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
Chancellor of the Exchequer serve in this way was Lord Denman in 1834. The chancellor is the third-oldest major state office in English and British history; it originally carried responsibility for the Exchequer, the medieval English institution for the collection and auditing of royal revenues which dates from the Anglo-Saxon period and survived the Norman conquest of England. The earliest surviving records which are the results of the exchequer's audit, date from 1129–30 under King Henry I and show continuity from previous years. The chancellor controlled monetary policy as well as fiscal policy until 1997, when the Bank of England was granted independent control