The Complete Yes Minister

by Jonathan Lynn

  The Lobby certainly discouraged political journalists from going out and searching for a story, as they only had to sit on their bottoms in Annie’s Bar (the bar exclusively reserved for the press, with the highest alcoholic consumption of any of the thirteen bars within the Palace of Westminster — which was saying something!) and a ‘leak’ would come their way.

  Finally, a word on leaks. Because there was no free access to information in Whitehall, everybody leaked. Everybody knew there was no other way to make the wheels go round.

  Equally, everybody pretended that leaking was ‘not on’, ‘not cricket’, ‘below board’ or underhand in the same way. This is because discretion is the most highly valued talent in Whitehall. Even above ‘soundness’. Or perhaps discretion is the ultimate indication that you are ‘sound’!

  Whenever a ‘leak’ occurred there would be cries of moral indignation, and a leak inquiry would be set up by the Prime Minister. Such enquiries seldom reported at the end, for fear of the embarrassing result — most leaks came from ‘Number Ten’ (a euphemism), most budget leaks from ‘Number Eleven’ (another euphemism) — Ed.]

  March 30th

  I met Walter Fowler in Annie’s Bar, as arranged, and leaked my plans for curtailing surveillance.

  Walter seemed a little sceptical. He said it was a worthy cause but I’d never see it through. This made me all the more determined. I told him that I intended to see it through, and to carry the Home Office on this matter in due course. I asked him if it would make a story — I knew it would, but journalists like to feel that their opinions are valuable.

  Walter confirmed it would make a story: ‘MINISTER FIGHTS FOR PHONE-TAP SAFEGUARDS — yes, there’s something there.’ He wheezed deeply and drank two-thirds of a pint of special.

  I asked where they’d run it. He thought fairly high up on the Home News Page. I was slightly disappointed.

  ‘Not on page one?’

  ‘Well…’ said Walter doubtfully. ‘Can I attribute it? MINISTER SPEAKS OUT!’

  I squashed that at once.

  ‘So where did I get the story?’ asked Walter plaintively. ‘I presume I can’t say it was “officially announced” or a “government spokesman”?’

  I told him he presumed right.

  We silently pondered the other options.

  ‘How about “sources close to the Minister”?’ he asked after a minute or two.

  ‘Hopeless,’ I pointed out, ‘I don’t want everybody to know I told you. Isn’t it possible for you to do a “speculation is growing in Westminster…”?’

  Walter shook his head sadly. ‘Bit weak,’ he said, and again he wheezed. He was like an old accordion. He produced a vile-looking pipe from his grubby pockets and stuffed tobacco into the bowl with a stubby forefinger that had a thick black line of dirt under the nail.

  I watched fascinated. ‘What about “unofficial spokesman”,’ I suggested, just before the first gust of smoke engulfed me.

  ‘I’ve used that twice this week already,’ replied Walter, contentedly polluting the atmosphere of central London. I choked quietly.

  It was true. He had used it twice this week. I’d noticed. ‘Cabinet’s leaking like a sieve, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes — um…’ he poured some more bitter past his nicotine-stained molars into his smoking mouth, ‘… could we attribute it to a leading member of the sieve?’ I looked at him. ‘Er… Cabinet?’ he corrected himself hastily.

  I shook my head.

  ‘How would you like to be an “informed source”?’ he offered.

  That seemed a good idea. I hadn’t been an informed source for some weeks.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’ll be.’

  Walter chuckled. ‘Quite a joke, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ I asked blankly.

  ‘Describing someone as “informed”, when his Permanent Secretary is Sir Humphrey Appleby.’

  He bared his yellow teeth at me. I think it was a smile. I didn’t smile back — I just bared my teeth at him.

  March 31st

  Annie came up to London today from the constituency.

  So this evening I told her about the surveillance we’d been under. I thought she’d be as indignant as me. But she didn’t seem to care.

