The Prime Minister’s Office: The Overall Picture

In the mid-1990s the structure linking advisers, assistants and aides to the prime minister was substantially the same as when Harold Wilson was prime minister in 1974, although Mrs Thatcher had made some changes, principally in the arrangements for policy advice. During John Major’s premiership the Prime Minister’s Office consisted, as before, of four basic parts, plus five other ‘tribes’. The four main parts of the Office, whose work is examined in each of the following four chapters, were: the ‘private office’ at its core, linking the prime minister to the bureaucratic world of Whitehall; the political office, linking the prime minister to the party; the press office, linking the prime minister to the media; the policy unit and some other individual policy advisers, providing policy advice. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.