A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  ‘How on earth could we make him Prime Minister?’ he had asked out loud as he and Lynn were discussing the switch. ‘You know, he’s such a bumbling fool.’ He already knew, however, how to answer such a question: ‘Well, it’s not impossible for bumbling fools to be Prime Minister, if the right things happen …’3

  While the number of bona fide bumbling fools to have actually presided from within Number Ten remains a matter of some contention, Jay certainly knew of countless stories in which even quite sensible leaders had sometimes appeared, behind that big black door, as fairly bumbling, and very human, figures. Thanks to the private input of Bernard Donoughue, for example, he had assimilated numerous additional anecdotes about Harold Wilson, during his final term in power, and James Callaghan, during his only term in power, in which they seemed to suffer, Hacker-style, from various degrees of distress, despair and befuddlement.

  There were even a few first-hand admissions to be found in past Prime Ministerial memoirs. Alec Douglas-Home had famously claimed that he required the use of a box of matches to help him ‘simplify’ the sums that were cited in important economic documents, and also quoted a memorably curt conversation he had with a make-up artist to explain why he had never mastered the medium of television:

  Q.

  Can you not make me look better than I do on television?

  A.

  No.

  Q.

  Why not?

  A.

  Because you have a head like a skull.

  Q.

  Does not everyone have a head like a skull?

  A.

  No.4

  The more Jay and Lynn thought about it, the less odd it seemed for them to picture Jim Hacker ensconced inside Number Ten. He would probably not even have been the worst, they reasoned, and so they set about making it happen.

  Before production began on ‘Party Games’, the two writers met Paul Eddington in the BBC Club at Television Centre and broke the news to him about his character’s imminent elevation. ‘We said, “You’re going to be Prime Minister in the next series”,’ Lynn would recall, ‘and you could see him change before our very eyes.’5 The head tilted slightly to one side, the eyebrows arched elegantly and the nose rose just a fraction higher than normal, as Eddington contemplated playing a person deemed primus inter pares.

  They also told Nigel Hawthorne about his own character’s promotion to Cabinet Secretary, but he realised that it would have little impact on Sir Humphrey other than providing him with the licence to seem even more supercilious than before. While a politician is more like an actor in rep, bouncing breathlessly from one characterisation to the next as he or she tries to keep impressing the audience while climbing up the greasy pole, the civil servant is more like an actor in a high-class version of a soap, never really changing but slowly maturing like (as Sir Humphrey would put it) ‘an old port’ or (as Hacker would put it) ‘Grimsby’. 6

  There would still be the same basic dynamic between Sir Humphrey and Hacker, as the tension between Number Ten and the Cabinet Office next door was like that between a Minister and his or her Department, but now writ large. There was, for example, the same contrast in terms of longevity: at the time the first series of Yes, Prime Minister was being written, there had been just six Cabinet Secretaries (with an average of 11.2 years each in office) since Sir Maurice Hankey became the first person to hold the position back in 1916, whereas, during the same period of time, there had been fourteen different Prime Ministers (with an average shelf life, per term, of a little over three years each).7

  There was also the same disparity between them in terms of the power that comes from knowledge. The Cabinet Secretary, unlike the Prime Minister, is allowed to see all the papers of previous governments, and so, in this sense, he will always have his political counterpart at a significant disadvantage. By sitting next to each successive Prime Minister at all of the meetings of the Cabinet and its major subsidiary committees, and acting as his or her chief policy adviser, editor and father confessor, he also accumulates an incomparable fund of insights into what makes each leader tick, triumph, trip up and tumble.

  With Hacker relocated to Number Ten, therefore, and Sir Humphrey to 70 Whitehall, connected to each other via the famous internal corridor, the same kind of clashes could take place as before, only now the stakes would be so much higher. Their relationship, as a result, was set to evolve into something that seemed more intense and intertwined than ever.

  The people who were most excited about all the changes were actually the two writers themselves, because they could now look down from the Prime Minister’s lofty perch and survey the entire political landscape, swooping whenever and wherever they saw something that could be captured and consumed in a comedy plot. ‘Defence, foreign policy and other things that were way out of Jim Hacker’s area of government,’ Lynn later remarked, ‘these were the subjects we hadn’t [until now] been able to touch.’8

  It was not just an opportunity for them to explore a wider range of issues. It was also a chance for them to mirror the Prime Minister’s broader concerns, and more dogged commitments, and run certain themes from one episode to the next. With so many Prime Ministers coming to office complete with a ready-made ‘Big Idea’ (always aimed at making their name but usually doomed to fail) tucked under their arm, the writers wanted to show what happened to that bold ambition from one episode to the next.

