First Secretary Of State
First Secretary of State is an office that is sometimes held by a minister of the Crown in the Government of the United Kingdom.
The office indicates seniority, including over all other secretaries of state. The office is not always in use, so there have sometimes been extended gaps between successive holders.
| United Kingdom First Secretary of State of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland | |
|---|---|
_(2022).svg) | |
Incumbent Vacant since 15 September 2021 | |
| Government of the United Kingdom | |
| Style | The Right Honourable (formal) His/Her Excellency (diplomatic) |
| Member of | |
| Reports to | Prime Minister |
| Residence | None, may use grace and favour residences |
| Nominator | Prime Minister |
| Appointer | The King (on the advice of the prime minister) |
| Term length | At His Majesty's pleasure |
| Inaugural holder | Rab Butler |
| Formation | 13 July 1962 |
| Salary | £153,022 per annum (including £81,932 MP salary) (2019) |
Dominic Raab most recently held the position between July 2019 and September 2021, making it vacant at the moment.
Constitutional position
Like the deputy prime minister, the first secretary enjoys no right of automatic succession to the office of Prime Minister. However, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved to an intensive care unit on 6 April 2020, after contracting COVID-19, First Secretary Dominic Raab was asked "to deputise for him where necessary."
The office temporarily enjoyed some greater constitutional footing between when it was incorporated as a corporation sole in 2002 and having all of its remaining functions transferred in 2008. During most of this time, John Prescott was First Secretary.
History
In 1962, R.A. Butler was the first person to be appointed to the office, in part to avoid earlier royal objections to the office of Deputy Prime Minister. The office gave Butler ministerial superiority over the rest of the Cabinet and indicated that he was second-in-command. Harold Wilson appointed three people to the office between 1964 and 1970, but it has been noted by Anthony Seldon et al. that the office may have caught on "more as an ego-massager than for functional reasons."
Later, Michael Heseltine and John Prescott held the office alongside being Deputy Prime Minister. The two offices have only existed concurrently with different holders in David Cameron's coalition government, wherein Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg was appointed Deputy Prime Minister while Conservative William Hague was First Secretary.
Responsibilities
The office is currently listed on the gov.uk website as bringing no additional responsibilities. However, Lord Norton says that there are two benefits to a prime minister in appointing a first secretary: firstly, it leaves a senior minister free to perform correlation and co-ordination and to chair committees and, secondly, it enables the prime minister to send a signal as to the status of the holder. Stephen Thornton and Jonathan Kirkup have said that "the Office of First Secretary of State is only as important as the person holding that office is perceived to be important", but in certain circumstances the office "can assume acute importance and real power" and it may yet become an office of substance.
List of first secretaries of state
| First Secretary of State | Term of office | Other ministerial offices | Party | Ministry | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | R. A. Butler MP for Saffron Walden | 13 July 1962 | 18 October 1963 | Conservative | Macmillan II | |||
 | George Brown MP for Belper | 16 October 1964 | 11 August 1966 | Labour | Wilson (I & II) | |||
.jpg) | Michael Stewart MP for Fulham | 11 August 1966 | 6 April 1968 | Labour | ||||
 | Barbara Castle MP for Blackburn | 6 April 1968 | 19 June 1970 | Labour | ||||
.jpg) | Michael Heseltine MP for Henley | 20 July 1995 | 2 May 1997 | Conservative | Major II | |||
 | John Prescott MP for Kingston upon Hull East | 8 June 2001 | 27 June 2007 | Labour | Blair II | |||
| Blair III | ||||||||
 | The Lord Mandelson (born 1953) | 5 June 2009 | 11 May 2010 | Labour | Brown | |||
.jpg) | William Hague MP for Richmond (Yorks) | 12 May 2010 | 8 May 2015 | Conservative | Cameron–Clegg (Con.–L.D.) | |||
 | George Osborne MP for Tatton | 8 May 2015 | 13 July 2016 | Conservative | Cameron II | |||
 | Damian Green MP for Ashford | 11 June 2017 | 20 December 2017 | Conservative | May II | |||
 | Dominic Raab MP for Esher and Walton | 24 July 2019 | 15 September 2021 | Conservative | Johnson (I & II) | |||
Timeline
See also
- Ministerial ranking - the "pecking order" or relative importance of senior ministers in the UK government.
Notes
References
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article First Secretary of State, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.