Lord Privy Seal

This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Lord Privy Seal is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:

Leader of the House of Commons

Incumbent:
Harriet Harman QC MP
Took office: 28 June 2007

Style: The Right Honourable
Appointed by: Gordon Brown
as Prime Minister
First : John Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle
(of Great Britain)
Formation: 1707
United Kingdom

This article is part of the series:
Politics and government of
the United Kingdom



Other countries · Atlas
 Politics portal
view  talk  

The Lord Privy Seal or Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal is the fifth of the Great Officers of State in the United Kingdom, ranking beneath the Lord President of the Council and above the Lord Great Chamberlain. The office is one of the traditional sinecure offices of state. Originally, its holder was responsible for the monarch's personal ("privy") seal (as opposed to the Great Seal of State, which is in the care of the Lord Chancellor). Today, the holder of the office is invariably given a seat in the Cabinet.

Though one of the oldest offices in government anywhere, it has no particular function today; thus the office has generally been used as a kind of Minister without Portfolio. Since the premiership of Clement Attlee, the position of Lord Privy Seal has frequently been combined with that of Leader of the House of Lords or Leader of the House of Commons. The jocular clarification that the office holder is neither a lord, nor a privy, nor a seal, though sometimes credited to Edward Heath, was attributed by him to Ernest Bevin.

Contents

Television industry term

The term "Lord Privy Seal" (as in "not bad, but it's a bit Lord Privy Seal") is used in the British television industry as shorthand for associating pictures too closely and literally with every element of the accompanying spoken script. The origin is a TV comedy sketch in The Frost Report taking the practice to an extreme, which backed a "news report" mention of the Lord Privy Seal with images, in quick succession, of a lord, an outdoor toilet, and a seal balancing a ball on its nose.

English Lords Privy Seal, 1307–1707

British Lords Privy Seal, 1707–present

Other countries

See also

References

Wikipedia content modification information:

  • This page was last modified on 12 November 2008, at 16:32.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Lord Privy Seal".

The URL for this specific entry is:

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.