  They also recognised that it would do the new version of the show no harm now that, thanks mainly to Margaret Thatcher’s increasingly Führerprinzip interpretation of what a Prime Minister should be, the very nature of the institution itself was currently the subject of regular debate. Ever since overseeing Britain’s role in the Falklands War in 1982, followed not entirely coincidentally by her landslide victory in the General Election of 1983 (the most decisive election triumph since 19459), Thatcher’s ever-confident style of leadership had been growing progressively autocratic and imperial, symbolised by her habit of referring to herself as ‘we’ and her obsession with ascertaining whether or not certain people were ‘one of us’. As one disaffected former Cabinet Minister after another started making public their doubts about her managerial skills (such as the newly sacked Francis Pym’s complaint that ‘any dissent, or even admittance of doubt, is [treated as] treachery and treason’10), and even one of her distinguished Conservative predecessors in Number Ten, Harold Macmillan, was moved to describe her as a ‘brilliant tyrant’,11 the implicit contrast with the cautious and consensually minded Hacker would add another dimension to the satire.

  The writers, however, remained just as resistant as they had ever been to the temptation to make the individual episodes appear overtly timely and topical, because, as they always insisted, far less changed in politics than any particular generation of politicians preferred to admit. When they were planning the first set of stories for Yes, Prime Minister, therefore, they sought out that day’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, placed it alongside one published on the same day and date from thirty years before, and compared the political stories on each of the two front pages. It came as no surprise to either writer that they were, in essence, more or less identical.

  Jonathan Lynn summarised the similarities: ‘Should we or shouldn’t we be in Europe? Why don’t we trust the French, or like the Germans (or vice versa)? Is the Franco-German alliance dominating Europe at our expense? Why should we give so much money to the Common Agricultural Policy, just to support French farmers? How will Europe affect our special relationship with America? What do we do about an impending war in the Middle East? What about the environment? Is there a risk of inflation/deflation (delete where applicable)? Is the NHS getting even worse and are the waiting lists getting longer? Why are house prices rising again? What’s wrong with the Honours list? How do we get defence spending under control? Why don’t we have a national transport policy?’12

  Even the respective inside pages, with their small talk of such things as leak inquiries, bureaucratic
inertia, potential leadership challenges, party conferences, diplomatic issues and local government concerns seemed remarkably alike. The names might have changed and the prices inflated, but otherwise the political news of the mid-1980s looked basically the same as that of the mid-1950s.

  The conclusion was that ‘topicality’ mattered far less than believable characters, enduring themes and the general truths that emerged from the attention to particular details. Yes, Prime Minister, therefore, would not strive to be a satirical snapshot of the Thatcher years, but rather would aim, just like Yes Minister had done before it, to engage with the broad and basic system through which any particular figure, from any point in the modern era, came and went and eventually disappeared.

  The research thus focused once again on linking together a variety of anecdotes and case studies in order to discern the most significant patterns and principles. Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoughue remained available for consultation, and the writers also now had access to a wider than ever range of other well-placed Westminster and Whitehall sources, as well as all of the usual archives and libraries. Their conversations now revolved around figures (past and present) at the very top of the political and bureaucratic hierarchies, and, as a consequence, they were conducted even more discreetly than before, but the insights were just as forthcoming. Gradually, as Jay and Lynn sifted through all of the fascinating details, a series of stories started to appear.

  For all of the previous instances when Jay, especially, had drawn on ideas that were also associated with the intellectual hinterland of the Thatcher Government, both of the writers (perhaps still somewhat stung by the recent attempt by Number Ten to co-opt the sitcom for the purposes of political publicity) were more determined than ever to cause Conservatives to feel just as bruised as Liberals or Labourites by their show’s satirical blows: ‘I would consider Yes, Prime Minister to be much less Thatcherite,’ Jonathan Lynn would later claim, ‘because […] as time wore on much of what we wrote was critical of the Conservative Government. Moreover, I should stress that whether we were pro- or anti-Thatcherite is not significant. The two series [Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister] were essentially about the relationship between politicians and civil servants, and that focus […] never changed.’13

  If these new shows did contain a conscious message, it concerned, as Lynn observed, a critique of the current claims that the Civil Service was being ‘tamed’ by the ‘tough’ Conservative Government:

  Towards the end of the 1980s it became an accepted truth – it was in all the newspapers, which should make one deeply suspicious of its accuracy – that Margaret Thatcher had been successful in politicising the Civil Service; that the Civil Service was now right wing and Tory; and that it represented the Conservative Government. Why did the Civil Service never deny that it had become politicised by Thatcher? The answer is: why should it? The senior members of the Civil Service want the Government and the media to think that they are house-trained, compliant and under Government control: that is the joke of the series. It is much easier for a Civil Service department to pursue its own agenda if everyone thinks it is pursing the Government’s agenda.14

  Jay and Lynn thus believed that, contrary to the many current popular reports and editorials, the view of the system that had been summarised back in 1973 by the MP Nicholas Ridley, and reaffirmed some time later by the rebellious bureaucrat Leslie Chapman, remained, in essence, as true in the mid-1980s as it had been many years before. As Ridley had written:

