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Robert Peel
Born
Before his famous premiership, Peel spent years as Home Secretary doing unglamorous reform: consolidating hundreds of criminal statutes, removing the death penalty from over a hundred offences and, in 1829, creating the Metropolitan Police. The design choices mattered most: a uniformed civilian force answerable to the Home Secretary, with instructions that stressed preventing crime and keeping public approval. The 'Peelian principles' later attributed to him were largely written up by others, but the force he set up became a model across the world.
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William Edward Forster
Born
Forster's Elementary Education Act of 1870 did not abolish church schools; it filled the gaps between them. Elected school boards could build and run schools wherever voluntary provision fell short, paid for from local rates, and within a decade thousands of board schools had been built. It was a pragmatic compromise that angered both Anglicans and Nonconformists, but it created the framework for compulsory, and later free, elementary education in England and Wales.
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Herbert Hoover
Born
Hoover's presidency is remembered for the Depression, but as Commerce Secretary from 1921 to 1928 he was one of the most effective administrators in American government. He drove standardisation of everything from bricks and tyres to screw threads, cutting waste across industry, organised the allocation of radio frequencies that preceded the Radio Act of 1927, and ran the relief operation after the 1927 Mississippi flood. That flood relief also left Black refugees in camps under harsh conditions, a stain his agency never fully addressed.
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John Wheatley
Labour's first government lasted less than a year in 1924, but Wheatley, its health minister, used it to pass the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act. It gave councils a long-term subsidy to build homes for rent rather than sale, and he negotiated with building unions and employers to expand the workforce and the supply of materials. Around half a million council homes were built under the act before it was repealed in 1933, establishing council housing as a mainstream tenure.
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Frances Perkins
Born
The first woman in an American cabinet, Perkins served as Labor Secretary for all twelve years of Roosevelt's presidency and chaired the Committee on Economic Security that drafted the Social Security Act. She also steered the Fair Labor Standards Act through, with its minimum wage, maximum hours and ban on most child labour. Much of the New Deal's lasting machinery came from her patient drafting and committee work, which attracted far less attention than the fireside chats.
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Herbert Morrison
Born
As Transport Minister Morrison designed the London Passenger Transport Board, finally created in 1933, which merged the Underground, buses and trams into a single public corporation run at arm's length from ministers. That 'Morrisonian' model became the template for the nationalised industries after 1945, and its successor still runs London's network. He also led the London County Council from 1934, clearing slums and creating the green belt.
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Ernest Bevin
A trade union leader brought into Churchill's war cabinet without a parliamentary seat, Bevin ran the Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1945. He organised the mobilisation of almost the whole adult population, directing workers into industry, sending conscripts to the mines as 'Bevin Boys' and bringing millions of women into war work, largely by agreement with unions rather than compulsion. He also used the job to extend joint production committees, canteens and welfare provision in factories.
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Frederick Marquis, 1st Earl of Woolton
Born
A department store executive appointed Minister of Food in 1940, Woolton ran Britain's wartime rationing system. Its fairness was the point: points rationing gave choice, and priority supplies of milk, orange juice and cod liver oil went to children and expectant mothers. Wartime nutrition actually improved for many of the poorest families, and infant mortality fell. He was a skilled publicist, and the 'Woolton pie' became a joke, but the administration underneath was what worked.
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Rab Butler
Born
Butler's Education Act of 1944 made secondary education free and universal in England and Wales, raised the leaving age to 15 and created the Ministry of Education. Much of his skill went into months of quiet negotiation with the Anglican and Catholic churches over the future of their schools, producing the voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled categories that still exist. The tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools that followed is the contested part of his legacy.
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Clement Attlee
Born
Attlee was famously unflashy, and his talent was chairing. His 1945 cabinet contained huge and quarrelsome personalities, Bevin, Bevan, Morrison, Cripps and Dalton, and he kept them delivering: the National Health Service, national insurance, nationalisation of coal and rail, Indian independence and a large council housing programme, all within six years and in a bankrupt country. He ran short meetings and wrote terse notes. The shortages, rationing and the 1947 fuel crisis were also part of the record.
