MICHAEL HOWARD has undermined a good idea with a muddled one. Cutting the size of the Shadow Cabinet from an unwieldy 26½ (the half being Bill Cash, who is on call to attend) to 12 looks sensible in theory. This creates the type of streamlined inner-core/executive committee which many Prime Ministers and party leaders have sought over the years. It is a manageable group where it is possible to have a sensible discussion. Then, the trouble starts. Who is in, and who out?

Mr Howard’s solution is to have overlords, responsible for a number of departments. The Tories say this is not based on any historical precedent. However, Winston Churchill named certain ministers as co-ordinators or overlords in his 1951 Government, and Harold Wilson briefly operated a smaller version in the mid-1960s, when Douglas Houghton was welfare overlord. The only trouble is that the Churchill plan was a flop and was quickly abandoned.

Churchill had wanted to recreate some of his wartime arrangements, when all but a handful of departmental ministers were excluded from the War Cabinet. All domestic ministers, including the Chancellor, were outside and this agenda was skilfully run by Attlee. In peacetime, politics is more complicated. Churchill took the Ministry of Defence, while the overlords were Lord Woolton to watch over food and agriculture; Lord Leathers as Secretary of State for Coordination of Transport, Fuel and Power; and Lord Cherwell to oversee scientific research and development.

The question immediately arose of who was constitutionally accountable. Ministers can always supervise other ministers, as Gordon Brown does in the economic and welfare fields. But someone has to answer questions. So, after a lot of fuss, the overlords experiment was doomed when Lord Woolton said that the ministers he was supposed to coordinate still had complete responsibility to Parliament. In practice, the roles of the overlord faded away, and Lord Leathers’s office disappeared within less than two years.

Opposition is different and, as Mr Howard’s team argues, there is no need for the shadow team to match exactly the Whitehall boundaries. There are different jobs in and out of Parliament in developing an alternative programme and scrutinising the Government.

But Mr Howard’s structure is a recipe for confusion. The new titles would have sounded cumbersome for Pooh-Bah as Lord High Everything Else in The Mikado.

Tim Yeo is supposed to be the public face for health and education, replying to statements by John Reid and Charles Clarke. But can he be on top of such a vast area? And where does that leave Tim Collins and Andrew Lansley, described as Shadow Secretaries for Education and Health respectively? And David Curry is going to have to work overtime to master Local Government (including Housing), the Regions, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

This set-up is designed for Opposition and is not supposed to imply any view about how a Tory government would work. But first, Mr Howard has to show that his overlords and spokesmen will not trip over themselves.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• In Margot Fonteyn's footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power