Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone in 1976). The relative inability of Parliament to hold the Government of the day to account is often cited by the UK media as a justification for the vigour with which they question and challenge the Government. The classic view of Cabinet Government was laid out by Walter Bagehot in
The English Constitution (1867) in which he described the prime minister as the
primus-inter-pares ("
first among equals"). The view was questioned by
Richard Crossman in
The Myths of Cabinet Government (1972) and by
Tony Benn. They were both members of the Labour governments of the 1960s and thought that the position of the prime minister had acquired more power so that prime ministerial government was a more apt description.
Graham Allen (a government whip during Tony Blair's first government) makes the case in
The Last Prime Minister: Being Honest About the UK Presidency (2003) that the office of prime minister has presidential powers, as did
Michael Foley in
The British Presidency (2000). However, the power that a prime minister has over his or her cabinet colleagues is directly proportional to the amount of support that they have with their political parties and this is often related to whether the party considers them to be an electoral asset or liability. Also when a party is divided into factions a prime minister may be forced to include other powerful party members in the Cabinet for party political cohesion. The prime minister's personal power is also curtailed if their party is in a power-sharing arrangement, or a formal coalition with another party (as happened in the
coalition government of 2010 to 2015). ==Current Cabinet==