As MPs reassemble in Westminster after the summer recess, this week sees a timely hearing by the Commons public administration committee in the light of the row over David Cameron's decision to appoint former army chief general Sir Richard Dannatt as a minister in the Conservative shadow cabinet.
The committee won't be covering this particular decision, but it is investigating the way in which the government has been appointing ministers and advisers on specific issues, as part of the prime minister's stated drive to assemble a "government of all the talents".
The appointment of what have inevitably been termed goats has proved a double-edged sword.
Few of the government's goats have stayed the course. Of the high-profile individuals appointed to the House of Lords to become government ministers, including Lord Ara Darzi, Lord Peter Mandelson, Lord Digby Jones and Lord Andrew Adonis, both Darzi and Jones have now left their ministerial roles, although Adonis and Mandelson remain embedded in government policy-making, as does the financial services secretary, Lord Paul Myners and former first sea lord Admiral Sir Alan West, now Lord West.
As for the tsars, they include Lord Alan Sugar, Lord John Birt, Louise Casey and Keith Hellawell. The committee wants to know how such appointments are made, what their benefits are to government and whether ministers and advisers appointed in this way are sufficiently accountable.
It is also posing pertinent questions about the status of people when they stop being ministers, but continue to be members of the House of Lords.
Real world expertise
Supporters of outside appointments say such individuals bring a different, "real world" expertise to their roles. That was certainly true in the case of Darzi, whose hands-on experience as a surgeon gave him a kudos among fellow clinicians that other policy-bearers could not match. Did that mean his ideas were any more palatable, however?
Critics argue that such advisers, no matter how great their expertise, are unelected and are not sufficiently accountable either to Parliament or to the electorate.
There's also the question of what happens when, as in the case of Lords Darzi and Jones, they resign from the government, but retain, of course, their seat in the Lords.
On Thursday, committee members will grill former cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull and Professor Anthony King, professor of government at the University of Essex and a renowned expert on constitutional issues, for their views on the current system.
It should be an interesting discussion. Earlier this year, King argued that while drawing only on the expertise of MPs may exclude specialist knowledge from the government, he noted that bringing in ministers from outside means they have not been democratically elected and that many of the outsiders brought into government over the years "have flopped".
It is, once again, a story of just how difficult it is for those with professional expertise to operate within a political framework. We see this time and again when private sector specialists move into the public sector and underestimate the sheer complexity of public services.