  I tried to make her grasp the extent of the wrongdoing. ‘Everything we said on the phone, everything we said to each other — all recorded. Transcribed. It’s humiliating.’

  ‘Yes, I see…’ she said thoughtfully, ‘it is a little humiliating that someone at MI5 knows just how boring our life is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All will be revealed,’ she said. ‘Or has already been revealed. That what you talk about at home is what you talk about in public — the gross national product, the public sector borrowing requirement, the draft agenda for the party conference…’

  I explained that I didn’t mean that. I meant that all our private family talk had been overheard.

  ‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Annie. ‘I hadn’t thought of that… “Have you got the car keys?”… “No, I thought you had them”… “No, I gave them to you”… My God, that could bring the government down!’

  ‘Annie.’ I was cross. ‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

  ‘Whatever gives you that idea?’

  ‘You still haven’t grasped how our privacy has been intruded upon. They might have heard what we say to each other… in bed.’

  ‘Would it matter?’ she asked, feigning surprise. ‘Do you snore in code?’

  I think she was trying to tell me something. Only last week she caused me great embarrassment when she was interviewed in some juvenile woman’s magazine. They asked her if the earth moved when she went to bed with me. ‘No,’ she’d replied, ‘not even the bed moves.’

  Perhaps this was part of a campaign.

  It was. She went on. ‘Look, it’s the Bank Holiday weekend coming up. Why don’t we go away for a long weekend, two or three days, like we used to?’

  My first thought was that I couldn’t. Then I thought: why not? And I couldn’t think of a reason. After all, even statesmen need holidays. I agreed.

  ‘Let’s go to Kingsbury Down,’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

  She stared at me. ‘Only where we spent our honeymoon, darling.’ Funny, I’d forgotten the name of the place. I tried to remember what it looked like.

  ‘It’s where you first explained to me your theory about the effect of velocity of circulation on the net growth of the money supply.’

  I remembered it well. ‘Oh yes, I know the place then,’ I said.

  Annie turned towards her bedside lamp. ‘Did you get that, boys?’ she muttered into it.

  [A startling development took place on the following day. The Special Branch contacted Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley with the news that a terrorist hit list had been discovered, and Jim Hacker’s name appeared on it as a potential target.

  The list apparently was drawn up by a group calling itself the International Freedom Army — Ed.]

  SIR BERNARD WOOLLEY RECALLS:[18]

  We could not imagine who on earth could possibly want to assassinate the Minister. He was so harmless.

  Nevertheless, Sir Humphrey Appleby and I were fully agreed that it was not possible to take risks with the Minister’s life, and so the whole paraphernalia of security would have to be brought out to protect him.

  [Hacker’s diary continues — Ed.]

  April 2nd

  Bernard greeted me like a mother hen this morning. He asked after my health with an earnest and solicitous attitude.

  I thought perhaps it was because I was a little late at the office. I hadn’t slept too well — ‘I feel like death,’ I remarked.

  Bernard whispered to Sir Humphrey, ‘Perhaps that’s just as well,’ a comment which I did not understand at the time but which I now regard as having been in the poorest of taste.

  I was actually rather cheerful. My leak had worked.
A story had appeared in the Express: HACKER MOVES TO CURB PHONE TAPS. I was described as an informed source, as agreed, and Walter had not taken a by-line — the story was ‘from our Political Staff’.

  Sir Humphrey wondered audibly where they’d got the information, and stared at me. Naturally I admitted nothing.

  [It has been said that the ship of state is the only type of ship that leaks from the top — Ed.]

  ‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘this leak only confirms my determination to act on this matter.’

  Humphrey asked me if I’d considered all the implications. This is generally the Civil Service way of asking me if I realised that I was talking rubbish. In this case, as it was to turn out, I had not quite considered all the implications.

  So I replied that free citizens have a right to privacy. An absolute right.

  How could I have said such a thing?

  But I didn’t know then what I knew just five minutes later. Those bastards hadn’t told me.

