There has been a tendency to use ‘minder’ to refer to a ministerial staffer who acts as a handler, carefully organising and superintending the personal appearances of a minister and exerting influence to develop a favourable persona for that minister. There is, however, a countervailing tendency to apply it more broadly, and taking my licence from the second passage quoted above, I wish to establish a wider provenance for it here. There is a good reason for this. The fact is that within ministerial offices functional differentiations (between, say, media handlers and an advisory elite) tend to break down: all staff may take an advisory role at some stage, and all staff are constrained to play the minder’s role at every stage. That is to say, ministerial staff members are the creatures of their minister, and must always put the minister’s interests first. Therefore, no matter how important they see their advisory role as being (and in chapter 6 it will be seen that ministerial staff increasingly rate policy advising as their most important function), and no matter how lofty their own aspirations are, they have no independent standing, and must couch their advice in terms of the minister’s needs. The term ‘minder’, therefore, serves as a salutary reminder of their subordinate role. This is not, however, to underrate their importance: the personal adviser has a venerable history, as chapter 2 indicates, and the institutionalisation of minders in the private offices of the political executive signifies an important stage in the evolution of contemporary leadership, as is demonstrated in chapters 2 and 3.

(From Chapter 1, ‘Introduction: Ministers, Minders and Mandarins’.)

In what ways do the characteristics of ministerial staff serve to differentiate them from mainstream politicians and bureaucrats? As it happens, relatively high socioeconomic status, and levels of education considerably higher than the norm, are characteristics shared by parliamentary politicians and bureaucrats. In the Australian instance, however, the current group of private office staffers has a higher level of tertiary qualifications than parliamentarians generally, or than the ministry (which itself is more highly qualified than the parliamentary norm). Advisers are in general a decade younger than politicians, and about the age when serious bureaucratic careers are getting underway. Most obviously, advisers are differentiated from politicians by their preference for the private office rather than the public podium, and from bureaucrats by their admission of political commitment and their relative disinterest in administration.

            How can one begin to move into fruitful generalisation from this point? It may be argued that given the high salience of intellectual training, and the commitment to policy, this group is part of the intelligentsia; ‘intelligentsia’ here refers to those who have acquired specialised technical skills or higher education, and whose career advance then depends on successful utilisation of the practical intellectual capacities thus generated. This clearly covers both particular skills (such as those of the journalist) and the high qualifications of the minders surveyed, as well as their policy aspirations. It does not suggest that they necessarily see themselves as an intelligentsia – the term serves as a categorisation summarising certain characteristics, not as a term of self-ascription. Nor does it suggest that many of the group are intellectuals: there are people committed to ideas-work, but most of them would scoff at the suggestion that they were intellectuals. In any case, the term ‘intellectual’ has too often been taken to entail critical detachment from, rather than engagement in, social action to sit easily with this group. It is therefore useful to remark that while ‘intelligentsia’ encompasses a sense of intellectual work, in its original sense it also implied political engagement rather than the detachment, even alienation, more commonly ascribed to the intellectual. Yet it would be hard to deny the claim that politicians and bureaucrats too might well be described in these terms as members of the intelligentsia – another essay might link the sociology of knowledge with the appropriation by the intelligentsia of modem political institutions.

It is important to recognise that the minders in politics are a particular subset of the intelligentsia: and that there are ramifications of the term ‘minder’ in this context which further differentiate them from ministers and mandarins. The minder, despite a training which entails technical skills and intellectual capacities, is nonetheless removed from the intellectual, who is so often assumed to maintain a critical distance. That is, the contemporary minder is usually a person of learning, but also a political operative: to state the obvious, he/she is not detached, but engaged. The fact of engagement also distinguishes the minder from the mandarin, for whom commitment to a political vision has had to be subsumed by the appearance of a ‘neutral’ technicism deemed appropriate to the bureaucracy. But the fact of being engaged political operatives does not of itself make minders akin to that other subset of the intelligentsia, the mainstream politicians – they have not chosen to pursue their ideas in the public forum, and the term ‘minder’ should always remind us of the dependent status of this group as the functionaries of mainstream politicians.

(From Chapter 5, ‘Who are the Minders?’)