The Complete Yes Minister

The New York Times
June 21, 1987

Book Review: "Sweet Are the Uses of Bureaucracy"
By Christopher Buckley

Someone once said the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because it doesn't trust it. But to judge from this uproarious compendium of novelized scripts from the successful BBC television series "Yes Minister," it is Britannia's Civil Service, not her empire, that has old Phoebus worried.

These are the "diaries" of James Hacker, Minister for Administrative Affairs, "edited" by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay (who write the television show) and published posthumously in 2019, after the end of the great man's career. A later volume, we are told, will appear here under the title "Yes Prime Minister," dealing with his career "as he failed upwards to Number Ten Downing Street." That is a consummation devoutly to be wished, because "Yes Minister" is the funniest, wittiest and truest piece of political satire to be published on either side of the Atlantic in the post-Evelyn Waugh era.

As Minister for Administrative Affairs, Sir James is nominally in charge of 23,000 British civil servants, an army of small but in their own way formidable men. The key word, of course, is nominally. A minister, as his department sees it, is essentially a politically appointed public relations man, whose duty is less to provide efficient administration than to preserve the species; above all - above all - it is not to meddle with the Permanent Secretary, who really runs the department.

Hacker's Permanent Secretary is Sir Humphrey Appleby, K.C.B., M.V.O., M.A. (Oxon.), an ur-civil servant of superior, gray-flanneled demeanor, whose devious undoings of his boss's every attempt at reform and cost-cutting provide both a plot and a rather Tocquevillean theme: the bureaucratic smothering of the independent spirit. Perhaps in this case, impulse.

Humphrey is Hacker's "no" man - never mind the title - and in this function he displays a brilliance that were it applied to other endeavors, might solve such lesser concerns as unemployment, national security, housing and the race question. He is a kind of Jeeves to Hacker's Bertie, except that the monster who looms in these pages is not the rich aunt threatening the lay-about nephew with disinheritance, but the prospect of a more efficient and accountable government.

Hacker himself is a sympathetic mediocrity, a former journalist, a London School of Economics man with Oxbridge pretensions, gifted with a capacity of moral outrage followed by quick retreat. Opinions about him run the gamut from "a very average minister" to "not…all that hot." To his own keen disappointment, he is, despite a brief alarm that terrorists are after him, not even important enough to assassinate.

"Darling," his wife Annie says to him in a moment of crisis, "how did you get to be a Cabinet Minister? You're such a clot." Annie is to be forgiven the remark, since he spent their honeymoon explaining his theory about the effect of velocity of circulation on the net growth of the money supply.

He may be thick as Devon cream, but poor old Hacker at least tries. His heart is in the right place as he tries to bring more women into the Civil Service, but stops the sale of British arms to the Red Brigades, cut costs "to the bone" and declare the usual war on wastefulness. But every time he gets his conscience cranked up, Humphrey comes in, quietly horrified, to explain calmly that it simply can't be done.

Exasperated at Humphrey's refusal to budge on the matter of the British arms being sold to Italian terrorists, Hacker explodes: "Humphrey, I can't believe it. We're talking about good and evil."

"Ah," the Permanent Secretary says. "Church of England problem."
One page later, the argument is reaching a climax, though the heat is less than white.

" 'Humphrey,'" Hacker demands, " 'have you ever known a civil servant resign on a matter of principle?'

"Now, he was shocked. 'I should think not! What a suggestion!'"

Thus do Hacker and Humphrey dither toward Bethlehem to be born. And what a journey the Civil Service provides. It is a world of inversions. The chauffeurs know more than the ministers; high I.Q.'s and classical British educations are devoted exclusively to the avoidance of error; by the stroke of a memorandum Good Friday is moved to a Tuesday; a new Civil Defense program is needed to protect a London suburb from the French. "Suddenly it didn't seem at all incredible - just common sense."

The most piquant inversion comes when someone - a woman, no less, whom Hacker has fought to get promoted athwart Humphrey's machinations - announces to him that she's quitting.

" 'Quite honestly, Minister, I want a job where I don't spend endless hours circulating information that isn't relevant about subjects that don't matter to people who aren't interested.'"

A far, far cry from Churchill's speech about the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. On such a world the sun never sets. It goes on administrative leave.

Christopher Buckley is the author of the novel "The White House Mess" and co-author of "Campion," a play.