Of Ministers and Mandarins

Much as I love Jonathan Lynn’s Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister, it seems that every time you poke it, another inaccuracy falls out. I’ve already talked about a certain set of Evening Standard reviews of Yes Minister. But that’s far from the only problem.

Let me quote that section of the book again.

“No one took much notice of the second episode, but everything changed after the third week. This sudden surge of enthusiasm was the result of a lengthy article by Roy Hattersley in the Spectator. Hattersley was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party at the time and, like Jim Prior in the Tory Party and Jim Hacker in our series, was a centrist politician who could have belonged to either party. Hattersley described everything that the show had shown so far, confirmed that this was exactly what had happened to him when he first became a minister, and asked how on earth did we know?

Hattersley’s article galvanised the political press. Suddenly political correspondents took up the show and editorials started to be written about it. The TV critics, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon, and after the fourth episode the critic from the Evening Standard told his readers that Yes Minister was an excellent comedy show and he had said so from the start. He hadn’t.”

As well as misrepresenting the Evening Standard reviews, commenters here were quick to notice other errors. David Boothroyd correctly points out that Hattersley only became Deputy Leader in 1983; it was Michael Foot in the role at the time of Yes Minister‘s first series. Worse, even the referenced article by Hattersley is incorrectly attributed: Simon Coward points out that there’s no evidence of such an article in The Spectator around this time.

Luckily, I have very good readers who do all my work for me. A bit more digging from Simon revealed that the article wasn’t in The Spectator at all; it was in The Listener instead. Silly similar syllable sounds. And then your friend – and indeed he’s my friend as well – John Williams kindly bunged me a copy of the whole article.

Titled “Of Ministers and Mandarins”, and published in the 20th March 1980 issue of the magazine, this was clearly written after the third episode of the series was broadcast: “The Economy Drive”, on the 10th March. It represents one of the very first serious pieces of analysis of Yes Minister – perhaps the very first – and so is an important document in our understanding of the initial reaction to the show.

It seems worth, therefore, replicating the article in full. Take it away, Roy Hattersley.

The day on which Jim Hacker joined the government was, for him, a confusion of unreasonable hope and irrational despair. Whenever the telephone rang, he assumed that the Prime Minister was on the line, impatient to offer him one of the great offices of state. Each time, the caller turned out to be a felicitous friend or an inquisitive acquaintance. Hacker tried to reconcile himself to the destruction of his political career: the Prime Minister, finding the line engaged, would lose patience with the pursuit of so garrulous a subordinate and turn his attention to a less talkative colleague whose phone was free. I know the feeling.

After Number Ten actually made the connection, Jim Hacker set off for his new department with a complete set of recently constructed policies and a suitably battle-hardened political advisor. The presence of the political advisor at the historic moment when Hacker entered into the kingdom was intended as both a sign and a symbol. It demonstrated the importance he attached to political, as distinct from (and sometimes opposed to), Civil Service advice. I have myself embarked on such an adventure, identically equipped.

The similarity between the fateful moment in our ministerial careers would not be worth a mention were it not for the diversity of our origins. I was created by the Sheffield City Council and Sparkbrook Constituency Labour Party. Jim Hacker was invented by Mr Anthony Jay and Mr Jonathan Lynn to be the eponymous hero of Yes Minister, BBC2’s new Monday-night television comedy series.

At least, he is the hero according to the popular definition of that much misunderstood condition. His face, emoting bemused joy and bewildered terror, is rarely off the screen. He possesses all the fallible charm and vulnerable attraction of a calf as yet unable to balance on its inadequate legs.

But, if heroism requires strength and if it is the dramatic duty of the hero to move the plot along – the subject rather than the object of action and activity – then the accolade must go elsewhere. It must be hung around the beribboned neck of Sir Humphrey Appleby, KCB, Permanent Under-Secretary of State to the Department of Administrative Affairs.

It is perhaps unreasonable to measure a television comedy that signals its jokes with recorded laughter against Milton’s view of heroes and heroism. But I find it impossible to watch a play concerned with Cabinet Committees, the drafting of White Papers and the preparation of legislation without thinking about Paradise Lost.

And all the details of life before the fall are there. Most of the action takes place in what looks suspiciously like the old Admiralty Building. The Principal Private Secretary races through the ranks of the Civil Service, their pseudonyms and then acronyms, with perfect precision. The arcane distinction between a Head of State visiting Britain ‘wearing that hat’ and a Head of State visiting in his capacity of Head of Government is one I well remember from my days in the Foreign Office.

When Hacker gets home late at night and staggers into his bedroom under the weight of four ministerial ‘red boxes’ I wondered if he, too, had been advised that before his safe was cemented into the wall, ‘between the floor and the mattress is the safest place’.

