David Lloyd George

Lloyd George replaced the full cabinet with a small War Cabinet of five, created the Cabinet Secretariat under Maurice Hankey, which first kept minutes, and depended on Conservative partners, above all Bonar Law, to stay in office. After the war his coalition rested on Conservative votes, and it fell when Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club voted in October 1922 to fight the next election alone. The machinery he created still runs Whitehall; the dependence on another party's leaders ended his career.