The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Rivals

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read21 min

I didn’t enjoy Rivals as much as some. The problem was Rupert Campbell-Black. He is supposed to be Mrs Thatcher’s minister for sport – and I am old enough to remember Mrs Thatcher’s actual ministers for sport. 

They were, in order of their appointment: Hector Monro, Neil Macfarlane, Richard Tracey, Colin Moynihan and Robert Atkins. None of these individuals were – and this is not meant as criticism – the sort of people on whom Jilly Cooper would have based a rakish anti-hero. Indeed, of the various people Campbell-Black is said to resemble, none were MPs; you can read into that whatever you want.

Rivals is set in 1986-7, slap bang in Tracey’s period of office, but it also contains the claim that Mrs Thatcher created the role specially for Campbell-Black, a former Olympic show-jumper, thus erasing Monro and Macfarlane, as well as their predecessors Denis Howell and Eldon Griffiths. The show also makes Campbell-Black a privy counsellor, even though the post was then held by an under-secretary of state. There were many other issues with the show’s depiction of political life, but there is a danger that this column becomes similar to the time I was watching a James Graham play with my wife, helpfully informing her of things I thought they had got wrong – until she indicated, with some forceful clarity, that she was no longer desirous of such a commentary.

Still, it’s nice to see junior ministers get some limelight. Kevin Theakston began his 1987 book on the subject quoting a newspaper claim that “few people in British politics exist in such deep obscurity as junior ministers”. That book aside, there have been precious few academic studies doing very much to bring them out of the shadows. One of the exceptions, as it happens, focuses on the role of sports minister. Published in 2011, it argued the role was primarily about raising the profile of sport, rather than policymaking. It also noted that the post was a poor career move. None of the sports ministers up to that point had made it to Cabinet, something which remains true – although a number are currently in the shadow cabinet and their race is not yet run. 

One issue with studying ministers is working out what they do, and especially on which parts of their portfolio they focus. You can talk to them – the Institute for Government ran a great project doing just this – or look at what they do in Parliament. But a fascinating new piece of research published in West European Politics has instead used Transparency International’s open access record of ministerial meetings. Transparency International’s work is most often associated with studies of corruption, but it is also very useful at showing who ministers engage with. The data is available online and freely downloadable.

One issue with studying ministers is working out what they do, and especially on which parts of their portfolio they focus

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This new research looked at more than 78,000 ministerial meetings held between 2012 and 2021. The key findings of the paper – that white male ministers engaged least with equalities organisations, and that women’s organisations enjoy much greater access to ministers than organisations focused on race – is interesting in itself, but the approach offers wider possibilities.  

The data now runs up to 2026 covering over 160,000 meetings. To what extent does a change in government change the groups who enjoy direct access to ministers? With one exception, the top 10 groups to hold meetings with ministers before and after 2024 are completely different. Prior to 2024, the list included the CBI, the NFU, and the Federation of Small Businesses. Since 2024, the top 10 includes the GMB (straight in at number two, as they used to say on the radio), and Unison (which gets coded up separately as Unison and UNISON, and would in fact be ahead of the GMB if only civil servants could agree on the capitalisation). The appeal of the Local Government Association is clearly universal, as it is top in both lists.

There is, lurking in this dataset, the potential for great mischief. But there is also the potential for some great research. 

Further reading: A McMaster and A Bairner, Junior Ministers in the UK: The Role of the Minister for Sport, Parliamentary Affairs, 2012; A Christoffersen et al, Intersectionality, NGOs and executives: who has which minister’s ear? West European Politics, 2025