The Complete Yes Minister

She told me she’d been out with the trots. I was momentarily sympathetic and suggested she saw the doctor. Then I realised she meant the Trotskyites. I’d been slow on the uptake because I didn’t know she was a Trotskyite. Last time we talked she’d been a Maoist.

‘Peter’s a Trot,’ she explained.

‘Peter?’ My mind was blank.

‘You’ve only met him about fifteen times,’ she said in her most scathing tones, the voice that teenage girls specially reserve for when they speak to their fathers.

Then Annie, who could surely see that I was trying to work my way through five red boxes this weekend, asked me to go shopping with her at the ‘Cash and Carry’, to unblock the kitchen plughole, and mow the lawn. When I somewhat irritably explained to her about the boxes, she said they could wait!

‘Annie,’ I said, ‘it may have escaped your notice that I am a Minister of the Crown. A member of Her Majesty’s Government. I do a fairly important job.’

Annie was strangely unsympathetic. She merely answered that I have twenty-three thousand civil servants to help me, whereas she had none. ‘You can play with your memos later,’ she said. ‘The drains need fixing now.’

I didn’t even get round to answering her, as at that moment Lucy stretched across me and spilled marmalade off her knife all over the cabinet minutes. I tried to scrape it off, but merely succeeded in buttering the minutes as well.

I told Lucy to get a cloth, a simple enough request, and was astounded by the outburst that it provoked. ‘Get it yourself,’ she snarled. ‘You’re not in Whitehall now, you know. “Yes Minister”… “No Minister”… “Please may I lick your boots, Minister?”’

I was speechless. Annie intervened on my side, though not as firmly as I would have liked. ‘Lucy, darling,’ she said in a tone of mild reproof, ‘that’s not fair. Those civil servants are always kowtowing to Daddy, but they never take any real notice of him.’

This was too much. So I explained to Annie that only two days ago I won a considerable victory at the Department. And to prove it I showed her the pile of five red boxes stuffed full of papers.

She didn’t think it proved anything of the sort. ‘For a short while you were getting the better of Sir Humphrey Appleby, but now they’ve snowed you under again.’

I thought she’d missed the point. I explained my reasoning: that Humphrey had said to me, in so many words, that there are some things that it’s better for a Minister not to know, which means that he hides things from me. Important things, perhaps. So I have now insisted that I’m told everything that goes on in the Department.

However, her reply made me rethink my situation. She smiled at me with genuine love and affection, and said:

‘Darling, how did you get to be a Cabinet Minister? You’re such a clot.’

Again I was speechless.

Annie went on, ‘Don’t you see, you’ve played right into his hands? He must be utterly delighted. You’ve given him an open invitation to swamp you with useless information.’

I suddenly saw it all with new eyes. I dived for the red boxes — they contained feasibility studies, technical reports, past papers of assorted committees, stationery requisitions… junk!

It’s Catch-22. Those bastards. Either they give you so little information that you don’t know the facts, or so much information that you can’t find them.

You can’t win. They get you coming and going.

February 21st

The contrasts in a Minister’s life are supposed by some people to keep you sane and ordinary and feet-on-the-ground. I think they’re making me schizoid.

All week I’m protected and cosseted and cocooned. My every wish is somebody’s command. (Not on matters of real substance of course, but in little everyday matters.) My letters are written, my phone is answered, my opinion is sought, I’m waited on hand and foot and I’m driven everywhere by chauffeurs, and everyone addresses me with the utmost respect as if I were a kind of God.

But this is all on government business. The moment I revert to party business or private life, the whole apparatus deserts me. If I go to a party meeting, I must get myself there, by bus if necessary; if I go home on constituency business, no secretary accompanies me; if I have a party speech to make, there’s no one to type it out for me. So every weekend I have to adjust myself to doing the washing up and unblocking the plughole after five days of being handled like a priceless cut-glass antique.

And this weekend, although I came home on Friday night on the train, five red boxes arrived on Saturday morning in a chauffeur-driven car!

Today I awoke, having spent a virtually sleepless night pondering over what Annie had said to me. I staggered down for breakfast, only to find — to my amazement — a belligerent Lucy lying in wait for me. She’d found yesterday’s Guardian and had been reading the story about the badgers.

‘There’s a story about you here, Daddy,’ she said accusingly.