In fact, for those of us who in the past lived lives that imitated Yes Minister‘s art, the programme is a sort of political ‘whodunit?’. Who told them about the frustrations of getting contentious speeches ‘cleared’ by colleagues? Who told them that Private Secretaries rarely want to call Ministers (at least, in their presence) by their Christian name? Who recounted the old Civil Service adage about the need to distinguish between activity and achievement and explained that, inherent in that distinction, is the contempt that a certain sort of civil servant has for a certain sort of Minister.¹

Whoever gave away our trade secrets enabled Mr Jay and Mr Lynn to be at their best when they caricature Whitehall and Westminster. Sir Humphrey Appleby taps the tips of his fingers together and descends an octave at the end of the sentences when he is anxious to sound audibly wise or profound. He is never ‘surprised’ or ‘amazed’. When taken unawares, he is invariably ‘aghast’. The Minister’s slightest witticism is invariably greeted with a comment that hangs suspended between congratulation and condemnation – ‘very droll’.

The hierarchy of gentlemen (who are the professionals) and players (who are the amateurs) is clearly identified by their dress, which draws the class lines as clearly as white and black hats once divided good cowboys from bad. The civil servants, being gentlemen, wear blue serge or a discreet pinstripe. The Minister, being not quite a gentlemen wears grey flannel. The political adviser, being not a gentlemen at all but a party factotum, comes to the office in a brown suit.

But I suspect that Mr Jay and Mr Lynn want to portray more than the small change of political life. Like Anthony Trollope (who in his time wrote not for Conservative Prime Ministers but for an audience certainly no more learned and literate than BBC2), they aspire to write fiction that is about politics, not just politicians. And, like him, they achieve some remarkable successes. The first two episodes really were about doubts and dilemmas that could not be experienced in any other profession. The threat of sudden public dismissal for inadvertently saying the wrong thing does not hang over dentists and draughtsman. The perils of attempting a balance of interest between the people and the party does not beset doctors or bookmakers.

And, most important of all, no other trade is (or imagines itself to be) so much at the mercy of popular newspapers. Jim Hacker, reading the tabloid analysis of his inadequacies, simultaneously rejects the criticism and acts upon the advice. He is suffering from a common ministerial syndrome – as common as the debilitating suspicion that the permanent Civil Service manipulates the temporary Minister by exploiting its years of previous experience, withholding essential information and operating behind his back with other civil servants in rival Departments.

The fact that civil servants rarely behave that way does not, as recent articles have proved, prevent paranoid politicians seeing signs of subversion in every ‘official submission’. Jim Hacker, on the other hand, is surrounded by sabotage and submerged in urbane indiscipline; only last Monday did he begin to suspect that his staff aspire to anything other than helping him along. Nobody should complain about that. Men of such profound naivety have held high office. And, in any case, the object of Yes Minister is to entertain. The entertainment comes from the relationship between the Minister and the Permanent Secretary being exactly what it is – the subordinate firmly in charge and the titular head of the Department never quite realising it.

English literature is full of Admirable Crichtons, who unobtrusively shoulder the burdens that should have been carried on more elevated backs, and Uriah Heeps, who feign humility in order to obtain power. But the relationship between Hacker and Sir Humphrey is more complicated than either of the stereotypes. The Permanent Secretary does not even try to disguise his superiority. Nor has he the slightest doubt about the objective purity of his motives. He feels no more guilt about his deception than a parent who delights his children with stories about fairies at the bottom of their garden.

It is on the authors’ ability to sustain and develop the complicated relationship between Minister and Permanent Secretary that the series depends. If the irony of the title is forgotten, not even the admirable performances of Paul Eddington (as Jim Hacker) and Nigel Hawthorne (as Sir Humphrey) will elevate Yes Minister above the run of ordinary situation comedy. Episode three dealt with they hackneyed problem of mistaken identity, when Ron Watson, the trade organiser, was confused with Mr Brough, the scourge of waste and overmanning in the North-East. An identical situation could arise (and probably has arisen) in On the Buses and Coronation Street.

None of which is to take Yes Minister too solemnly or judge it against too serious criteria. There are funny things to be said and written about the profession of politics and enormous entertainment to be provided by recounting the political ways in which politicians are risible and ridiculous. Mr Jay and Mr Lynn may, on the evidence of the earliest episodes, be able to entertain us by saying them. I hope so.

It is, of course, an excellent, thoughtful article, of the kind that I wish more politicians would write these days. (Or, indeed, of the kind that I wish more magazines and newspapers would publish.) As might be expected, Hattersley acquits himself well on the political side of things.

He perhaps acquits himself less well on the sitcom. He stops just short of saying “canned laughter”, but “recorded laughter” is inexplicit enough to annoy, and besides, his phrasing indicates a certain distrust of the form. But worse, his complaints about the mistaken identity in “The Economy Drive” seem positively misguided. Partly because the section he complains about is such a small part of the episode, but mainly because he seems to be objecting to the idea of a sitcom being, y’know a sitcom. So much of the joy of Yes Minister is the combination of the politics with more standard sitcom tropes, just as the joy of Red Dwarf is the mingling of audience sitcom with science fiction. To wrinkle your nose a little at the sitcom part of things shows a slight misunderstanding of what the show is, and why it works.

Still, a great many people whose entire job it is to write about television have repeatedly done an awful lot worse than Roy Hattersley does here. It’s 2023, am I supposed to stop whinging about Sam Wollaston yet?

1. Oddly, the published article is indeed missing a question mark here. ↩

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