The Complete Yes Minister

The Washington Post
Saturday, May 9, 1987

BOOK WORLD: Government Giggles, British Style
THE COMPLETE YES MINISTER: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by the Right Hon. James Hacker MP
By Alan Ryan

Sunday night in New York, where I live, is British comedy night on the telly because that's when our PBS station shows both "Fawlty Towers" and "Yes Minister." "Fawlty Towers," of course, has been here for years, and in many scenes I can rant right along with Basil word for word. ("May I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?") But "Yes Minister" is new here - at this writing, only nine of 21 episodes have aired - and it is, without qualification, a priceless comic treasure.

The television series has deservedly won many awards in Britain, and "The Complete Yes Minister," the book Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay have based on their original scripts has been a best seller. The British have an enviable ability to laugh at themselves, but no special talent for laughter is required when the British government and how it works - or, rather, how it pretends to work.

Recast as "The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by the Right Hon. James Hacker MP," the book follows each episode of the television series, supplementing the stories with journal entries, memos and newspaper clippings. In the first episode, Jim Hacker is sent to Parliament by his marginal constituency and is appointed by the prime minister to head up the Department of Administrative Affairs. The department has 23,000 employees, all of them administering the affairs of other administrators, with Hacker administering the lot, a job that any government functionary with the exception of Jim Hacker, would instantly recognize as both thankless and hopeless.

Jim plunges in and is at once swept under a wave of bureaucracy, a wave kept in constant motion by his permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, and his private secretary, Bernard Woolley. Sir Humphrey is the Civil Service head of the department and has long years of experience in house training ministers.

Although Jim has a "natural gift for the misuse of language," which is "invaluable to an active politician," he is no match for Sir Humphrey and the established way of doing things. When Jim declares that he means to have open government, he doesn't know that others feel such a thing is "a contradiction in terms." Nor does Jim understand what the Civil Service people call "the law of Inverse Relevance: the less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it." In the end, it turns out to be "closed season for Open Government," and Jim is left lamenting early in his ministerial career that "a career in politics is no preparation for government."

Language is the key to the comedy here, and it often seems that these pages were written by some madcap combination of Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw and the George Orwell of "Politics and English Language". Poor Jim has so much to learn. "What's the difference," he asks, "between 'under consideration?' and 'under active consideration'?" "'Under consideration,'" he is told, "means we've lost the file. 'Under active consideration' means we're trying to find it!" Similarly, Jim slowly comes to understand that "a controversial decision will merely lose you votes, a courageous decision will lose you the election." And on the matter of private information, "RESTRICTED means it was in the papers yesterday. CONFIDENTIAL means it won't be in the papers till today."

And how does government really operate? Before his first year as minister is out, Jim himself can propound "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." Jim even comes to a point where he can write in his diary, "I had to establish whether or not this lie was true."

Somewhere between politics and government, Jim tries to operate on principle - he believes in principles because they're good for winning votes - and comes to consider himself a success if he merely manages to extricate himself from the endless disasters that threaten his tenure. Clearly, this is a politician, amiable, and likeable, who stands a good chance of "falling upwards" to No. 10 Downing St.
"The Complete Yes Minister" is hilarious - a categorical statement that the Civil Service would never permit itself - and should be required reading for every politician and/or government leader in America. Here's hoping they see the humor and the truth of it.

The review is a journalist, travel writer, anthologist and author of four novels.