A Very Courageous Decision Page 2
Because of their invisibility, however, there was perhaps something inevitable about popular culture’s struggle to depict these figures as anything more vivid and vulnerable than either a sparely sketched troupe of interchangeable turnspits or a charcoal-smudged vignette of brollied, bowler-hatted and pinstriped éminences grises. While the caricaturists were busy individuating the most prominent members of the political class, their focus on the Civil Service tended to fix on the form instead of the content, mocking the institution rather than any of its members.
Often reduced to little more than a comical synecdoche, be it a sober suit, a lofty sneer perched on top of a starched wing collar or a solitary rubber stamp, the individual civil servant’s identity, and accountability, thus remained protected for some time by the shield of his cultural and social obscurity. The Daily Mirror’s William Haselden, for example, produced a series of cartoons early on in the twentieth century, entitled ‘The Public Money and the Public Man’, which treated Britain’s mandarins as human beings who had been worn down into anodyne anonymity by their meek submission to rigid routine (with one sequence charting the process whereby the newly enlisted bureaucrat was gradually mummified by red tape22), leaving little else to ridicule except for the supposed point-lessness of the profession as a whole (‘One of Mr Bureaucrat’s first acts is to engage a huge staff,’ another caption declared, ‘then to provide them with a suitable number of forms to send out to the public’23).
Arguably something of a breakthrough occurred shortly before the start of the Second World War, with the arrival on Britain’s airwaves of the radio comedy show It’s That Man Again (usually abbreviated as ITMA24), where, for a while, much of the action took place in a shambolic wartime bureaucracy called ‘The Office of Twerps’ (which was situated next door to the real-life Office of Works).25 Soon hugely popular with millions of listeners, this fast-paced, pun-addicted, catchphrase-crazy show starred Tommy Handley as the ‘Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries’ (‘We’ve been very busy in the Office of Twerps – making out official forms and scribbling all over them, issuing orders one day and cancelling them the next!’), who presided over such eccentric and overzealous officials as a strait-laced Permanent Secretary named Fusspot (whose standard response to any request was the startled exclamation: ‘Most irregular!’). The absence of vision obliged both the writers and performers to transcend the old cartoonists’ Whitehall stereotype and make an effort instead to craft a set of distinctive comic characters. It was still a blatantly broad-brush style of satire, but at least Britain’s bureaucrats were now beginning to be treated as potentially intriguing personalities rather than completely flat and uninteresting cardboard clichés.
This mildly progressive trend continued after the war, when many recently demobbed young performers showed a keen appetite for treating authority figures as potential targets for satire. A whole generation of clever character actors, such as John Le Mesurier, had encountered at first hand all kinds of meddling mandarins during their years of military service, and returned to stage and studio much more able to personalise their portrayal of any Civil Service type – ranging from the most risibly incompetent to the most chillingly efficient – who happened to pop up in a script. There was even a minor movie, the comedy Dear Mr Prohack (1949), that had Cecil Parker playing a senior Treasury official as a man who was hopelessly ill equipped to cope with the world outside of the Whitehall womb.
Meanwhile, in the variety halls and on the wireless, countless stand-up and sketch comedians, surveying a social scene in which all of the newly nationalised industries seemed in danger of being smothered by the remorseless, rapid spread of red tape, now rushed to include Britain’s bureaucrats among the regular objects of their most biting jokes and routines. Indeed, by 1950, the then Head of the Civil Service, Sir Edward Bridges, noting the recent proliferation of gags and parodies (‘I take this to be part of the Englishman’s reaction against authority’), felt moved to make the sad prediction that he and his colleagues ‘shall continue to be grouped with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as one of the recognised objects of ridicule’.26
Film-makers certainly wasted little time in trying to fulfil Sir Edward’s prophecy on the cinema screen. The 1949 sardonic political fable Passport to Pimlico had already reunited Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (familiar to audiences as the cricket-obsessed pair of old coves Charters and Caldicott in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 comedy thriller The Lady Vanishes) playing a couple of clueless, chronically buck-passing civil servants (‘A rather abstruse constitutional issue has now arisen,’ declares one of them desperately, ‘and I’m afraid we shall have to pass it on to the Law Offices Department …’), and now the artfully owlish Richard Wattis added further failings as an irascibly fatalistic Ministry of Education official called Manton Bassett in a series of popular comedies, beginning with The Belles of St Trinians (1954) and Blue Murder at St Trinians (1957).
The Boulting brothers, those masters of post-war film comedy, did much the same, deploying a mini-repertory company of crafty character actors to breathe life into the many bureaucrats who bungled about in the background of their socially acerbic movies, before placing the profession centre stage and casting Terry-Thomas as a hopelessly inept, nepotism-tainted, aimless Foreign Office diplomat in their 1959 satire Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (‘It’ll mean that I shall miss Ascot!’ he gasps, on learning that he is being sent out on an important mission abroad right in the middle of the flat season). Carlton-Browne was arguably the most notable cinematic take on the Civil Service thus far, simply because, although it featured far more comedy than realism, it did at least purport to depict a whole network of officials, rather than just an individual apparatchik, at work within the walls of Whitehall, and thus projected to the public an artist’s impression of the wheels and pulleys that worked the previously unseen machine.
