A Policy Cabinet
It was fully time the Haldane Report of 1918 on the machinery of government was taken down from the shelf, and no one is better fitted to raise the question of its application today than Lord Haldane's Cabinet colleague, Lord Samuel. As it happens, another
ex-Minister, Mr. Amery, has recently been laying stress on the need for a Cabinet of thinkers apart from a Cabinet of administrators.
In days when planning must be in varying degree one of the chief tasks of any Government, the importance of a small Cabinet, such as Mr. Lloyd George relied on in the later phases of the first Great War, needs no emphasis. When all who have considered the ques- tion agree that there must be groupings of analogous functions, as the Navy, Army and Air Force, each with a Minister of its own, are today grouped under a Minister of Defence, all that remains is to decide what the groupings shall be. Locd Haldane's pro- posals, Mr. Amery's and Lord Samuel's are not identical, but they are far more accordant than contradictory. Lord Samuel (in his article in Tuesday's Times) suggests a Cabinet of ten members, the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary, together with five other Ministers without executive functions presiding over groups of non-Cabinet Ministers, which might come to form in some sense sub-Cabinets themselves. Some such development is essential. The trouble is that at this juncture no Ministers have time to think about how to give Ministers time to think.
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