A Very Courageous Decision Read online

  A Very Courageous Decision

  THE INSIDE STORY OF

  YES MINISTER

  Graham McCann

  For Silvana

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1. The Writers

  2. The Situation

  3. The Pitch

  4. The Preparation

  PART TWO

  5. Series One

  Case Study 1: Mr Wilson Changes on Trains

  6. Series Two

  Case Study 2: From the Government of People to the Administration of Things

  7. Series Three

  Case Study 3: Whisky Galore

  8. Interregnum

  PART THREE

  9. Yes, Prime Minister

  10. Series One

  Case Study 4: Thank You for Not Smoking

  11. Series Two

  12. The End

  PART FOUR

  13. The Revival

  EPILOGUE

  Episode Guide

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.

  Thomas Paine

  As yet the few rule by their hold, not over the reason of the multitude, but over their imaginations, and their habits; over their fancies as to distant things they do not know at all, over their customs as to near things which they know very well.

  Walter Bagehot

  It is a good thing to be laughed at. It is better than to be ignored.

  Harold Macmillan

  Prologue

  The day – Monday, 25 February 1980 – unfolded, in the context of British politics, much like any other day. Government, in those days, happened rather like a tree falling in a forest when there was no one there to witness it. For those among the Great British Public who wanted to believe that something was happening, the assumption was that something was indeed most probably happening, while for those who still needed to see it, or hear it, to believe it, there remained a high degree of doubt that anything was happening at all.

  The scepticism was far more understandable than the faith, because there was, in those days, no live coverage of formal political proceedings on television. There were no rolling news channels, no Internet, no online feeds, no text messages, blogs or tweets, and, apart from half an hour of ‘highlights’ tucked away late at night on BBC Radio 4’s Today in Parliament programme, not even very much on the wireless.1 What went on in Westminster and Whitehall that day in 1980, therefore, would remain, as far as the vast majority of the British public was concerned, as formidably obscure and bemusingly inscrutable as the rest of Britain’s political system.

  The House of Commons met, as usual, at 2.30 p.m., when prayers were said, and then various Ministers stood up and gave run-of-the-mill answers to run-of-the-mill questions, ranging from the general pace of industrial progress (‘Whilst the Government have made a good start on getting the right climate for economic growth, it will take time for their policies to be fully implemented and to take effect’2) to the specific prospects for British Steel (‘Whatever the British Steel Corporation’s record in forecasting it cannot conceivably be as bad as the forecasts of successive Governments who over-expanded the industry’3), with a tantalisingly brief aside on the topic of telephone tapping (‘I have at present nothing to add’4).

  The House of Lords, meanwhile, was at its ermine-swathed, arcane best, pondering at great length the most prudent possible response to a year-old ‘consultative document’ (‘My Lords, the time for consultation on the Consultative Document was to end originally in January 1979 and that was later deferred. Do the Government intend to continue consultation in view of the change of Government in the meantime?’5), and exploring the minutiae of the new Education Bill (‘Doubtless the liability of individual governors in respect of claims could be covered by some form of insurance, but it seems an unfortunate second best when the opportunity to make the governing body a body corporate was there’6), while also finding time to acknowledge receipt of a report regarding some proposed legislation concerning the promotion of better health within Britain’s population of bees.

  Deeper still into the darkest shadows cast by the political Establishment, the denizens of dusky committee rooms in Whitehall were keeping themselves similarly busy by even more byzantine means, with various officials poring over recent speeches by leading political figures on the future of the EEC budget, while another clique was assessing plans for a national shelter policy designed to help the country cope with a potential nuclear attack. Elsewhere in the same set of buildings, a coterie of kingmakers was mulling over the respective merits of several candidates for the soon-to-be-vacant position of Head of the Diplomatic Service. Whatever the specific details aired in these many meetings of mandarins, it was safely assumed that not so much as a scintilla of information would reach the ears or eyes of any humble outsider until any disclosure was deemed to be wise and worthwhile.

  None of this was at all out of the ordinary. None of this was in danger of intruding too noticeably onto the day’s main news agenda.

  This day, in short, was how such days were done. The sheer opacity of the political system, and the barely audible hum of its hidden machinery, was still treated by the vast majority of the population as part and parcel of how the country was run.

  True, there were brief annual spasms of distant visibility, when the three main parties set up stalls at the seaside for their respective conferences, and longer periods of staged accountability mixed with sundry redundant intimacies that happened every few years during the run-up to each General Election, but neither of these events afforded the public a genuinely rich and vivid opportunity to analyse the actions of their elected representatives, let alone lend them any insight into the ancillary activities of their unelected civil servants. The best (or worst) any typical day in British politics could expect to elicit, in terms of exposure, was the tiny amount of trickle-down enlightenment tucked away in the ‘serious’ pages of the following morning’s papers.

