- Location
- Sandford, Gloucestershire
- Pronouns
- She/They
"The gritty, derpived, post-industrial Northern town of Watford."
According to my uncle when he was young, Growing up in Caterham, North of Watford was "The North"
"The gritty, derpived, post-industrial Northern town of Watford."
Wow! Very complexThe God Abandons Summers
HORSEGUARDSFrom The New Encyclopedia of British Politics, 10th Edition, Pub, 2015:
Lovely this. Spads have been around for a century, some of them not so young, but they have a derisory name amd their own show. More popular than Political Animals.HORSEGUARDS
A colloquial nickname for SPECIAL ADVISORS, political appointees who advise and assist government ministers and senior politicians in Westminster and the Home Rule Administrations of Ireland, Scotland and other regions. They are paid and regulated under Section 10 of the 1995 Governance Act, which sets out a code of conduct for special advisors and allocates budgets and resources for their work and employment. The nickname refers to the prime minister's office in Century House that overlooks Horseguard's Road.
The first "Horseguard" was Raymond Asquith, Duff Cooper's Principal Secretary, who in the late 1930s who left the leftward-drifting Liberals to work as a military-style chief of staff to gatekeep information and visitors to a Tory Prime Minister. Like pre-war Principal Private Secretaries in the former Prime Ministerial residence of Downing Street, Asquith was a political appointee who possessed the title and powers of a civil servant, empowered to direct civil servants within the Commonwealth Secretariat and Whitehall more generally. The nickname was derisory, referring to the Principal Secretary's loyalty to the prime minister before the government or their party. It was first as the title of a cartoon in a 1941 issue of Punch, where Raymond Asquith is depicted as a guard dog residing in a kennel beneath Duff Cooper's office window outside Century House.
In subsequent decades the power and number of "Horseguards" grew in size, becoming responsible for centralised communications, policy development and political strategy. Under Allan Bertam in the 1970s, some "horseguards" such as Ben Griffin were regularly described as possessing more power than elected ministers. The power and opacity of these advisors was heavily scrutinised during the Eastern War, with some officials at Century House accused of overruling government ministers and military staff on war strategy. This led to Special Advisors coming to be formally defined and regulated under the 1995 Governance Act, often referred to as the "Horseguard's Charter".
Fiction set within the Westminster village frequently includes characters that are special advisors. The nickname of Horseguards was popularised by the 1996-2006 political TV drama Horseguards, which follows several special advisors at both ministerial and prime ministerial level as they manage and manipulate officials and events.
Someone's been borrowing ideas from 1920s Pan-Europa types.
ranking a few dozen journalists from “based” to “finn”.