The Complete Yes Minister

He listened for a moment, then replaced the receiver. ‘He’s coming round now.’

‘Why?’ I was feeling malicious. ‘Did he faint?’

We looked at each other in silence. And we both tried very hard not to laugh.

Bernard’s mouth was twitching from the strain.

‘This is very serious, Bernard.’

‘Yes Minister,’ he squeaked.

I was, by now, crying from the effort not to laugh. I covered my eyes and my face with my handkerchief.

‘No laughing matter,’ I said, in a strangled muffled gasp, and the tears rolled down my cheeks.

‘Absolutely not,’ he wheezed.

We recovered as best we could, shaking silently, but didn’t dare look at each other for a little while. I sat back in my chair and gazed reflectively at the ceiling.

‘The point is,’ I said, ‘how do I best handle this?’

‘Well, in my opinion . . .’

‘The question was purely rhetorical, Bernard.’

Then the door opened, and a desperately worried little face peeped around it.

It was Sir Humphrey Appleby. But not the Humphrey Appleby I knew. This was not a God bestriding the Department of Administrative Affairs like a colossus, this was a guilty ferret with shifty beady eyes.

‘You wanted a word, Minister?’ he said, still half-hidden behind the door.

I greeted him jovially. I invited him in, asked him to sit down and – rather regretfully – dismissed Bernard. Bernard made a hurried and undignified exit, his handkerchief to his mouth, and curious choking noises emanating from it.

Humphrey sat in front of me. I told him that I’d been thinking about this Scottish island scandal, which I found very worrying.

He made some dismissive remark, but I persisted. ‘You see, it probably hasn’t occurred to you but that official could still be in the Civil Service.’

‘Most unlikely,’ said Sir Humphrey, presumably in the hope that this would discourage me from trying to find out.

‘Why? He could have been in his mid-twenties then. He’d be in his mid-fifties now,’ I was enjoying myself thoroughly. ‘Might even be a Permanent Secretary.’

He didn’t know how to reply to that. ‘I, er, I hardly think so,’ he said, damning himself further.

I agreed, and said that I sincerely hoped that anyone who made a howler like that could never go on to be a Permanent Secretary. He nodded, but the expression on his face looked as though his teeth were being pulled out without an anaesthetic.

‘But it was so long ago,’ he said. ‘We can’t find out that sort of thing now.’

And then I went for the jugular. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Little did I dream, after he had humiliated me in front of Richard Cartwright, that I would be able to return the compliment so soon.

And with the special pleasure of using his own arguments on him.

‘Of course we can find out,’ I said. ‘You were telling me that everything is minuted and full records are always kept in the Civil Service. And you were quite right. Well, legal documents concerning a current lease could not possibly have been thrown away.’

He stood. Panic was overcoming him. He made an emotional plea, the first time I can remember him doing such a thing. ‘Minister, aren’t we making too much of this? Possibly blighting a brilliant career because of a tiny slip thirty years ago. It’s not such a lot of money wasted.’

I was incredulous. ‘Forty million?’

‘Well,’ he argued passionately, ‘that’s not such a lot compared with Blue Streak, the TSR2, Trident, Concorde, high-rise council flats, British Steel, British Rail, British Leyland, Upper Clyde Ship Builders, the atomic power station programme, comprehensive schools, or the University of Essex.’

[In those terms, his argument was of course perfectly reasonable – Ed.]

‘I take your point,’ I replied calmly. ‘But it’s still over a hundred times more than the official in question can have earned in his entire career.’

And then I had this wonderful idea. And I added: ‘I want you to look into it and find out who it was, okay?’

Checkmate. He realised that there was no way out. Heavily, he sat down again, paused, and then told me that there was something that he thought I ought to know.

Surreptitiously I reached into my desk drawer and turned on my little pocket dictaphone. I wanted his confession to be minuted. Why not? All conversations have to be minuted. Records must be kept, mustn’t they?

This is what he said. ‘The identity of this official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent speculation is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, and, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question was, it may surprise you to learn, the one to whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of identifying by means of the perpendicular pronoun.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

There was an anguished pause.

‘It was I,’ he said.

I assumed a facial expression of deep shock. ‘Humphrey! No!’