Hey Albo, read this! This is something, as Prime Minister, you need to know about. It’s called ministerial responsibility – one of the foundations of our Westminster system of government.

Let me spell it out for you. Ministers have the responsibility to oversee executive action within their portfolios. Because government is now so extensive, we can’t expect them to do this on their own, so we furnish them with departments, lavishly endowed with hordes of over-paid bureaucrats, to carry out important work like commissioning studies and so on.