Chancellor of the Exchequer his duty to distribute as fairly as he can." The chancellor has considerable control over other departments as it is the Treasury which sets Departmental Expenditure Limits. The amount of power this gives to an individual chancellor depends on his personal forcefulness, his status within his party and his relationship with the prime minister. Gordon Brown, who became chancellor when Labour came into Government in 1997, had a large personal power base in the party. Perhaps as a result, Tony Blair chose to keep him in the same position throughout his ten years as prime minister; making Brown an unusually
Exchequer of Ireland the Irish Exchequer of Pleas, after the English body. The Inferior Exchequer, tasked with collecting revenues, remained part of the Exchequer long after the English Inferior Exchequer had become a distinct body called the Treasury. The Exchequer was finally dissolved in 1817, when it was amalgamated with the Exchequer of Great Britain following the Act of Union 1800. The "Red Book of the Irish Exchequer" (so called by analogy with the English Red Book of the Exchequer) was a 14th-century compilation of Exchequer practice, including the text of the Magna Carta Hiberniae, destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts explosion. Court