Prime Minister and Cabinet

While British political history is frequently preoccupied with the role and actions of prime ministers and Cabinets, the formal study of those institutions remains underdeveloped. In part this is because those roles have often been imprecisely defined, and understood largely in terms of the personnel who discharged them. The value of biography, or collective biography, in analysing these subjects is therefore considered in this chapter, alongside a wider treatment how work on the offices has developed over time. Issues of change and continuity are assessed against broader developments in British political history. Building on this, the chapter considers which questions the political historian should ask of these key institutions, including how they should be defined, and what source material might best be used to advance our understanding of them.