The Guardian has an odd and strangely entertaining list going on of the fifty most influential unelected people in England, or possibly Great Britain. Anyway, they’ve convened a panel, and printed an initial list of nominees. The list is quite odd in some ways. There are the people I would expect to be on the list no matter who actually holds the position (the Queen, the Heir Apparent, the head of the Civil Service, the leader of the House of Lords, the Archibishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the governor of the Bank of England, the P.M.’s chief of staff, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the Director General of the BBC). I’m told that the Skull and Bones automatically gives membership to whoever holds a handful of positions like that: the newspaper editor, the head of the debate team, the captain of the football team, etc, etc, unless that person is for some reason blackballed. This list has to be like that. There are a few company heads: Tesco, BT, Virgin (special case?), Man Group, Marks and Spencer. Also the former head of W.H. Smith, just for kicks, but he’s evidently now a major government regulator. The others are mostly cultural figures, and an interesting bunch. The only novelist is J.K. Rowling. There’s the editor of the Daily Mail and the Sun, but not of the Guardian or the Times or the Independent. There are a couple of labor figures, too.
When I started to think about who I would nominate to be on a similar list of most influential unelected people in the US, I immediately realized that because of our Presidential system, there are a dozen or more people that pretty much demand to head the list that are within the government. The Secretaries of Defense, State, Commerce, and Homeland Security, as well as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for absolute beginners. Also the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; is it odd that the British list has no military figures? Of course the Prime Minister, like our President, has a couple of unelected advisors and assistants (and possibly a spouse or parent) who have tremendous influence, and I believe it is technically possible for a Prime Minister to appoint unelected citizens to the Cabinet (other than the Lord Chancellor, of course). But my point is that in our system, unlike the British system, has by design a large number of unelected government officials of tremendous personal power and influence. And our political tradition, unlike the British tradition, prevents (or at least discourages) candidates from disclosing their potential Cabinets before election.
That tradition, of course, could change.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.