Mainstream radio responded soon after with the BBC’s The Men from the Ministry – a sitcom, written primarily by Edward Taylor, featuring Wilfrid Hyde-White (later replaced by Deryck Guyler) and Richard Murdoch as ‘Number One’ and ‘Number Two’, a pair of bumbling bureaucrats in the fictional ‘General Assistance Department’ of an unnamed Ministry. Running for fourteen series from 1962 to 1977,27 the show proved very popular both at home and abroad without ever really threatening to say anything sharply incisive about the institution it was supposed to be mocking.
NUMBER ONE:
Have you seen that memo from the Ministry of Regional Development?
NUMBER TWO:
The one about that campaign against pollution?
NUMBER ONE:
Yes, that’s it. Did you take the appropriate action?
NUMBER TWO:
Yes, I folded it up very small and put it under the leg of my desk to stop it rocking about.28
Formulaic and increasingly repetitive, too many of the episodes relied on the plot conceit of crossed wires within Whitehall (such as an order for ‘5,000 rubber boats’ for an army exercise being misread as ‘5,000 rubber boots’,29 or a scribbled note about a dilatory secretary being ‘due for a rocket’ being mistaken as an official bulletin about the space programme30), but, every now and again, the odd barbed remark would slip in (such as the comment that a missile had been nicknamed ‘The Civil Servant’ – because ‘it wouldn’t work, they couldn’t fire it and it cost the taxpayer a fortune’).
There was even a similarly themed but short-lived ITV television sitcom If It Moves, File It, written by Troy Kennedy Martin, broadcast in 1970.31 Starring John Bird and Dudley Foster as a pair of obsessively secretive but indolent British bureaucrats, it was as insular as its radio predecessor, making the same sort of mildly irreverent jokes without any real sense of point or purpose.
By 1980, therefore, there was nothing new or revolutionary per se about satirising either Britain’s politicians or its bureaucrats. Both of these traditions were firmly established in the country’s popular consciousness. What was new and, indeed, revolutionary about Yes
Minister was the fact that it brought these two particular comic traditions together, synthesised them and then, in a very important sense, transcended them to create something much richer, more ambitious and much more insightful.
Yes Minister did not just go beyond what had passed for political satire in the past by featuring both politicians and civil servants. Crucially, it also went beyond the mere coexistence of these two types of public official, consigning to entertainment history the notion of them taking turns to pop in and out of the picture like the husband and wife inside a weather clock, and focused instead on the relationship between them. Here on show, for the first time in popular culture, was the clandestine connection, the hidden hyphen, at the heart of the British system of government – the living, meaningful, dynamic relationship between politician and bureaucrat.
The effect was akin to finding chess pieces that moved of their own volition. Suddenly, all of the old familiar snapshots that stood in for real political insight – all those multiple but interchangeable images of sober-looking suits slipping in and out of the big black shiny door of Number Ten, or gesticulating self-consciously from behind the conference podium, or posing awkwardly with random members of the public while out and about on the hustings – looked as flat and fake and shamelessly meretricious as they had, really, always been, and in their place now came a coherent and compelling vision of how the business of British government was actually done. The conversation was at last being covered.
Here, on the screen, were the scenes behind the scenes. Here was the real battle for power, the struggle for supremacy. Finally exposed were all the cogs and springs of the political clock, the proper nature of the tick and the tock.
Viewers saw the threat to progress and innovation posed by the likes of Sir Humphrey and his bureaucratic battalion of specialists without spirit, doing their best to bring about Max Weber’s notorious vision of an ‘iron cage’ of cool and clinical efficiency that locked in more and more individuals while leaving all matters of political will and principle locked outside to perish in the ‘polar night of icy darkness’.32 Viewers also saw the contiguous threat to continuity and stability posed by the likes of Hacker and his horde of party political activists, who, as the ever-prescient nineteenth- century critic Walter Bagehot had once warned that they would, now seemed to oscillate wildly and bewilderingly between the arrogant desire that ‘an eager, absolute man might do exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately’,33 and the cowardly inclination to allow any dubious version of ‘vox populi’, even when distorted into ‘vox diaboli’, to dictate the answers to the weightiest and most urgent of their decisions.34
Not since the stand-up comic Frankie Howerd, back in the early 1960s, contrived to reduce the analysis of high-level British politics to something that could be gossiped about over the garden wall (‘Everyone blames Harold Macmillan for sacking half the Government last year,’ he tittle-tattled. ‘I don’t. No. I’m sorry, I don’t blame him. I blame her. No, I do. It’s Dot. Yes, Dot. Dotty Macmillan!’35), had the core of the country’s institutional conflict seemed so engagingly comprehensible and comically credible. The major difference now was that the insight provided by Yes Minister was founded firmly on truth rather than just playful speculation, and what was being laughed at today could be taken away and reflected upon far more seriously tomorrow.