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Gunnar Sträng
Born
Sweden's finance minister from 1955 to 1976, Sträng built the revenue machinery behind the Swedish welfare state: a general sales tax introduced in 1960, later turned into VAT, a broad income tax base and a reputation for fiscal caution in a spending government. He also oversaw the introduction of the ATP earnings-related supplementary pension in the 1960s. Critics later blamed very high marginal tax rates for distortions, famously satirised by Astrid Lindgren in 1976, the year his party lost power.
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Goh Keng Swee
Born
Lee Kuan Yew was the public face of Singapore's government; Goh Keng Swee was much of its engine. As finance minister he set up the Economic Development Board and the Jurong industrial estate to attract foreign manufacturers, then built the Singapore Armed Forces from scratch as defence minister after independence in 1965, introducing national service. He later reformed schooling and helped found the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the sovereign fund GIC. All of it took place within a tightly controlled one-party political system.
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Sargent Shriver
Born
Shriver turned two presidential ideas into working agencies. He set up the Peace Corps for Kennedy in 1961, with volunteers abroad within months, and then ran Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity, which created Head Start, the Job Corps, Upward Bound and legal services for the poor. Head Start and Job Corps still operate. The 'community action' programmes that gave poor neighbourhoods a say in spending caused bitter fights with city mayors and were soon curtailed.
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Barbara Castle
Born
Castle was a fiery public figure, but her most lasting work as Transport Minister was dry. She introduced the breathalyser in 1967, a permanent 70 mph motorway limit and a requirement for new cars to have front seat belts fitted. Road deaths fell sharply in the first year of the drink-drive law. Later, at the Department of Health and Social Security, she created child benefit, paid directly to mothers, and the earnings-related state pension scheme.
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Al Gore
Born
Gore's National Performance Review, launched in 1993 as 'reinventing government', was the least glamorous project of the Clinton years. It cut the federal civilian workforce by roughly 400,000 positions, scrapped thousands of pages of internal rules, pushed agencies to publish customer service standards and simplified procurement. Some savings were overstated, and much of the headcount reduction came from defence. It remains one of the more serious attempts to improve how the federal government actually works.
More about Al Gore16
Trevor Manuel
Born
South Africa's finance minister for thirteen years, Manuel, working with Pravin Gordhan at the South African Revenue Service, turned an apartheid-era tax bureaucracy into one of the most respected revenue agencies in the developing world. The number of registered taxpayers grew several-fold, and the budget moved from deficit to surplus by 2007, paying for expanded social grants. The Treasury's and SARS's independence was later undermined during the Zuma years, which shows how much depended on the people involved.
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Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis
Born
Adonis was never elected to the Commons but, as an adviser and then schools minister, he designed and drove the original academies programme, which replaced failing secondary schools with independently run state schools, around 200 of them by 2010. As Transport Secretary he drew up the first HS2 plans. Results for the early sponsored academies were generally positive, while the later mass conversion under other governments is more contested, and HS2's costs and cuts have become a byword for overruns.
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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
As Nigeria's finance minister, Okonjo-Iweala negotiated the 2005 deal with the Paris Club that wrote off around 18 billion dollars of debt, and in her second spell introduced a computerised payroll and personnel system that removed tens of thousands of 'ghost workers' from the federal wage bill. She also began publishing monthly allocations to states. The fuel subsidy removal she backed in 2012 was reversed after mass protests. She has been Director-General of the World Trade Organization since 2021.
More about Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala19
Sri Mulyani
Born
Across two long spells as Indonesia's finance minister, Sri Mulyani reformed the tax and customs offices, replacing senior officials in agencies notorious for corruption, introduced performance-based pay and ran the 2016 tax amnesty that declared hundreds of billions of dollars of assets. She kept deficits within the legal 3 per cent ceiling outside the pandemic. She was removed in a reshuffle in September 2025 after a week of protests, and markets fell on the news, a sign of how much her reputation underpinned confidence.
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