The leading candidate is Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, who is thought to have more than 70 MPs behind him, while Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has around 50.
Fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the next Labor Department secretary, turned around the Southern California-based parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's with help from scantily clad women hawking oversized burgers in racy ads.
With his innate sense of the sweep and surge of history and his zest for the personalities of power, Henderson, still in his 20s, was conscious of the undercurrents of the interplay between the ambassadors and under-secretaries around the Washington negotiating table.
"A one-minute dictation takes a secretary around four and a half minutes to transcribe.
It's (usually) not about the stuff you see on Mad Men, and it's not chasing the secretary around the desk.
A study four years ago concluded the average retirement income of former permanent secretaries was around £100,000 a year.
Hoping to promote the White House plan, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and five cabinet secretaries traveled around the country to emphasize the need for a national energy policy.
"You'd have these people, senior people, the ministers who had things on their agenda, their departmental secretaries, waiting around all day in whatever city the SPBC meeting was in, and then not even get into the room, they'd fly home, or go out and buy some clean smalls and fly on to wherever the whole show was going the next day," one person involved in the process told me soon afterwards.
Monkey's awkward moment of the festival: when culture secretary John Whittingdale looked around and realised that all around him were getting to their feet to give a standing ovation to Armando Iannucci's MacTaggart speech in which he accused ministers of effectively trying to kill off the BBC.
Most afternoons there was a break, and the secretary would come around and take tea or coffee orders and provide sweets.
