Talk:War cabinet

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This currently has had the following text reinstated after an earlier removal by myself,

"On May 28 1940, with the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk and the threat of a German invasion looming, the War Cabinet discussed whether to evacuate the government & monarchy (Churchill refused) and then whether they should attempt to deal with Hitler, using Mussolini as a go-between. In the vote, Attlee, Greenwood, and Churchill voted to continue the war. "

I thought I had posted reasons for deleting on this page, but they seem not to have stuck; I repeat my views below

It seems to me that there are 2 very good grounds for re-removing

a) this is an article about what a War Cabinet is, not about "notable decisions taken by War Cabinets"

b) I am not sure whether the problem lies with Mr Marr, or with whoever has read his work, but the account given above fails all sorts of tests.

1. The BEF was not evacuated from Dunkirk on May 28; evacuation continued until June 3, and only about 10% of the total lifted had left by the end of May 28.
2. On May 28 the possibility of getting the bulk of the BEF away was not even dreamed of: Churchill estimated, when briefing the non-War-Cabinet Cabinet that they should hope for no more than 50,000 to be evacuated
3. The proposed evacuation of the Royal Family and also the government does not appear to have ever been raised at any War Cabinet; Martin Gilbert's multi-volume biography talks (p 449 of 'Finest Hour') of a Foreign Office submission to Churchill (30 May) dealt with in peremptory terms by a minute (1 June)from Churchill
4. Gilbert gives a fairly detailed account of the War Cabinet in question. Working backwards, there is no mention of a formal vote being taken, (and once you start checking other crucial decisions - eg the meetings which decided to send no more fighter squadrons for France on June 3/4 - there is a similar lack of a head-count vote. I believe normal practice was at that period for the PM to sum up 'the mood of the meeting' if necessary - certainly post-war Attlee is said to have summed up in line with what he thought the mood of the meeting should have been, rather than paying much heed to head-count) , and the proposition on the table was not whether Britain should continue the war but how Britain should respond to Italian offers to see what terms Hitler was prepared to offer. Chamberlain started the meeting against, briefly in the middle said he couldn't see what harm there would be in asking, but reverted to being against after Attlee and Greenwood had said their piece Rjccumbria (talk) 00:24, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

• I hate to moan but could we possibly spell Attlee correctly please? Feel free to remove this afterwards. Thanks DBaK (talk) 10:06, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Attlee corrected as required (my only excuse is that the previous post was well past my bed-time). I have now found & read the 2009 paperback edition of Marr, and Marr does not support most of the statements he is being cited as supporting. What he actually says is consistent with the Gilbert version; some sexing-up but within broadly acceptable limits, given that Marr is mostly interested in using the discussion to support a counter-factual. Rjccumbria (talk) 22:08, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

References

Falklands and Gulf Wars

Could we have a reference for the assertion that during the Falklands War, and again during the Persian Gulf War, Britain had a body actually called "the War Cabinet"? Intelligent Mr Toad (talk) 03:50, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

The Falklands War Cabinet was technically a Cabinet Committee (ie. its decisions could in principle have been overruled by full Cabinet), rather than a small Cabinet replacing the normal peacetime structure.Paulturtle (talk) 19:28, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Here's a good source for this, John Nott was a member of the 'Falklands War Cabinet'. I'm not sure where to cite this, only the first page is in front of a paywall.

• Nott, John (April 2007). "Inside the War Cabinet". The RUSI Journal. 152 (2): 74–77. doi:10.1080/03071840701350024.

Verbcatcher (talk) 20:28, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

First National Government

The "First" National Government, from August 1931 until the autumn, had a small Cabinet of half a dozen men. I presume this was a deliberate echo of the wartime War Cabinet, this time to implement the spending cuts and to preserve the Gold Standard. I dare say Lloyd George had been calling for such an emergency Cabinet for years, in the transparent hope of leading it himself. We'd need a source for all this.

In the autumn, after devaluation and the 1931 election, normal Cabinet government was resumed.Paulturtle (talk) 19:37, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Parliamentary Control over PM Appointment

Have removed some confused content about this.

1782 (Rockingham replacing North) wasn't the first time a ministry was ousted by a vote of confidence in the Commons. The first was, I think, Walpole in 1742. Nor did the King's power to appoint a PM of his choice suddenly end. In 1783 George III put Pitt the Younger in without a majority, and he won a majority at the general election the following year. The last time this was tried was in 1834 when William IV dismissed Melbourne and put Peel in; Peel failed to win the election the following year, not least as the number of pocket and rotten boroughs under Royal control had dropped sharply since the Great Reform Act, and Melbourne was restored as PM. Since then, the Monarch has not been able to impose a ministry on Parliament without a majority, although Monarchs retained a lot of discretion over the appointment of PMs well into the twentieth century - at least as late as 1923, if not 1931.

To this day, the PM is appointed by the Monarch not by Parliament. She appoints the person best placed to command a majority, and since 1963 she has not got directly involved in the process. When a coalition has to be negotiated, as in 2010 (Heath-Thorpe 1974 and May-Foster 2017 were a bit different as in those cases a sitting PM was trying to shore up a government which had just lost its majority), the politicians are told to sort it out and give the Palace a bell when they've decided. Nonetheless, it is an autonomous process (in a vernacular English "a bit of a grey area"), and Prime Ministers are most certainly not appointed by the House of Commons.

It's also far from clear that a PM who has just lost a vote of no confidence is nowadays under any obligation to resign. If anything, a convention was evolving in the twentieth century (MacDonald in 1924, Callaghan in 1979) that a no-confidenced PM could have an election so the voting public got to decide on the matter. There was a fair bit of discussion of this during the Addled Parliament of 2017-19, with the commentator's opinion on the matter usually being fairly obviously dependent on where he stood on the Brexit debate.

None of this, as far as I can see, is of any direct relevance to the evolution of Cabinet Government (the Cabinet as we would recognise it existed by early nineteenth century, and certainly by the mid nineteenth century when Bagehot was writing).Paulturtle (talk) 04:23, 24 March 2021 (UTC)