Subsequent episodes would build on this achievement and fulfil its promise. Many of the themes that were covered, for example, seemed intriguingly topical, even though the scripts had been written about a half a year before.
At a time when Margaret Thatcher’s notoriously irascible, beetle-browed press Secretary, Bernard Ingham, was mastering the dark arts of spin, and some of her Ministers were beginning to obsess about whether their worst publicity was originating from inside or outside of Westminster, Jim Hacker was depicted on a weekly basis getting similarly paranoid. He was pictured poring over the pages of Private Eye in case he had been compromised, leaking against colleagues in the House of Commons bar (‘The first law of political indiscretion: always have a drink before you leak’43), and desperately trying to use the media before it could abuse him.
There were also some scrupulously researched and smartly insightful stories about dealing with the dreaded new nosy select committees (SIR HUMPHREY: ‘This is the first and only brief containing possible questions from the Committee with the appropriate answers, all carefully presented to give the Department’s position.’ HACKER: ‘Is it absolutely accurate?’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘They’re all carefully presented to give the Department’s position’44); Cabinet reshuffles (anticipating Margaret Thatcher’s imminent purge of the ‘wets’ in her Government, Hacker was seen panicking that he was about to be exiled by his leader to the Lords or, worse still, Europe45); the publication of a Leslie Chapman/Your Disobedient Servant-style whistle-blower memoir (‘It was a tiny mistake,’ Sir Humphrey protests when Hacker quotes one of the damning examples of bureaucratic waste. ‘Give me an example of a big mistake!’ snaps the Minister. ‘Letting people find out about it!’ replies his Permanent Secretary46); the increasingly brazen attempts by Ministers to stage media stunts (‘SIR FRANK: ‘Saw your chap on the television last night, cuddling a rabbit.’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘Mmm, the St Francis of Tower Hamlets.’ SIR FRANK: ‘What was it supposed to be in aid of?’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘After the rodent vote I imagine’47); and even the recent increase in overseas student fees (SIR HUMPHREY: ‘But why don’t you fill up your vacancies with British undergraduates?’ OXFORD MASTER: ‘I don’t think that’s awfully funny, Humphrey.’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘I wasn’t trying to be funny.’ OXFORD MASTER: ‘My dear fellow – anything but home students!’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘Why?’ BURSAR: ‘We only get five hundred a head for UK students! We’d have to take four hundred to replace a mere fifty foreigners, and the staff–student ratio would go from one to ten to one to thirty-four!’ OXFORD MASTER: ‘We’d have classrooms, dormitories – it would be like Wormwood Scrubs … or the University of Sussex!’48).
There were also plenty of the now expected sparklingly incisive analyses and parodies. In episode two, for example, there was another classic piece of Civil Service circumlocution:
SIR HUMPHREY:
I am fully seized of your aims and of course I will do my utmost to see that they are put into practice. To that end, I recommend that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we will be in a position to think through the various implications and arrive at a decision based on long-term considerations, rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived actions which might well have unforeseen repercussions.
The details of the Faustian deal awaiting every new Minister were explained in episode six:
SIR HUMPHREY:
There’s an implicit pact offered to every Minister by his senior officials. If the Minister will help us to implement the opposite policy to the one that he’s pledged to, which – once he’s in office – he will see as obviously incorrect, we will help him to pretend that he is in fact doing what he said he was going to do in his manifesto.
The same episode also offered another insight into the means by which civil servants maintained control over their Minister:
SIR HUMPHREY:
Any document which removes the power of decision-making from Ministers and gives it to us is important.
WOOLLEY:
Why?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh, Bernard, don’t be obtuse, please. It helps us to take government out of politics. It’s Britain’s only chance of survival!
WOOLLEY:
But even so, couldn’t it have waited until he wasn’t in such a hurry?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh, Bernard! When we want Ministers to sign something without asking too many questions we have to wait until they’re in a hurry – that’s when their concentration is at its weakest. They’re nice and vulnerable. That’s why we keep them on the go.
The civil servant’s view of the Minister’s most useful skills was outlined in the seventh episode:
SIR HUMPHREY:
Blurring the issue is one of the basic Ministerial skills.
HACKER:
Oh. What are the others?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Delaying decisions, dodging questions, juggling figures, bending facts and concealing errors.
The most recurrent of all the underlying themes was, once again, that of political ‘dirty hands’, with Jim Hacker, now a fully fledged graduate from the school of realpolitik, sullying them so often it seemed he had given up trying to wash them clean. In episode two, for example, he eagerly abandons plans to clean up the honours system once he himself is offered an honorary Oxford doctorate; in episode three (in a sly reprise of the Sir Frank Soskice volte-face), he vetoes his own petition to stop covert electronic surveillance after he discovers that it might help protect him from a death threat;49 in episode four (the one that most obviously reflected Antony Jay’s enthusiasm for the teachings of public choice theory), he decides to drop his support for a lucrative new chemical manufacturing contract, that would create masses of new jobs on Merseyside, purely on the grounds that erroneous reports of health hazards might end up damaging his standing with the electorate:
HACKER:
Something has just struck me.