  While some contemporary critics complained that such a tradition of secrecy, muddled with mystery, represented a deep-rooted ‘English disease’ and ‘the chronic ailment of the British Government’,7 others – noting the peculiarly, and potentially unnervingly, ambiguous nature of an ‘organic’ constitution partly unwritten and entirely uncodified – continued to echo the more cautious Victorian view that a certain degree of impenetrability was actually quite beneficial, acting as a discreet but invaluable counterweight to the average citizen’s propensity for ‘irritable activity’,8 thus maintaining the ‘great union of spur and bridle, of energy and moderation’9 that inspired the best kind of British character.

  This particular day, however, would end up making all of the days to come seem a little different to all of those that had gone before, because, right in the middle of the mainstream television that was being broadcast that evening, a new situation comedy was screened that, as if out of nowhere, appeared to lay bare the real workings of British government. Even though it was presented as a ‘mere’ comedy rather than something ‘worthy’ from the realms of drama or current affairs, and even though it was placed there primarily to provoke some laughs rather than spark serious debate, once it had arrived, the show, called Yes Minister, would provide the British public with arguably the quintessential piece of public service broadcasting on the subject of p
ractical politics: something that informed, educated and entertained people about the prosaic processes of power.

  It would have made a mark on TV even if it had been just one more British sitcom, because the British sitcom, back in those days, was in something of a rut, having recently seen the great wave of 1970s series slowly recede (Dad’s Army and Porridge, for example, had both ended in 1977, with The Good Life and Rising Damp bowing out in 1978 and Fawlty Towers following suit in 1979), leaving, at the start of the new decade, a distinctly barren-looking beach littered with such evanescent seaside-postcard fare as Hi-de-Hi!, Terry and June, Only When I Laugh and the long-running but visibly flagging duo of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Are You Being Served?. In such a context, therefore, any new sitcom that boasted better-quality scripts, more elegant comic acting and a greater degree of intelligence would have been more than welcome, but Yes Minister brought all of that and more. What made it still more notable and admirable was the combination of the seriousness of its subtext and the lightness of its touch.

  This, after all, was still an era in which the mainstream TV sitcom was supposed to know its place. After a brief period of bold and confident creativity in the mid-1960s, when Galton and Simpson blended raw emotion with playful humour in Steptoe and Son and Johnny Speight brutally satirised bigotry in Till Death Us Do Part, the genre had appeared to lose its nerve. Perhaps this was partly due to the messy failure of lesser efforts: Speight’s own spectacularly clumsy Curry and Chips in 1969, for example, and Vince Powell and Harry Driver’s depressingly lazy Love Thy Neighbour from 1972 to 1976, both of them bungling the opportunity to mock rather than mirror the racial prejudices of their time. There may also, though, have been a disinclination among TV executives to continue dealing with the controversies that such shows had provoked. There rarely seemed to be a day during the second half of the 1960s, for example, when the BBC’s Director-General, Hugh Carleton Greene, escaped public censure from British broadcasting’s self-appointed moral arbiter, ombudswoman and would-be Platonic guardian Mary Whitehouse, along with her clique of easily piqued ‘Clean Up TV’ acolytes, for supposedly condoning programmes that undermined ‘the moral, mental and physical health of the country’.10

  The consequence was that, while the 1970s was in many ways a continuation of a golden age for British sitcoms (with new heights being reached in terms of both the standard of the ensemble acting and the consistently high quality of the humour), the genre as a whole preferred to err on the side of caution when it came to choosing its subject matter, with imitation mattering more than ideas as sitcoms aimed to encourage social identification far more assiduously than they did intellectual engagement. The arrival of Yes Minister early in 1980 thus represented, in this sense, a welcome return to the ambitious populism of the 1960s, eschewing zany escapism or cosy suburban domesticity and choosing instead to engage directly with arguably the most complicated, contentious, divisive and – as far as many members of the public were concerned – driest topics imaginable, and make it not only comprehensible and colourful but also consistently funny.

  Suddenly, the kind of subject matter that television usually treated as something self-consciously sober and serious, communicated via the stiff-necked, straight-faced style it had always associated with the industrious domain of ‘hard’ news rather than the playful preserve of ‘light’ entertainment, was now being made accessible to everyone, regardless of background or bias. Now everybody was being invited to explore, understand and evaluate a process that had previously seemed aloof, obscure and obfuscatory.

  Minute by minute, as that first engrossingly amusing episode of Yes Minister unfolded, the nobility of its comic novelty grew more evident and admirable. It respected the intelligence of its audience, it shared with them its secrets and it conspired with them to create a new and populist critique. What it showed them – all of them – was a part of their lives that should have been monitored constantly, but, until now, had been left shrouded in myth and mystique.

  Here was a Minister: the restless, rash Jim Hacker. Here was a Civil Servant: the calm, cautious Sir Humphrey Appleby. Here, inside the generic government department, was the context within which they came into contact with each other. Here, in essence, was British politics and administration, in tandem, in action. Yes, it was exaggerated and embellished in places for comic effect, and yes, it was nipped and tucked in terms of detail, but, more importantly, it was still the moment when, in a popular cultural sense, the curtains were first parted to reveal the routine interaction between Westminster and Whitehall.

