If you follow politics, you’ll probably have heard the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster mentioned from time to time, without what the office is or what its holder does being explained. And it might seem strange that Pat McFadden, who played a major role in Labour’s election campaign and was dubbed ‘the most powerful Labour politician most have never heard of in 2023’ has been appointed to this seemingly anonymous office. But the role of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has a long history – and many of its occupants, from Mo Mowlam to Michael Gove, have quietly wielded major influence in successive British governments.
Today, the title ‘Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’ is something of a misnomer, an artefact of a once constitutionally important role which has since evaporated into the mists of history. Originally, the Chancellor played an important role as the monarch’s main representative in Lancashire, then governed quasi-separately from the rest of England, and later the UK, as a ‘county palatine’, with the monarch themselves holding the title of Duke of Lancaster from 1399. This idiosyncratic constitutional settlement continued until 1873 and is still reflected in the Duchy of Lancaster’s separation from the Crown Estate and in the now rare usage of a lyrical variant ‘God Save the Duke’ when the national anthem is sung in Lancashire.
With the end of the Lancastrian palatinate, however, the role of Chancellor of the Duchy was left with few, mostly ceremonial, powers, whilst remaining in the cabinet. It is here that its fascinating modern history begins. With the Chancellor’s powers largely devolved to a deputy, and Lancashire’s semi-separate judiciary abolished by the Courts Act (1971), the office became vestigial, a cabinet post of ancient pedigree with few actual responsibilities.
Consequently, the position has effectively become a sinecure, allowing a senior politician to be appointed to the cabinet without having to confer upon them the responsibilities of managing a government department. At various times from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards this was used to bring an important minister who was not a secretary of state into the cabinet, as, for example, when Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) was made Chancellor of the Duchy and Minister of Information in 1918. And the Duchy was used slightly differently but to similar effect when Edward Turnour (later the Earl of Winterton) was appointed to the office in 1937 as the Air Ministry’s Commons spokesperson, because the Secretary of State, the Viscount Swinton could not answer questions in the Commons. On other occasions, the position of Chancellor of the Duchy was used to empower a senior politician to tackle a particular issue. Thus, in the second Labour government, Oswald Mosley was appointed Chancellor with a special mission to tackle unemployment. Likewise, Anthony Barber, Geoffrey Rippon, and John Davies all held the position as the UK’s chief negotiator with the EEC during Edward Heath’s government’s bid for membership.
More recently, the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown combined the office with the position of Minister for the Cabinet Office. This tradition was briefly revived when David Cameron appointed Letwin to both offices in 2014-16, by Theresa May with the appointment of David Liddington in 2018-19, and again by Boris Johnson with Michael Gove’s appointment in 2019-21 and Steve Barclay’s in 2021-22. But recent Chancellors of the Duchy have also combined the office with that of Downing Street Chief of Staff, as Barclay did, Deputy Prime Minister, as Oliver Dowden did from 2022 until 2024, and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, the role held by Nadim Zahawi during the brief premiership of Liz Truss.
In fact, in these cases, the seemingly quite specific role of Minister for the Cabinet Office obscured the potential breadth – and potential irrelevance – of the Chancellor of the Duchy’s role. Michael Gove, for example, possessed a broad suite of responsibilities whilst holding the office, including contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit, maintaining the integrity of the union, and managing constitutional affairs for the government. Mo Mowlam, on the other hand, was appointed to the position to serve as Tony Blair’s ‘fixer’ after her successful time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, though she herself derided the position as being no more than ‘Minister for the Today Programme’.
Other Chancellors of the Duchy have been shuffled into the office precisely because it marked a clear demotion without removing them from the cabinet. To give one particularly notable example, Winston Churchill’s move from the Admiralty to the Duchy in 1915 was generally seen as a punishment for the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, although this demotion proved short-lived.
On other occasions still, the position has been used, sometimes quite innovatively, as a bridge between the ‘administrative’ and ‘political’ elements of government. Barclay, as Downing Street Chief of Staff and Chancellor of the Duchy, for example, was able to act both as a kind of chief executive for the Prime Minister’s operation in Downing Street and as a member of the cabinet, forming a bridge between the largely unaccountable workings of modern prime ministerial government and the traditional system of cabinet responsibility. Oliver Dowden appears to have played a similar role as combined Chancellor of the Duchy, Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office and Deputy Prime Minister
And yet Pat McFadden holds none of these positions. He is not, currently, a minister in any government department, and nor has he been granted a specific policy area to manage. The best reflection of McFadden’s role as Chancellor of the Duchy in the Starmer government is provided by Gov.uk, which lists the following areas in the office’s remit:
- Missions – supporting delivery of Government’s priorities
- Oversight of all Cabinet Office policy
- National security, resilience, and civil contingencies, including:
- COBR
- Resilience policy
- Cyber security
- State threats
- National Security and Investment Act
- Propriety and ethics
- Public appointments
- Major events policy
In effect, McFadden seems to have been given a general-purpose role as a government ‘enforcer’, akin to that Blair attended for Mowlam, with oversight of all of the government’s major areas of interest and a remit to enforce standards in government, choose key appointees, and supervise core executive competencies, including crisis governance (and implicitly the use of emergency powers).
This is largely in line with pre-election predictions that McFadden, alongside Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and Angela Rayner (to which one should probably add Sue Gray) would be key to a governmental ‘quad’ setting policy. In that sense, McFadden continues the trend which began in the New Labour era and continued under successive Conservative administrations of using the Chancellor of the Duchy to appoint a de facto political chief executive of the civil service, operating as the Prime Minister’s right hand in managing the machinery of government.
But McFadden has also played a key role in Labour campaigns since the late 1980s, and campaigned tirelessly for Labour at the last election. Other commentators, including Charles Moore, may, therefore, be right to predict that McFadden will continue to be the government’s primary spokesperson – especially on the Today Programme – in his new role, acting as the mouthpiece for the Prime Minister as the Chancellor of the Duchy once was for the sovereign in the county palatine.
Angus Brown.
Angus is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he works on debates about constitutional guardianship and the emergence of modern constitutionalism in the eighteenth century.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.