SIR HUMPHREY:
So I noticed.
HACKER:
D’you know? There could be arguments against this scheme.
SIR HUMPHREY:
Minister, you have already agreed—
HACKER:
Yes, but it – it could lead to a loss of … public confidence.
SIR HUMPHREY:
You mean votes!
HACKER:
No, no, no, no, no, no! Not votes, no, no! No, it’s, er, not that votes are a consideration! Good heavens, no! Not at all ! No, but you see, it’s the Public Will. This is a democracy. And the People don’t like it!
SIR HUMPHREY:
The People are ignorant and misguided.
HACKER:
Humphrey! It was the People who elected me!
In the same episode, when he hears that the Prime Minister is similarly concerned about the bad publicity that the scare stories are causing the Government, Hacker does not even try to hide where his real loyalties lie:
SIR HUMPHREY:
It could be said that you’re putting Party before Country.
HACKER:
Oh, those hoary old clichés! Can’t you think of a new one?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Well, I think, Minister, that a ‘new’ cliché could perhaps be said to be a contradiction in terms.
HACKER:
Humphrey, you know nothing because you lead a sheltered life! I intend to survive! And I’m not crossing the PM!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh, Minister, why must you always be so concerned with climbing the greasy pole?
HACKER:
The greasy pole is important! I have to climb it!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Why?
HACKER:
Because it’s there!
Later on in the episode, after brushing aside all the protests from those who know that he is putting popularity before probity (‘It’s politics!’), he tries to justify removing a dissident head of a ch
emical corps simply because it suits his personal ambitions:
SIR HUMPHREY:
How do you expect the Department of Industry to find a decent replacement when we forced his predecessor to resign for taking a sound commercial decision which we blocked for political reasons?
HACKER:
Oh, don’t bring that up again! I have no choice!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Minister, a Minister can do what he likes!
HACKER:
It’s the People’s Will! I am their leader! I must follow them!
[Sir Humphrey looks bemused.]
HACKER:
I have a clear conscience! My hands are clean!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Well, I should have thought it was frightfully difficult to keep one’s hands clean while climbing the greasy pole!
By the final episode in the series, Hacker, having committed so many dirty deeds that he has just received a congratulatory letter from the Prime Minister (‘It’s paid off!’), is now clearly so at home in this amoral world that even that arch-Machiavellian Sir Humphrey seems alarmed:
HACKER:
Do you realise, Humphrey, how much this is worth?
SIR HUMPHREY:
I believe the going rate is thirty pieces of silver, Minister!
HACKER:
No, Humphrey, loyalty and integrity have received their just reward.
SIR HUMPHREY:
Loyalty?!?
HACKER:
I have backed you up, Humphrey, in just the same way that you have always backed me up – isn’t that so?
SIR HUMPHREY:
[Furious but confused] Er, ah––
HACKER:
I’m sorry? Did you say something?
WOOLLEY:
Ah, I think he said, ‘Yes, Minister’.
It was this darkening of Hacker’s personality, this further weakening of the whisky priest, which made his survival as a Minister more believable, and was also the most effective piece of character evolution during the second series. Not all of the other figures in the sitcom, however, went so far on such a journey.
The whole point of Sir Humphrey was that, as Permanent Secretary, he was a constant presence, and, as such, he did not have to change – he just had to be. Fully formed and firmly set in his ways long before Hacker had even set a suede-shod foot inside his Department, his rock-solid instrumentality, his shameless amorality meant that he could not be dragged down any deeper.
Woolley, on the other hand, needed to remain torn between Sir Humphrey and Hacker, staying apprenticed to both sorcerers in order to maintain the comic triangle, and so, once again, there was little leeway for further development. What he did show, during this series, was that he was learning a little, but not enough, from each of his mentors, which left him stuck more or less where he was.
