The Everyday Life of a Minister: a confessional and impressionist tale'

Normally, I would start a chapter with something like the following paragraph. The chapter reports my shadowing of ministers in British government and seeks to answer the question 'what do ministers do?' The first part of the chapter briefly outlines the research and explains the idea of a 'confessional tale'. The second and largest section of the chapter draws extensively on my fieldwork notebooks, supplemented by interviews with the ministers, to describe not only the everyday life of ministers but also my reaction to being with them for many days. Finally, I reflect on what I have learnt.