It was clearly the announcement of the intended creation of the new ministry that upset Askwith so much he had to forgo a day's shooting; it was going to have huge implications for his department. The idea of setting up the ministry had been aired more than a decade earlier, but it had been resisted by Llewellyn Smith who thought it undesirable that there should be a split between the commercial and labour aspects of economic questions. Pressure for a separate ministry from the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress grew during the war.

John Hodge was not the first choice as Minister of Labour. The office was first offered to J. H. Thomas, the newly appointed secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR); Thomas declined, possibly because as a senior official in one of the most powerful unions in the country, he did not wish to resign this position for a second-rate ministry that did not carry a seat in the War Cabinet. Hodge's appointment was a mistake; he was a ‘rampaging and most patriotic working-man’, who at a convivial 18 stone ‘looked the part to perfection’, but he had neither the administrative ability nor the political imagination to establish properly the ministry or to develop its policies’. Once in office Hodge had to appoint a Permanent Secretary to the Ministry, and he wanted to choose someone ‘who understands Labour and has the capacity and character’.