On one occasion, for example, he is canny enough to allow Sir Humphrey to bet him a pound that the first thing their media-conscious Minister would say upon entering his office would be: ‘Any press reports on my Washington speech?’ After shaking on it, a smug-looking Woolley announces: ‘He won’t, because he’s already asked in the car on the way back from Heathrow.’ Sir Humphrey is impressed by such deviousness: ‘You’re learning, Bernard!’ Like all of Woolley’s rare victories, alas, this one is soon proven pyrrhic, because, when Hacker does arrive in his office, the first thing he says is: ‘Bernard, didn’t you say there were some press cuttings of my Washington speech somewhere?’ Crestfallen, Woolley slips the pound back into Sir Humphrey’s hand.50
The one character who arguably should have changed but stayed the same was Jim Hacker’s wife, Annie. Only glimpsed here and there during the first series, in the second she was, if anything, even more peripheral, and not even quite as coherent as a character. Popping up a couple of times in the third episode, and once in the fifth, she sometimes sounded very politically engaged and interested in her husband’s career (reminiscing cheerfully about the first time they discussed ‘the effect of velocity of circulation on the net growth of money supply’51), and yet at other moments she seemed completely detached and uninterested (‘Sometimes I think we deserve a bit of failure!’52) – as if Eleanor Roosevelt had suddenly morphed into Mary Wilson. While her limited screen time was entirely understandable – this was not, after all, a domestic sitcom, but rather a professional one – this imprecision was a rare minor blemish in what was otherwise an admirably well-realised world.
Probably the best episode of the second series in terms of plot, pace and depth was the fifth: ‘The Devil You Know’. As Jay and Lynn had done in the first series with ‘The Writing on the Wall’, they used this episode to give both Hacker and Sir Humphrey a brief, tantalising glimpse of an escape from the other, only to conspire, under the pressure of events, to remain within the trapped relationship.
It began with Hacker moaning about interference from Europe. Having managed to persuade all of his Cabinet colleagues to let his own Department of Administrative Affairs take charge of a combined order for new word processors – thus boosting investment in Britain’s technology industry (and hopefully prompting such headlines as: ‘HACKER’S MASSIVE INVESTMENT IN MODERN TECHNOLOGY’ and ‘JIM’S VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN BRITISH INDUSTRY’) – he has been blocked from completing the deal, thanks to an EEC directive from Brussels. It obliges him instead to attend a forthcoming European conference to agree on a common policy.
This intrusion invites Hacker and Sir Humphrey to compare notes on what they most dislike about the European Community. Sir Humphrey starts by reasserting his conviction that the whole thing is a self-serving scam:
SIR HUMPHREY:
It is a game played for national interests, and always was. Why do you suppose we went into it?
HACKER:
To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations.
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh really! We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.
HACKER:
Well, why did the French go into it, then?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Well, to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition.
HACKER:
Well, that certainly doesn’t apply to the Germans!
SIR HUMPHREY:
No, they went in to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race.
HACKER:
I’ve never heard such appalling cynicism! Well, at least the small nations didn’t go into it for selfish reasons.
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh, really? Luxembourg is in it for the perks. The capital of the EEC – all that foreign money in, hmm?
HACKER:
It’s a very sensible central location.
SIR HUMPHREY:
With the administration in Brussels and the Parliament in Strasbourg? Minister, it’s like having the House of Commons in Swindon and the Civil Service in Kettering!
Hacker then responds with his own critique, preferring, just as predictably, to shift the blame onto the bureaucracy:
HACKER:
Brussels is a shambles. You know what they say about the average Common Market official? He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans and the modesty of the French. And that’s topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish. It’s all a great big gravy train!
SIR HUMPHREY:
What do you mean?
HACKER:
They live on champagne and caviar, chauffeur-driven Mercedes, private aeroplanes – every one of those officials has got his snout in the trough. And most of them have got their two front trotters in as well!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Oh, Minister, I beg to differ. Brussels is full of busy, hard-working public servants who have to endure a lot of exhausting travel and tedious entertainment.
HACKER:
Oh, terribly tedious, working their way through all that smoked salmon, forcing
back all of that champagne!
The real concern, however, turns out to be much closer to home: Sir Humphrey reveals that it was actually one of Hacker’s own Cabinet colleagues who tipped off Brussels about his plans to bulk-buy British merchandise: the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Basil Corbett. ‘Bloody Corbett again!’ spits Hacker. ‘When I think of Basil Corbett I really warm to Judas Iscariot!’
Bernard Woolley has a clue as to what prompted Corbett’s latest bit of back-stabbing. There is a rumour that a Cabinet reshuffle is being planned.
Hacker is horrified:
HACKER:
A Cabinet reshuffle!?! I mean I-I’ve hardly started to do the things that I, er, that we––
SIR HUMPHREY:
Well, perhaps you won’t be moved, Minister.
HACKER:
Ah … Yes … But if I’m not, it means that my career isn’t moving forward as it ought to be!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Well, at least it wouldn’t be moving backwards.
HACKER:
BACKWARDS?? You don’t mean … Good God … But I, I have … But it’s not … I-I-I’ve been doing all right, haven’t I? Hu-Humphrey? We’ve done all right?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Yes. You’ve done all right.
A Very Courageous Decision Page 18