  ‘Suppose…’ suggested Sir Humphrey smoothly, ‘suppose MI5 had reason to suspect that these “free citizens” were, shall we say to take a purely hypothetical example, planning to assassinate a Minister of the Crown?’

  I made a little speech. I spoke of the freedom of the British people, and how this is more important than the lives of a few Ministers. I said that freedom is indivisible, whereas Ministers are expendable. ‘Men in public life must expect to be the targets of cranks and fanatics. A Minister has the duty to set his own life at naught, to stand up and say “Here I am, do your worst!” and not cower in craven terror behind electronic equipment and secret microphones and all the hideous apparatus of the police state.’ Me and my big mouth.

  Sir Humphrey and Bernard looked at each other. The former tried to speak but I made it clear that I would brook no arguments.

  ‘No Humphrey, I don’t want to hear any more about it. You deal in evasions and secrets. But politicians in a free country must be seen to be the champions of freedom and truth. Don’t try and give me the arguments in favour of telephone tapping — I can find them in Stalin’s memoirs.’

  ‘Actually,’ quibbled Bernard, ‘Stalin didn’t write any memoirs. He was too secretive. He was afraid people might read them.’

  Humphrey succeeded in interrupting us.

  ‘Minister,’ he insisted, ‘you must allow me to say one more thing on this matter.’

  I told him that he might say one sentence, but he should keep it brief.

  ‘The Special Branch have found your name on a death list,’ he said.

  I thought I must have misheard.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘The Special Branch have found your name on a death list,’ he repeated.

  This made no sense. A death list? Why me?

  ‘A death list?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, a death list?’

  ‘An assassination list,’ he said.

  He really is a fool. ‘I know what you mean by a death list,’ I said, ‘but… what do you mean?’

  Sir Humphrey was now as baffled as I.

  ‘I don’t know how I can express it more clearly, Minister,’ he said plaintively.

  Obviously, I wanted him to explain things like what the list was, where it came from, why I was on it — my mind was racing with dozens of unanswered questions, that’s why I was so inarticulate.

  Sir Humphrey tried to answer what he thought I was asking him.

  ‘To put it absolutely bluntly, Minister, confidential investigations have revealed the existence of certain documents whose provenance is currently unestablished, but whose effect if realised would be to create a cabinet vacancy and precipitate a by-election.’

  I didn’t know what he meant. I asked him.

  ‘You are on a death list, Minister.’

  We were going round in circles. ‘Who…?’ I spluttered, ‘What…?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. It is the International Freedom Army. A new urban guerrilla group, apparently.’

  My bowels were turning to water. ‘But what have they got against me?’ I whispered.

  Bernard reminded me of the vague rumours recently of a Cabinet reshuffle, and that my name has been mentioned in one or two of the papers in connection with the Ministry of Defence.

  I asked who they could be, these urban guerrillas. Bernard and Humphrey just shrugged.

  ‘Hard to say, Minister. It could be an Irish splinter group, or Baader-Meinhof, or PLO, or Black September. It could be home-grown loonies — Anarchists, Maoists. Or it might be Libyans, Iranians, or the Italian Red Brigade for all we know.’

  ‘In any case,’ added Bernard, ‘they’re all interconnected really. This could simply be a new group of freelance killers. The Special Branch don’t know where to start.’

  That was very encouraging, I must say! I couldn’t get over the cool, callous, unemotional way in which they were discussing some maniacs who were trying to kill me.

  I tried to grasp at straws.

  ‘There’s a list of names, is there? You said a list? Not just me?’

  ‘Not just you, Minister,’ Sir Humphrey confirmed.

  I said that I supposed that there were hundreds of names on it.

  ‘Just three,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘Three?’

  I was in a state of shock. I think. Or panic. One of those. I just sat there unable to think or speak. My mouth had completely dried up.

  As I tried to say something, anything, the phone rang. Bernard answered it. Apparently somebody called Commander Forest from Special Branch had come to brief me.

