The Complete Yes Minister

The New York Times
Friday, June 12, 1987

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By John Gross

"Ministers will generally accept proposals which contain the words simple, quick, popular and cheap.

"Ministers will generally throw out proposals which contain the words complicated, lengthy, expensive and controversial.

"Above all, if you wish to describe a proposal in a way that guarantees that a Minister will reject it, describe it as courageous."

Such is the matured wisdom of Sir Humphrey Appleby, as he passes it on to a junior colleague in the British Civil Service; and no one who has seen the BBC series "Yes Minister" (shown over here on public television) will be likely to forget the skill with which Sir Humphrey, Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Department of Administrative Affairs, sets about manipulating his own minister, the Right Hon. James Hacker, in this and a hundred other ways.

Hacker arrives at the department - his first ministerial appointment - with a brief to cut down inefficiency and curb Government waste throughout the system. Naturally, he looks to Sir Humphrey for support and advice, but what he encounters (though it takes him time to realize it) are bland obstructionism, ingenious evasions and a mastery of the process known to its practitioners as "Creative Inertia."

For his part, Sir Humphrey sees his role as defending the entrenched influence of the Civil Service, or rather that of its senior members, not excluding himself. He speaks with the voice of experience, and he has watched a dozen ministers come and go; for whatever party happens to be in office, Permanent Secretaries are always in power.

Starting from this central premise, the authors of "Yes Minister," Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, succeeded in creating an outstanding comic series. That they should now have turned it into an equally entertaining book is in large part, of course, a tribute to their original material. But it also reflects the skills with which they have adapted it - recasting the stories in the form of extracts from Hacker's diaries, weaving in interviews and their own straight-faced explanatory comments, peppering the narrative with newspaper clippings, cartoons and official memoranda (all reproduced in facsimile and all cunning parodies of the real thing).

It helps that so much of the comedy turns on the almost infinite elasticity of language. The hapless Hacker has to learn how to find his way through a world where "under consideration" means "we've lost the file" and "under active consideration" means "we're trying to find it," where "novel" and - even worse - "imaginative" are calculated terms of abuse, where an official who is told that he is not answering your question is quite likely to reply, "Yes and no."

Mr. Lynn and Mr. Jay inspire complete confidence in their mastery of professional jargon and statesmanlike cliché. You feel that they know exactly how often one bureaucratic panjandrum would say, "Rome wasn't built in a day," and at precisely what point another would permit himself a little joke about "Catch-22, subparagraph (a)."

They are equally adept at steering their heroes into Wodehousian predicaments, and getting the most out of a gag (but not too much). There is the teetotal reception during an official visit to an oil sheikdom, for instance, at which Hacker arranges for a communications room to be set up for the purposes of concealing liquor, and momentarily forgets the plan when an assistant comes hurrying up with an urgent message from Mr. Haig - "Mr. Haig, Minister - you know, with the dimples." He is more alert, though, when he is subsequently summoned to receive messages from Mr. John Walker of the Scotch Office and from a delegation of teachers, and jut before he sinks into a final stupor at Sir Humphrey's feet he manages to pass on a message himself, from Napoleon.

Not everything in "The Complete Yes Minister," it will be seen, is politics, and not all its humor qualifies as satire. But a great deal of the book's staying power, like the program's, undoubtedly depends on the feeling that it is laying bare some insufficiently appreciated political truths - about the power that civil servants exert over their masters, and the power that public relations exerts over policy. (A less-well-kept secret, this second one; but it has seldom been illustrated as graphically as it is in Hacker's anxious contortions.)

The other enduring appeal of the saga lies in the perfectly realized characters of Hacker and Sir Humphrey, and the chemistry that develops between them. If Hacker is the more likable of the two, Sir Humphrey offers the satisfaction we get from watching a supreme master practice his craft: he is a Paganini of prevarication. And yet in his bumbling way Hacker learns to anticipate the maestro's techniques, and even, sometimes, to outwit him. They end up being quite fond of each other - "like a terrorist and a hostage" is Hacker's cheerful comparison.

Hacker also ends up, as we know from the television sequel, "Yes Prime Minster," ensconced in No. 10 Downing Street. In the words of Mr. Lynn and Mr. Jay, looking back on his career in their foreword (dated Hacker College, Oxford, September 2019), he failed upwards," and the political moral of that scarcely bears thinking on. But at least they promise to publish the diaries covering the later stages of his career, which are something to look forward to.

Meanwhile, "The Complete Yes Minister" is guaranteed, as far as any book can be, to produce happy little explosions of laughter - and to leave you wishing that someone would try to produce an American equivalent. It would surely have its possibilities.