  The British Civil Service is sometimes compared to a fly-wheel; to slow it down or speed it up immense effort is necessary; it has a vast inbuilt momentum of its own. Rather, I think, it is like an enormous steel spring; it can be pulled out of its natural position by great exertion but it eventually pulls you back by its sheer persistence. Thus, towards the middle and end years of each government some of the same policies begin to appear whatever the reforming, even crusading nature of the incoming government. Undermined by the system, exhausted by the workload, battered by events, they relax their pull upon the spring and are pulled back, themselves, to the position the Civil Service always wanted.15

  The point was not to depict this phenomenon by siding systematically with either Hacker or Sir Humphrey, because, as Antony Jay emphasised at the time, both of them were symptoms rather than causes of the malaise at the heart of British government. ‘The reason there isn’t any malice in the series […] is that we think if we were in the position of either of them, as the system created them, we would be doing pretty well the sort of things that they do. When you get Jim Hacker in a spot, knowing what you do about the pressures on him and what his real motives are – and we admit he is a pretty power-seeking, achievement-oriented politician, but nevertheless not off the end of the spectrum – we think, well, what would we do? And Sir Humphrey the same: what would you do if this Minister came along with this lunatic idea?’16

  It was not, in truth, the most morally demanding or rigorous of perspectives. After all, if Jay and Lynn’s own Video Arts training films had been so fatalistic and indulgent (and they were partly inspired by the fact that so much traditional corporate and commercial training was so fatalistic and indulgent) they would never have made a difference, and such a deterministic view could surely be used as an all-purpose, off-the-peg excuse for any and every weak-willed and/or cynical political or bureaucratic official around (as Disraeli put it, ‘Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power’17).

  It was certainly, nonetheless, a well-meaning and balanced approach which would at least help to keep the main critical focus, as in the previous shows, on the process as a whole. The real, trapped relationship between Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary would be mirrored by the fictional one between Hacker and Sir Humphrey.

  All of this, Jay and Lynn were confident, would be clear and accessible so long as the scripts covered the right range of topics with the right degree of accuracy. The satire should not be imposed on the stories; it should emerge quite naturally from out of the truth of the situations.

  It was not just the writers, however, who needed to refresh their approach to engage with the change from Yes Minister to Yes, Prime Minister. The team responsible for the sets (led by Valerie Warrender, an experienced and very versatile production designer who had previously worked on programmes ranging from Monty Python’s Flying Circus to Doctor Who) also needed to create a new physical environment for Hacker and Sir Humphrey, and in this they too showed an admirable attention to detail.

  They were helped in this ambition by no less a figure than Sir Robin Butler, Margaret Thatcher’s Principal Private Secretary, who (having been authorised by the Prime Minister to do so, and reassured by Bernard Donoughue that they could be trusted) took the team on a guided tour of 10 Downing Street, explaining who did what and who sat where as they moved through the building. Valerie Warrender would remember the occasion vividly:

  This was when Mrs Thatcher was not in residence. Although we were permitted to take notes about the layouts and décor details, photography was forbidden. It was possible to visit the Cabinet Room, the Cabinet Office, the Private Office of the Prime Minister, the Pillared Room, the Small Dining Room, the Entrance Hall, the connecting corridors and the White Drawing Room. The Cabinet Room was of particular interest because of the large lozenge-shaped table, the top covered with brown felt to protect the polished surface and the leather blotters laid in front of each chair ready for the meetings. One of the most impressive interiors was the Pillared Room with the large paintings, huge flower displays echoing the rich colour of the wallpaper and a Tabriz carpet. In the studio the carpet was actually a painted replica on scenic canvas.18

  The only demand that came from Downing Street was that, in return for this privileged access, the team would slightly alter the internal geography of the building to comply with security concerns. With this agreement in place, the work began on bringing Whitehall to White City.

  The extrem
ely detailed notes and sketches that had been taken during the tour formed the basis of the designs, but these were further enhanced, where needed, with descriptions from special reference books, historic portraits and film stills. The whole construction process was an unusually elaborate practical enterprise – ‘Obviously some of the sets were large,’ Valerie Warrender would recall, ‘so the production was set in two adjacent studios at TV Centre with the audience in one of them’19 – but, eventually, everything was in place.

  The result was that the finished sets were actually far closer to the reality than most outsiders would ever realise. Indeed, when Paul Eddington first ventured onto the floor of what now passed as the Cabinet Room, he could not quite believe how precisely the set reflected the real thing. Brian Jones, the floor manager, came over to him and proudly held up a photograph of the actual room, and Eddington, innocently, looked at it, assuming it was merely an assemblage aide-memoire for the production team, and said, ‘Yes, I know, I’m standing in it!’ ‘No, no,’ replied Jones. ‘This is a picture of the real one.’20

  Eddington was astonished. Glancing backwards and forwards between the photograph and the set, he was open-mouthed in admiration for what the team had done. ‘I went round examining the ornaments, the design of the chairs, the moulding round the fireplace and so on. It was hardly distinguishable from the original, and this was true of all the interiors: the Permanent Secretary’s office, the Cabinet Secretary’s, the Whips’ and so on. Only two things were deliberately inaccurate: the views out of the windows and the labels on the doors.’21