In 1907, when Winston Churchill was considering which to prioritise out of a number of Cabinet posts potentially open to him, he gave this verdict on the turn-of-the-century version of our beloved department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), the Local Government Board, which was in theory one of his options:
There is no place in the Government more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties…
Does the fact that I’m finding Roy Jenkins’ biography a laugh-a-minute read make me sad?
arbitrary constant 