The Complete Yes Minister

Arnold was most interested to learn that we have a Minister with two ideas. He couldn’t remember when we last had one of those.

[Of course, Hacker had not really had any ideas. One was Bernard’s and the other was Dr Cartwright’s – Ed.]

Arnold wanted to know about the latest idea, and I was obliged to tell him that it was Cartwright’s idiotic scheme to introduce pre-set failure standards for all council projects over £10,000, and to make a named official responsible.

Arnold knew about this scheme, of course, it’s been around for years. But he thought (as I did) that Gordon Reid had squashed it. I think Arnold was a bit put out that Cartwright had got it to Hacker, though I don’t see how I could have prevented it since Cartwright has now come over to the DAA. After all, he slipped it to the Minister privately, under plain cover. Brown envelope job.

Arnold was adamant that it must be stopped. He’s absolutely right. Once you specify in advance what a project is supposed to achieve and whose job it is to see that it does, the entire system collapses. As he says, we would be into the whole squalid world of professional management.

Arnold reminded me (as if I didn’t already know) that we already move our officials around ever two or three years, to stop this personal responsibility nonsense. If Cartwright’s scheme goes through, we would have to be posting everybody once a fortnight.

Clearly we have to make the Minister understand that his new local authority responsibilities are for enjoying, not for exercising.

I told Arnold that tomorrow Hacker will be living his little triumph all over again, recording a TV interview with Ludovic Kennedy for a documentary on Civil Defence.

Arnold wondered out loud what would happen if we gave Hacker a dossier of the curious ways in which local councillors spend their Civil Defence budgets. I remarked that I couldn’t really see how that would help. But Arnold had an idea . . .

Perhaps he should become a Minister!

[Appleby Papers 39/H1T/188]

[It was known that Hacker was delighted by the invitation, expected though it was, to appear on Ludovic Kennedy’s television documentary on Civil Defence. He was under the impression that he was being given a chance to discuss a Ministerial success. Before the recording, in fact, it is said that he jocularly asked Kennedy if this represented a change of policy by the BBC.

We reproduce the transcripts of the interview, which took a course that was, as it turned out, not to Hacker’s liking. This, of course, was a result of Sir Arnold Robinson’s idea – Ed.]

[It is interesting to read Hacker’s brief remarks in his diary, written on the evening of the television interview – Ed.]

March 29th

TV interview went quite well. But I got into a bit of difficulty over Ben Stanley’s bunker. I said that politicians weren’t as important as doctors and so on.

He asked about the PM’s place in a government shelter. I should have seen that one coming.

I got out of it, pretty cleverly on the whole. All the same I’m not sure how happy the PM will be about it.

Fortunately I was able to tell a marvellously funny story about a group of councillors who spent three years’ Civil Defence budget on a jaunt to California. So that’s all right. On the whole it should do me a bit of good when it goes out next week.

March 30th

A worrying day. I’ve put my foot in it with the PM in a much bigger way than I’d ever imagined.

That wretched story about the councillors going to California is the root of the trouble. I don’t even remember where I got it from – it was in some brief that Bernard passed on to me from the Civil Defence Directorate before the TV programme, I think.

Anyway, Humphrey asked me about it. At first he wouldn’t say why. He merely made the observation that he was sure that I knew what I was doing.

He only says that when I’ve made an appalling cock-up.

Then he revealed that the borough in question contains the PM’s constituency. And the PM’s election agent was the councillor who led the offending delegation.

At first I thought he was joking. But no.

‘Number Ten have been trying to keep it quiet for weeks,’ he said. ‘Ah well. Truth will out.’