Lord President of the Council
cabinet minister in the United Kingdom
The lord president of the Council is the presiding officer of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom and the fourth of the Great Officers of State, ranking above the lord keeper of the privy seal. The lord president usually attends and is responsible for chairing the meetings of the Privy Council, presenting business for the approval of the sovereign.
The office and its history
The Privy Council meets once a month, wherever the sovereign may be residing at the time, to give formal approval to Orders in Council. Only a few privy counsellors need attend such meetings, and only when invited to do so at the government's request. As the duties of the Lord President are not onerous, the post has often been given to a government minister whose responsibilities are not department-specific. In recent years it has been most typical for the Lord President also to serve as Leader of the House of Commons or Leader of the House of Lords. The Lord President has no role in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
In the history of British government, the President of the Council is a relatively recent creation. The first certain appointment to the office was that of the Duke of Suffolk in 1529. Although there is a reference to Edmund Dudley serving as 'president of the council' in 1497, it was only in 1529 that the role was given the style and precedence of a Great Officer of State by the President of the Council Act 1529 (21 Hen.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lord President of the Council” as cabinet minister in the United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as cabinet minister in the United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q943379. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1529 and 1497.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lord President of the Council” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.