The Complete Yes Minister

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, do forgive me, Minister, I knew I shouldn’t have . . .’

‘No, no,’ I said, hastily reassuring him. Bernard has great ideas but he needs much more confidence. ‘It’s brilliant!’

And indeed it is a brilliant idea. I was cock-a-hoop. It’s our only hold over the civil servants. Ministers can’t stop their pay rises, or their promotion. Ministers don’t write their reports. Ministers have no real disciplinary authority. But Bernard is right – I can withhold honours! It’s brilliant!

I congratulated him and thanked him profusely.

‘You thought of it, Minister!’

I didn’t get the point at first. ‘No, you did,’ I told him generously.

‘No, you did,’ he said meaningfully. ‘Please!’

I understood. I nodded, and smiled reassuringly.

He looked even more anxious.

[Some days later Sir Humphrey Appleby was invited to dine at the High Table of his alma mater, Baillie College, Oxford. He refers to the dinner and subsequent discussion in his private diary – Ed.]

Had an excellent high table dinner at Baillie, followed by a private chat over the port and walnuts, with the Master and the Bursar. Clearly they were worried about the cuts. Sir William [Sir William Guthrie, the Master – Ed.] was looking somewhat the worse for wear – and the worse for port. His face was red, his hair is now quite white but his eyes were still the same clear penetrating blue. Rather patriotic, really. Christopher [Christopher Venables, the Bursar – Ed.] still looked like the precise ex-RAF officer that he had been in the days before he became a don – tall, neat, and meticulous in manner and speech.

I asked the Master how he was feeling. He replied that he was feeling very old. But he smiled. ‘I’m already an anomaly, I shall soon be an anachronism, and I have every intention of dying an abuse.’ Very droll!

Guthrie and Venables started out by telling me that they intended to sell the rest of the rather delicious 1927 Fonseca¹ which we were drinking. Baillie has a couple of pipes left and the Bursar told me they’d fetch quite a bit. I couldn’t think what they were talking about. I was astounded. Excellent shock tactics, of course. Then they told me that if they sold all the paintings and the silver, they could possibly pay off the entire mortgage on the new buildings.

They think – or want me to think – that Baillie College is going to the wall.

It transpired that the trouble is the government’s new policy of charging overseas students the full economic rate for their tuition. Baillie has always had an exceptional number of overseas students.

The Bursar tells me that they cannot charge the full economic fee of £4000 per annum. Hardly anyone will pay it.

He says he has been everywhere! All over the USA, raising funds, trying to sell the idea of an Oxford education to the inhabitants of Podunk, Indiana, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

But the competition is cut-throat. Apparently Africa is simply crawling with British Professors frantically trying to flog sociology courses to the natives. And India. And the Middle East.

I suggested that they do the obvious thing – fill up the vacancies with British students.

This idea met with a very cold response. ‘I don’t think that’s awfully funny, Humphrey,’ the Master said.

He explained that home students were to be avoided at all costs! Anything but home students!

The reason is simple economics. Baillie only gets £500 per head for the UK students. Therefore, it would have to take four hundred home students to replace a mere fifty foreigners. The number of students at a tutorial would quadruple. The staff/student ratio would go from one in ten to one in thirty-four.

I see their point. This could be the end of civilisation as we know it. It would certainly be the end of Baillie College as we know it. There would be dormitories. Classrooms. It would be indistinguishable from Wormwood Scrubs or the University of Sussex.

And Hacker is the Minister who has the authority to change it. I had not realised the implications of all this, it being a DES [Department of Education and Science – Ed.] decision. Ours not to reason why, ours just to put the administrative wheels in motion.²