  It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Yes Minister emerged, fully formed, from nowhere. Although its particular approach and focus was strikingly and invaluably novel, as a comic commentary on certain aspects of the Establishment it was actually founded on two largely distinct but very significant satirical traditions: one that targeted our elected representatives, and the other their unelected associates.

  The failings of Britain’s politicians, in particular, had been the subject of accessible satire since at least the eighteenth century, when William Hogarth and James Gillray captured all of the corruption in caricatures that even the illiterate lower classes could comprehend. The trend continued, albeit in a more decorous and discreet style, throughout the Victorian era, when such notable works of fiction as Anthony Trollope’s series of Palliser novels personalised the political machinations of their age, poking fun, as they did so, at the institutionalised indolence of Parliament (‘[Palliser] had spoken for two hours together, and all the House had treated his speech with respect – had declared that it was useful, solid, conscientious, and what not; but more than half the House had been asleep more than half the time that he was on his legs’11), the aimlessness of most administrations (‘I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything’12), the shameless self-absorption of the ambitious politician (‘The rising in life of our familiar friends is, perhaps, the bitterest morsel of the bitter bread which we are called upon to eat’13) and the degree of cynicism demanded of those who desire to rise all the way to the top (‘When a man wants to be Prime Minister he has to submit to vulgarity, and must give up his ambition if the task be too disagreeable to him’14).

  By the early twentieth century, with pictures now proving to be at least as powerful as prose, political cartoonists such as David Low ensured that no popular newspaper would fail to inject at least a degree of irreverence into its coverage of the existing crop of MPs. Portraying politicians as, among other things, flea-ridden dogs, spitting cats, creeping insects, bawling babies, interchangeable fashion mannequins and a wide array of human grotesques, these daily cartoons gleefully deconstructed every new attempt at striking a proud and ingratiating pose. Winston Churchill, one of Low’s favourite (and, to his great credit, most respectful) targets, reacted stoically to the rise of such visual critiques by describing Low in 1931 as a ‘truly Laboucherian jester’ (the allusion is to the waggish Liberal politician and critic Henry Labouchère) and his style of cartoon as ‘the regular food on which the grown-up children of today are fed and nourished’, adding for the benefit of the more mature among his Parliamentary peers: ‘Just as eels are supposed to get used to skinning, so politicians get used to being caricatured’.15

  A similarly dissident comic spirit was evident, here and there, in the theatre and cinema of that time, communicating a common message that echoed Thomas Carlyle’s bitterly dismissive view of Parliament as ‘a poor self-cancelling “National Palaver”’.16 Such plays as the Unity Theatre’s subversive take on the pantomime Babes in the Wood (a 1938 attack on Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement) and William Douglas-Home’s class-conscious confection The Chiltern Hundreds (a 1947 burlesque of recent election campaigns), and films ranging from the knockabout farce of Old Mother Riley, MP (a 1939 mockery of corrupt politicians) to Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s far more sophisticated mixture of romance and satire Left Right and Centre (a 1959 take on by-election opportunism), all contrib
uted to such a consensus, and, in doing so, sported a succession of nods and winks to the gradual decline of the country’s deferential political culture. Even radio, hindered though it was during the early post-war years by the notorious list of so-called ‘taboos’ collected in the BBC’s policy guide, known informally as the ‘Green Book’, was prepared to insist on the right of its comic contributors to ‘take a crack at the Government of the day and the Opposition so long as they do so sensibly, without undue acidity, and above all funnily’.17

  By the start of the 1960s, a more confrontational spirit was abroad in the land and enjoying subversive success on the stage in the form of the intelligently irreverent revue Beyond the Fringe. Here, Peter Cook not only impersonated the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, but also, on one memorable occasion, did so in his presence, staring out straight at him while saying: ‘There’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly face’.18 Finally ready to air its own style of biting critique, television followed suit and launched the topical That Was The Week That Was in 1962 to inspire a new age of small-screen political satire. While leaving the real, intricate workings of Westminster largely an unexamined mystery, this and other shows’ countless biting jibes about individual MPs certainly helped to popularise, if not quite democratise, the assessment of particular political performances.

  Whitehall, meanwhile, was by no means exempt from the evolution of such irreverence (one thinks, for example, of the nepotistic, nit-picking Barnacle family, plodding around in circles within the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit,19 and the Pharisaical Sir Gregory Hardlines, straining for ways to achieve greater respectability inside the Department of Weights and Measures in Trollope’s The Three Clerks20), but, for a surprisingly long time, its officials seemed to be subjected to far less cultural abuse than did their Westminster counterparts. What made this satirical sluggishness so surprising was the fact that, in more formal critical circles, the creeping increase in the power and influence of the Civil Service had long been a topic of urgent and anxious discussion, with Max Weber – a German social theorist whose practical career unusually saw him straddle the bureaucratic and political divide – warning darkly as far back as the start of the twentieth century of the ‘inescapable’ and ‘progressive’ rise of a specially trained, unelected and therefore unaccountable administrative class, whose growing de facto dominance within the system came mainly from the fact that they were the ‘permanent residents of the house of power’, while any particular set of politicians were merely transient and amateurish players dependent on the vicissitudes of occasional reshuffles and regular elections.21