Her Majesty's Government
Her Majesty's Government, or when the
sovereign is male,
His Majesty's Government, abbreviated
HMG or
HM Government, is the formal
title used by the Government of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the governments of some other kingdoms where
executive authority is theoretically vested in the monarch and exercised through his or her
ministers.
In British usage,
Parliament of the United Kingdom and the
Courts of the United Kingdom are not considered to be part of the 'Government'.
In the
British Empire, the term "His Majesty's Government" was originally only used by the Imperial Government in
London. With the development of the
Commonwealth, the self-governing
Dominions came to be seen as realms of the
British Sovereign equal in status to the United Kingdom, and from the
1920s and
30s the form "His Majesty's Government in ..." began to be used by United Kingdom and Dominion governments. Colonial, state and provincial governments, on the other hand, continued to use the lesser title "Government of ...". There was also
His Majesty's Government in the Irish Free State.
Today, however, most Commonwealth governments have now reverted to the form "Government of ...", and it is today mainly in the United Kingdom that the titles "Her Majesty's Government", "Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom" or "Her Britannic Majesty's Government", the last in dealings with foreign states, can be found in official use.
The acronym HMG is often used by members of the government and their advisers as a convenient short label to describe
British Ministers and the senior
civil servants or
mandarins in
Departments of the United Kingdom Government. The term comes from the formal constitutional position that British ministers govern the country by advising the Crown through the
Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
