Rearranging the bric-a-brac in the Cabinet

BBC News published this piece over the weekend (but, of course, they would say, "at the weekend") with speculation about a possible impending Cabinet reshuffle.

I have written a handful of posts recently about the political difficulties of U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Adam Fleming of the BBC reports pressure for Brown to "re-assert his authority and help his party out of the hole they have managed to dig themselves into".

Prime ministers periodically move Cabinet ministers around, promoting rising stars, demoting those who are disloyal and/or less-than-stellar performers, and making lateral moves to fit everyone in. That is called a "reshuffle". Brown is reportedly planning to conduct a reshuffle next month.

One difference between the American Cabinet and its British counterpart is that all members of the British Cabinet are members of Parliament, in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

The prime minister and his or her fellow Cabinet ministers are collectively called "Her Majesty's Government". As I have addressed previously, while the politicians are in fact answerable to the electorate, they to some extent maintain the fiction that the monarch rules, and that the government is there to carry out her wishes.

By contrast, in the U.S. those appointed to the Cabinet may or may not be members of either house of Congress. But if they are, they must resign their House or Senate seat, in order to take up a Cabinet position.

One implication of that is that British Cabinet members are more likely to be career politicians, while some of their American counterparts are experts in the work of their departments, through experience in business, academia, or elsewhere. A current example is Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, who came to that job from a Wall Street career. His British counterpart, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, is a career politician.

I don't have a strong opinion about which approach is better. The U.K. structure is along the lines of the "war is too important to be left to the generals" idea, which I think has a lot to be said for it.

Also, my impression is that U.K. Cabinet members are more likely to move between departments than their opposite numbers in America. I'm not sure whether anyone has studied that closely, but it has seemed that way to me.

A few American Cabinet secretaries have headed more than one department. Elliot Richardson held four different Cabinet positions during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. His movements in part reflected the chaos toward the end of the Nixon Administration that was caused by the Watergate scandal.

But it seems routine for top British politicians to move around. Considering some recent prime ministers, John Major was both chancellor and foreign secretary. James Callaghan held those two jobs at various times, and had also been home secretary.

Gordon Brown is one of the exceptions. He was chancellor for 10 years, an unusually long tenure. That was the only Cabinet position he held before becoming prime minister.

I'm not sure that any British readers will "get" the pun in the title of this post. They may be more likely to refer to a piece of furniture in which things are stored as a "cupboard".