Yorkshire faces Cabinet onslaught
The Cabinet is to meet in Leeds later today on the second of its meetings outside London.
Gordon Brown’s government will meet at the city’s Royal Armouries building for their first meeting since the Pre-Budget Report was announced on Monday.
Ministers will then disperse around Yorkshire as the prime minister seeks to re-engage government with the people.
International development secretary Douglas Alexander will meet a community group, business secretary Peter Mandelson is in Sheffield for a business lunch and work and pensions secretary James Purnell will visit Action in Employment in Wakefield.
The trip may come as a surprise to Australia’s foreign minister, who will be meeting foreign secretary David Miliband in Leeds rather than London.
Today’s Cabinet meeting follows a similar event in Birmingham on September 8th which Downing Street claimed was only the second to be held outside London or Chequers in British history.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster challenged this claim in a letter to the Times newspaper published the following day, however. He recalled the Cabinet meeting in Brighton in 1966 in an “emergency meeting” to consider imposing a freeze on prices and incomes.
“I remember this well, because I was one of the members of the Cabinet secretariat who travelled to Brighton to take the minutes of the meeting,” he wrote.
The first meeting outside London took place in 1921. Prime minister David Lloyd George had called a meeting at Inverness during his Highlands holiday after Ireland renounced the British monarchy.
