The Complete Yes Minister: THE DIARIES OF A CABINET MINISTER BY THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES HACKER MP, edited by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay (Salem House: $19.95; 514 pp.)
In this fictional memoir, which is loosely based on the British television series “Yes Minister,” now being seen on many American cable television channels in the United States, one can see the history of comedy.
There is the rascally Roman slave who suffers at the hands of his master but manages to manipulate the master to his own, often outrageous ends . . . and there is the mannered wit of contemporary British comedy, twinned, it would seem, for the slaves at work--a permanent secretary and a private secretary--manipulate, even manhandle, in a bowler-hatted, bumbershooted sort of way, the newly appointed minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs, James Hacker, whose very name must have morality-play significance.
His forte having been journalism with some polytechnic lecturing tossed in, with only a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and with no previous experience administrating or managing anything, Hacker accepts the Cabinet post as a perk but has no idea what he is to do.
Nothing is what he is supposed to do, according to the secretaries, who often quote the statistic that there is a new minister of DAA every 11 months. They attempt to “house-train” Hacker, who from the very first, fights against the tendency to “go native,” the Whitehall expression for knuckling under to the secretaries. They try to inculcate in him “the three articles of Civil Service faith: It takes longer to do things quickly, it’s more expensive to do things cheaply, and it’s more democratic to do things secretly.”
Wanting to do simple things like bring bureaucracy and red tape under control, Hacker quickly learns the three adjectives of Civil Service abuse that the Oxbridge secretaries aim at all of his proposals: “interesting,” “novel,” “imaginative.”
Once, after taking a particularly courageous stand on an ecological issue, he has to repudiate it almost immediately for political reasons. “It falls to few people,” said his private secretary, the lament rolling sweetly off his tongue, “to be within 24 hours both St. Francis and St. Joan.”
To his face, a secretary defines a minister as one having “a whole range of dazzling qualities including . . . um . . . an enviable intellectual suppleness and moral manoeuverability.” But behind his back, the secretary describes the minister as having “the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Together the secretaries subtly try to tell him why it is necessary to write minutes before rather than after a meeting takes place, how to attribute remarks without actually being quoted, and how the words “this is an urgent problem, and we therefore propose setting up a Royal Commission” really mean “this problem is a bloody nuisance, but we hope that by the time a Royal Commission reports, four years from now, everyone will have forgotten about it or we can find someone else to blame.”
The book is full of wildly successful apothegms, all of which encapsulate in one way or another the Civil Service’s philosophia perennis. “Many things may be done, but nothing must ever be done for the first time.” “Private projects are more socially responsible with government money, and government projects are more efficient with private investment.”
Classical though much of this rollicking comedy is, and situated in a book that is supposed to be published in AD 2019, detailing events that took place three decades earlier, it has definite reference points in contemporary British government. PMs Heath, Wilson and Callaghan make special guest appearances, as do spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby and a host of other Whitehall denizens.
Connoisseurs of transatlantic humor will find much to laugh at in the book, and they will find something to ponder. In the 19th chapter, a “computerized bomb detonator” manufactured by the British has been found in the hands of Italian Red Terrorists. By virtue of synecdoche, British arms are in the hands of terrorists all over the world.
Having learned this from an informant, Hacker feels that he must tell the PM. He is prevented from doing so, however, by just about everybody in government, the last and indeed the largest one telling him that if the PM doesn’t officially know, then the PM doesn’t officially have to act or react. This lesson American bureaucrats seem to have learned especially well.
Admitted co-conspirators of this Swift-witted, Shavian-shafted comedy are Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. Lynn is resident director of the National Theatre in London; among his sprawling credits are writer and director of “Clue,” the game-board movie with the quatrefoil ending. Jay was a reporter for some years with the BBC, co-authored scripts and manuscripts with David Frost and authored an award-winning book entitled “Management and Machiavelli.”
One last item of special interest to Americans. The British secretaries Appleby and Woolley could teach Fawn Hall a thing or two. When it comes to handling potentially damaging pieces of paper, they feel it more efficient to file than to shred. But at least once in “Yes Minister,” an incendiary file was about to inflame. Having been scrutinized by the permanent secretary, the file was hand-delivered by the private secretary to the minister, who read the first sheet that met his eyes:
“This file contains the complete set of available papers except for: a small number of secret documents, a few documents which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967, some records which went astray in the move to London, other records which went astray when the War Office was incorporated into the Ministry of Defence, and the normal withdrawal papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel or breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments.”
It was the only paper in the file.
