American news agency CNN recently ran an attention-grabbing headline about the UK cabinet: for the first time ever, ‘none of the top jobs is held by a white man’. Yet this acclaim was not for new prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-election cabinet but instead for Liz Truss’s short-lived one back in September 2022. It reflects the fact that the representative evolution of the UK cabinet predates the current government, and its composition is both highly sensitive and widely scrutinised.
The cabinet selection process is a powerful tool for any prime minister, with significant discretion offered in terms of who they appoint. While the Labour Party cabinet, with 26 ministers in attendance, is the second largest of any incoming government since 1945, it is smaller than recent cabinets, where attendance has averaged over 30 since the 2010 coalition government.
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