The Complete Yes Minister

He then asked me for a straight answer! The nerve of it! However, as he had started to use my terminology, I answered him in his.

‘In due course, Humphrey.’ I was really enjoying myself. ‘In the fullness of time. At the appropriate juncture. When the moment is ripe. When the requisite procedures have been completed. Nothing precipitate, you understand.’

‘Minister,’ he said, losing all traces of good humour. ‘It is getting urgent.’

He was getting rattled. Great. My tactics were a triumph. ‘Urgent?’ I said blandly. ‘You are learning a lot of new words.’ I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so rude to anyone in my life. I was having a wonderful time. I must try it more often.

‘I hope you will forgive me for saying this,’ began Sir Humphrey in his iciest manner, ‘but I am beginning to suspect that you are concealing something from me.’

I feigned shock, surprise, puzzlement, ignorance – a whole mass of false emotions. ‘Humphrey!’ I said in my most deeply shocked voice, ‘surely we don’t have any secrets from each other?’

‘I’m sorry, Minister, but sometimes one is forced to consider the possibility that affairs are being conducted in a way which, all things being considered, and making all possible allowances, is, not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps not entirely straightforward.’ Sir Humphrey was insulting me in the plainest language he could manage in a crisis. Not entirely straightforward, indeed! Clearly, just as it’s against the rules of the House to call anyone a liar, it’s against the Whitehall code of conduct too.

So I decided to come clean at last. I told him that I have redrafted the redraft myself, that I’m perfectly happy with it, and that I don’t want him to redraft it again.

‘But . . .’ began Sir Humphrey.

‘No buts,’ I snapped. ‘All I get from the Civil Service is delaying tactics.’

‘I wouldn’t call Civil Service delays “tactics”, Minister,’ he replied smoothly. ‘That would be to mistake lethargy for strategy.’

I asked him if we hadn’t already set up a committee to investigate delays in the Civil Service. He concurred.

‘What happened to it?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, brushing the matter aside, ‘it hasn’t met yet.’

‘Why not?’ I wanted to know.

‘There . . . seems to have been a delay,’ he admitted.

It is vital that I make Humphrey realise that there is a real desire for radical reform in the air. I reminded him that the All-Party Select Committee on Administrative Affairs, which I founded, has been a great success.

This was probably an error, because he immediately asked me what it has achieved. I was forced to admit that it hasn’t actually achieved anything yet, but I pointed out that the party is very pleased by it.

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

‘Ten column inches in the Daily Mail last Monday, for a start,’ I replied proudly.

‘I see,’ he said coldly, ‘the government is to measure its success in column inches, is it?’

‘Yes . . . and no,’ I said with a smile.

But he was deeply concerned about my redraft of the draft report.

‘Minister,’ he said firmly, ‘the evidence that you are proposing to submit is not only untrue, it is – which is much more serious – unwise.’ One of Humphrey’s most telling remarks so far, I think. ‘We have been through this before: the expanding Civil Service is the result of parliamentary legislation, not bureaucratic empire building.’

I begin to think that Sir Humphrey really believes this.

‘So,’ I said, ‘when this comes up at Question Time you want me to tell Parliament it’s their fault that the Civil Service is so big?’

‘It’s the truth, Minister,’ he insisted.

He can’t seem to grasp that I don’t want the truth, I want something I can tell Parliament.

I spelled it out to him. ‘Humphrey, you are my Permanent Secretary. Are you going to support me?’

‘We shall always support you as your standard-bearer, Minister – but not as your pall-bearer.’

There seemed to be a vaguely threatening air about these remarks. I demanded to know what he was actually saying. As I was becoming more and more heated, he was becoming icier and icier.

‘I should have thought,’ he pronounced, in his most brittle voice with excessive clarity of enunciation, somewhat reminiscent of Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, ‘that my meaning was crystal-clear. Do not give such a report to a body whose recommendations are to be published.’

As always, he has completely missed the point. I explained that it is because the report is to be published that I am submitting the evidence. I, the Minister, am to be the judge of when to keep secrets, not the permanent officials.

I appeared to have silenced him completely. Then, after a rather long pause for thought, he enquired if he might make one more suggestion.

‘Only if it’s in plain English,’ I replied.

‘If you must do this damn silly thing,’ he said, ‘don’t do it in this damn silly way.’

February 2nd