  Bernard went to get him. As he left he turned to me and said in a kindly fashion: ‘Try looking at it this way, Minister — it’s always nice to be on a shortlist. At least they know who you are.’

  I gave him a withering look, and he hurried out.

  Sir Humphrey filled in the background. The Special Branch had apparently informed the Home Secretary (the usual procedure) who recommended detectives to protect me.

  I don’t see how they can protect me. How can detectives protect me from an assassin’s bullet? Nobody can. Everybody knows that.

  I said this to Humphrey. I suppose I hoped he’d disagree — but he didn’t. ‘Look at it this way,’ he responded. ‘Even if detectives cannot protect anyone, they do ensure that the assassin is brought to justice. After the victim has been gunned down.’

  Thanks a lot!

  Bernard brought in Commander Forest. He was a tall thin cadaverous-looking individual, with a slightly nervous flinching manner. He didn’t really inspire confidence.

  I decided that I had to put on a brave show. Chin up, stiff upper lip, pull myself together, that sort of thing. I’d been talking a lot about leadership. Now I had to prove to them — and myself — that I was officer material.

  I smiled reassuringly at the Commander, as he offered to brief me on the standard hazards and routine precautions. ‘I don’t really have to take these things too seriously, do I?’ I asked in a cavalier manner.

  ‘Well, sir, in a sense, it’s up to you, but we do advise…’

  I interrupted. ‘Look, I can see that some people might get into a frightful funk but, well, it’s the job, isn’t it? All in a day’s work.’

  Commander Forest gazed at me strangely. ‘I admire your courage, sir,’ he said as if he really thought I were a raving idiot.

  I decided I’d done enough of the stiff upper lip. I’d let him speak. ‘Okay, shoot,’ I said. It was an unfortunate turn of phrase.

  ‘Read this,’ he said, and thrust a Xeroxed typescript into my hand. ‘This will tell you all you need to know. Study it, memorise it, and keep it to yourself.’

  [The Museum of the Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard has kindly lent us a copy of ‘Security Precautions’, the document handed to Hacker. It is self-explanatory — Ed.]

  I read the document through. It seemed to me as though I had little chance of survival. But I must continue to have courage.

  After Commander Forest had lef
t, I asked Humphrey how the police would find these terrorists before they found me. That seems to be my only hope.

  Sir Humphrey remarked that telephone tapping and electronic surveillance of all possible suspects is the best way of picking these bastards up.

  ‘But,’ he added cautiously, ‘that does incur intolerable intrusion upon individual privacy.’

  I carefully considered the implications of this comment.

  And then I came to the conclusion. A slightly different conclusion, although I think that perhaps he had misunderstood what I’d been saying earlier.

  I explained that, on the other hand, if the people’s elected representatives are to represent the people, it follows that any attack on these elected representatives is, in itself, an attack on freedom and democracy. The reason is clear. Such threats strike at the very heart of the people’s inalienable democratic right to be governed by the leaders of their choice. Therefore, the safety of these leaders must be protected by every possible means — however much we might regret the necessity for doing so or the measures that we may be forced to take.

  I explained all this to Humphrey. He was in complete agreement — although I didn’t care for his choice of words. ‘Beautifully argued, Minister,’ he replied. ‘My view exactly — or else you’re a dead duck.’

  April 5th

  Today there was a slight embarrassment.

  My petition arrived.

  The petition against phone tapping and electronic surveillance, the one that I started a year and a half ago when I was in opposition and Editor of Reform. Bernard wheeled into the office a huge office trolley loaded with piles of exercise books and reams of paper. It now has two and a quarter million signatures. A triumph of organisation and commitment, and what the hell do I bloody well do with it?

  It is now clear to me — now that I have the full facts which you cannot get when in opposition, of course — that surveillance is an indispensable weapon in the fight against organised terror and crime.

  Bernard understood. He offered to file the petition.

  I wasn’t sure that filing it was the answer. We had acknowledged receipt from the deputation — they would never ask to see it again. And they would imagine that it was in safe hands since I’m the one who began it all.