The Ministerial Role: Activism and Agency

There have been a number of academic categorisations of the role or roles of a government minister, but former ministers, as practitioners, have an activist view of the role, which is bound up with a sense of purpose and motivation, and to a degree a sense of ethics and values. There is also the polar opposite in some of the Ministers Reflect interviews: a sense of how a poor minister behaves. As well as their informal, acquired understanding of the role, ministers also have the guidance of Ministerial Codes, and at UK level, the Cabinet Manual, which seek to formalise rules for some aspects of the ministerial role.