The Complete Yes Minister

[Although Sir Humphrey, and Jim Hacker, were responsible for the implementation of these cuts, characteristically the Department of Education and Science had made them without consulting any of the other interested departments – the Foreign Office, or the Department of Health and Social Security or the Department of Administrative Affairs – Ed.]

I suggested that we must persuade Hacker of the special and unique importance of Baillie College. He should be invited to dinner at High Table and the case explained to him.

The Master was noticeably worried about Hacker – he was concerned whether he was of the intellectual calibre to understand the case.

I pointed out that the case is intelligible to anyone of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh.

They asked me if Hacker is of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. Clearly they’ve had dealings with politicians before.

I was able to reassure them on that point. I’m fairly sure that he is of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. On his day.

I left Oxford convinced that I must find a way to get Baillie recognised as a special institution (like Imperial College) for the extraordinary work that they do. [A well-chosen adjective! As this episode in Hacker’s life is fundamentally concerned with honours – deserved or undeserved, earned or unearned – we felt that at this point it might be of interest to the reader to know the principal honours conferred on the antagonists:

Sir William Guthrie, OM, FRS, FBA, Ph.D, MC, MA (Oxon)

Group Captain Christopher Venables, DSC, MA

Sir Humphrey Appleby, KCB, MVO, MA (Oxon)

Bernard Woolley, MA (Cantab)

The Rt Hon. James Hacker, PC, MP, BSc. (Econ)

Sir Arnold Robinson, GCMG, CVO, MA (Oxon) – Ed.]

April 28th

This morning Humphrey badgered me again.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, there is the matter of the Departmental recommendations for the Honours List.’

I told him we’d leave that on one side for a bit.

He became very tense and twitchy. I tried not to show amusement. He told me we can’t leave it as we are getting dangerously close to the five weeks.

[All recipients of honours are notified at least five weeks before promulgation. Theoretically it gives them time to refuse. This is rare. In fact, the only time a civil servant is known to have refused a knighthood was in 1496. This was because he already had one – Ed.]

I decided that I would not yet give my approval to the Department’s Honours List, because I’ve been doing some research. [Hacker almost certainly meant that a party research assistant had been doing some research and he had read the report – Ed.] I have found that twenty per cent of all honours go to civil servants. The rest of the population of this country have to do something extra to get an honour. Over and above their ordinary work, for which they get paid. You or I have to do something special, like work with mentally-handicapped children for twenty-seven years, six nights a week – then we might get an MBE. But Civil Service knighthoods just come up with the rations.

These honours are, in any case, intrinsically ridiculous – MBE, for instance, according to Whitaker’s Almanack, stands for Member of the Most Honourable Order of the British Empire. Hasn’t anyone in Whitehall noticed that we’ve lost the Empire?

The civil servants have been having it both ways for years. When Attlee was PM he got £5000 a year and the Cabinet Secretary got £2500. Now the Cabinet Secretary gets more than the PM. Why? Because civil servants used to receive honours as a compensation for long years of loyal public service, for which they got poor salaries, poor pensions and few perks.