This, however, was only the first of several layers that contributed to the show’s great and enduring appeal. Lurking beneath the pertinent but ultimately parochial comic casing were other, universal and timeless, themes that had more to do with political theory than political science. A wide range of topics, relating to truth, honour, prudence, accountability, personal integrity and the pursuit and preservation of power, were persistently picked at and probed under the surface as the show continued to progress.
There was, for example, the nagging matter of how political actors competed, through their mastery of the art of rhetoric, to present the public with a very partial version of what was supposed to pass for the truth. Such an issue had been a constant source of contention ever since ancient times in Athens, when the conservative Thucydides, on being asked whether he or the democrat Pericles was the more formidable political fighter, conceded glumly but promptly that Pericles was by far the better, because, even when he knew that he had been defeated, he still managed to convince the audience that he was in fact the victor.36
In the British context, the same theme had been evident since at least the middle of the seventeenth century, when Thomas Hobbes, alarmed as he watched the country collapse into civil war, warned about the combined dangers of dogmatism, unwarranted credulity and the cynical misuses of eloquence. ‘For words,’ he remarked darkly, ‘are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools’.37 Surveying the various factions that were fighting to win the bitter ideological battles of the time, he feared that the ‘powerful Eloquence’ of those in authority, which enabled them to ‘procure[th] attention and Consent’, was ever more likely to seduce most people’s rational faculties into mistaking mere opinions and passions for the ‘principles of Truth’.38
The point was echoed soon after by Hobbes’ equally eminent theoretical contemporary, John Locke, when he complained that the art of rhetoric is ‘nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement’, thus making such skills amount to the ‘perfect cheat’. The conclusion, once again, was to demand that this deviousness be avoided ‘in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct’.39
Three centuries on, and much the same kind of critique was being amplified by George Orwell shortly after the end of the Second World War, when he raged against the institutionalised insincerity that clanked and clunked as the machinery of each party’s political claptrap continued to click and whir. ‘When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,’ he warned, ‘one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink’. Surveying the weaselly rhetoric of his own age, he lamented that much of mainstream political discourse had been reduced to ‘a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia’, adding that when ‘the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer’.40
By the late twentieth century, in an age of all-encompassing mass media, this anxiety was more intense than ever, with orators now being supplemented by public relations-savvy ‘post-orators’, or, as they were soon to be called, ‘spin doctors’, giving another twist to what had already been twisted and thus making the means of communication seem more intricate, slippery and bewildering than ever before. In this sense, the ability of Yes Minister to feature regular scenes in which policies were packaged, messages massaged and errors explained away could not have been more welcome or apposite, mirroring so precisely as it did the growing prominence of advertising and PR as part and parcel of modern politics.
Here, the significance of the satire within Yes Minister stretched out far beyond the British Isles and spoke to audiences, and governments, all over the world. As Saatchi & Saatchi set about rebranding Margaret ‘Milk Snatcher’ Thatcher as ‘The Iron Lady’ in the UK, and similarly assiduous image makers in America started work on elevating Ronald Reagan to a level of stardom in Washington that he had never managed to achieve in Hollywood, and a whole new breed of fiercely ambitious communications officers began to buzz about trying to ‘clarify’ what had been ‘misspoken’ by their political bosses, Yes Minister highlighted the whole message- manipulation phenomenon, and in so doing underlined the irony of a process that appeared to treat honesty as the only intolerable policy in politics.
The sitcom’s deepest and most weighty subtext of all, however, explored an issue that had preoccupied theorists and activists alike since classical times: namely, the problem of ‘dirty hands’.41 The deceptively simple-sounding question posed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 play, Les Mains Sales – ‘Do you think you can govern innocently?’42 – has nigg
led away at any and every political figure when faced with the prospect of exercising what Trollope termed ‘beneficent audacity’43 and doing what feels like the ‘wrong’ thing in order to achieve what feels like the ‘right’ thing for the community as a whole.
At least three conflicting ethical answers have been articulated over the centuries. There is the deontological (whereby the likes of Immanuel Kant argued that, as no crisis ought to compel us to respond in a way that contravenes the dictates of our absolute moral principles, we should solve the problem of dirty hands simply by never getting our hands dirty44); the utilitarian (whereby the likes of John Stuart Mill contended that, as no particular moral code can be considered incontrovertible in absolute terms, we should go ahead and get our hands dirty to ensure we achieve the greatest good for the greatest number45); and the value pluralist (whereby the likes of Isaiah Berlin claimed that, as there are different spheres of value between which crucial and potentially incommensurable conflicts are possible, we should only get our hands dirty if and when we are convinced that enough members of the community, here and now, expect us to do so46).