The Complete Yes Minister

Humphrey ignored the crack. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘And if we were to insist on one per cent of the equity in the oil revenues ten years from now… yes, on balance, I think we can draft a persuasive case in terms of our third-world obligations, to bring in the FCO… and depressed area employment, that should carry with us both the Department of Employment and the Scottish Office… then the oil rig construction should mobilise the Department of Trade and Industry, and if we can reassure the Treasury that the balance of payments wouldn’t suffer… Yes, I think we might be able to mobilise a consensus on this.’

I thought he’d come to that conclusion. We trooped back into Charlie’s room.

‘Mr President,’ said Sir Humphrey, ‘I think we can come to terms with each other after all.’

‘You know my price,’ said Charlie.

‘And you know mine,’ I said. I smiled at Sir Humphrey. ‘Everyone has his price, haven’t they?’

Sir Humphrey looked inscrutable again. Perhaps this is why they are called mandarins.

‘Yes Minister,’ he replied.

3 The Economy Drive

December 7th

On the train going up to town after a most unrestful weekend in the constituency, I opened up the Daily Mail. There was a huge article making a personal attack on me.

I looked around the train. Normally the first-class compartment is full of people reading The Times, the Telegraph, or the Financial Times. Today they all seemed to be reading the Daily Mail.

When I got to the office Bernard offered me the paper and asked me if I’d read it. I told him I’d read it. Bernard told me that Frank had read it, and wanted to see me. Then Frank came in and asked me if I’d read it. I told him I’d read it.

Frank then read it to me. I don’t know why he read it to me. I told him I’d read it. It seemed to make him feel better to read it aloud. It made me feel worse.

I wondered how many copies they sell every day. ‘Two million, three million?’ I asked Bernard.

‘Oh no, Minister,’ he answered as if my suggested figures were an utterly outrageous overestimate.

I pressed him for an answer. ‘Well, how many?’

‘Um… four million,’ he said with some reluctance. ‘So only… twelve million people have read it. Twelve or fifteen. And lots of their readers can’t read, you know.’

Frank was meanwhile being thoroughly irritating. He kept saying, ‘Have you read this?’ and reading another appalling bit out of it. For instance: ‘Do you realise that more people serve in the Inland Revenue than the Royal Navy?’ This came as news to me, but Bernard nodded to confirm the truth of it when I looked at him.

‘“Perhaps,”’ said Frank, still reading aloud from that bloody paper, ‘“Perhaps the government thinks that a tax is the best form of defence.”’

Bernard sniggered, till he saw that I was not amused. He tried to change his snigger into a cough.

Frank then informed me, as if I didn’t already know, that this article is politically very damaging, and that I had to make slimming down the Civil Service a priority. There’s no doubt that he’s right, but it’s just not that easy.

I pointed this out to Frank. ‘You know what?’ he said angrily. ‘You’re house-trained already.’

I didn’t deign to reply. Besides, I couldn’t think of an answer.

[The Civil Service phrase for making a new Minister see things their way is ‘house-training’. When a Minister is so house-trained that he automatically sees everything from the Civil Service point of view, this is known in Westminster as the Minister having ‘gone native’ — Ed.]

Sir Humphrey came in, brandishing a copy of the Daily Mail. ‘Have you read this?’ he began.

This was too much. I exploded. ‘Yes. Yes! Yes!!! I have read that sodding newspaper. I have read it, you have read it, we have all bloody read it. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?’

‘Abundantly, Minister,’ said Sir Humphrey coldly, after a brief pained silence.

I recovered my temper, and invited them all to sit down. ‘Humphrey,’ I said, ‘we simply have to slim down the Civil Service. How many people are there in this Department?’

‘This Department?’ He seemed evasive. ‘Oh well, we’re very small.’

‘How small?’ I asked, and receiving no reply, I decided to hazard a guess. ‘Two thousand?… three thousand?’ I suggested, fearing the worst.

‘About twenty-three thousand I think, Minister?’

I was staggered. Twenty-three thousand people? In the Department of Administrative Affairs? Twenty-three thousand administrators, all to administer other administrators?

‘We’ll have to do an O & M,’ I said. [Organisation and Method Study — Ed.] ‘See how many we can do without.’