Guthrie and Venables started out by telling me that they intended to sell the rest of the rather delicious 1927 Fonseca[20] which we were drinking. Baillie has a couple of pipes left and the Bursar told me they’d fetch quite a bit. I couldn’t think what they were talking about. I was astounded. Excellent shock tactics, of course. Then they told me that if they sold all the paintings and the silver, they could possibly pay off the entire mortgage on the new buildings.
They think — or want me to think — that Baillie College is going to the wall.
It transpired that the trouble is the government’s new policy of charging overseas students the full economic rate for their tuition. Baillie has always had an exceptional number of overseas students.
The Bursar tells me that they cannot charge the full economic fee of £4000 per annum. Hardly anyone will pay it.
He says he has been everywhere! All over the USA, raising funds, trying to sell the idea of an Oxford education to the inhabitants of Podunk, Indiana, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
But the competition is cut-throat. Apparently Africa is simply crawling with British Professors frantically trying to flog sociology courses to the natives. And India. And the Middle East.
I suggested that they do the obvious thing — fill up the vacancies with British students.
This idea met with a very cold response. ‘I don’t think that’s awfully funny, Humphrey,’ the Master said.
He explained that home students were to be avoided at all costs! Anything but home students!
The reason is simple economics. Baillie only gets £500 per head for the UK students. Therefore, it would have to take four hundred home students to replace a mere fifty foreigners. The number of students at a tutorial would quadruple. The staff/student ratio would go from one in ten to one in thirty-four.
I see their point. This could be the end of civilisation as we know it. It would certainly be the end of Baillie College as we know it. There would be dormitories. Classrooms. It would be indistinguishable from Wormwood Scrubs or the University of Sussex.
And Hacker is the Minister who has the authority to change it. I had not realised the implications of all this, it being a DES [Department of Education and Science — Ed.] decision. Ours not to reason why, ours just to put the administrative wheels in motion.[21]
[Although Sir Humphrey, and Jim Hacker, were responsible for the implementation of these cuts, characteristically the Department of Education and Science had made them without consulting any of the other interested departments — the Foreign Office, or the Department of Health and Social Security or the Department of Administrative Affairs — Ed.]
I suggested that we must persuade Hacker of the special and unique importance of Baillie College. He should be invited to dinner at High Table and the case explained to him.
The Master was noticeably worried about Hacker — he was concerned whether he was of the intellectual calibre to understand the case.
I pointed out that the case is intelligible to anyone of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh.
They asked me if Hacker is of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. Clearly they’ve had dealings with politicians before.
I was able to reassure them on that point. I’m fairly sure that he is of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. On his day.
I left Oxford convinced that I must find a way to get Baillie recognised as a special institution (like Imperial College) for the extraordinary work that they do. [A well-chosen adjective! As this episode in Hacker’s life is fundamentally concerned with honours — deserved or undeserved, earned or unearned — we felt that at this point it might be of interest to the reader to know the principal honours conferred on the antagonists:
Sir William Guthrie, OM, FRS, FBA, Ph.D, MC, MA (Oxon)
Group Captain Christopher Venables, DSC, MA
Sir Humphrey Appleby, KCB, MVO, MA (Oxon)
Bernard Woolley, MA (Cantab)
The Rt Hon. James Hacker, PC, MP, BSc. (Econ)
Sir Arnold Robinson, GCMG, CVO, MA (Oxon) — Ed.]
April 28th
This morning Humphrey badgered me again.
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, there is the matter of the Departmental recommendations for the Honours List.’
I told him we’d leave that on one side for a bit.
He became very tense and twitchy. I tried not to show amusement. He told me we can’t leave it as we are getting dangerously close to the five weeks.
[All recipients of honours are notified at least five weeks before promulgation. Theoretically it gives them time to refuse. This is rare. In fact, the only time a civil servant is known to have refused a knighthood was in 1496. This was because he already had one — Ed.]
I decided that I would not yet give my approval to the Department’s Honours List, because I’ve been doing some research. [Hacker almost certainly meant that a party research assistant had been doing some research and he had read the report — Ed.] I have found that twenty per cent of all honours go to civil servants. The rest of the population of this country have to do something extra to get an honour. Over and above their ordinary work, for which they get paid. You or I have to do something special, like work with mentally-handicapped children for twenty-seven years, six nights a week — then we might get an MBE. But Civil Service knighthoods just come up with the rations.
These honours are, in any case, intrinsically ridiculous — MBE, for instance, according to Whitaker’s Almanack, stands for Member of the Most Honourable Order of the British Empire. Hasn’t anyone in Whitehall noticed that we’ve lost the Empire?
The civil servants have been having it both ways for years. When Attlee was PM he got £5000 a year and the Cabinet Secretary got £2500. Now the Cabinet Secretary gets more than the PM. Why? Because civil servants used to receive honours as a compensation for long years of loyal public service, for which they got poor salaries, poor pensions and few perks.
Now they have salaries comparable to executives in the most successful private enterprise companies (guess who’s in charge of the comparability studies), inflation-proof pensions, chauffeur-driven cars — and they still get automatic honours.
[Hacker was right. The civil servants were undoubtedly manipulating the honours system to their own advantage. Just as incomes policies have always been manipulated by those that control them: for instance, the 1975 Pay Policy provided exemptions for Civil Service increments and lawyers’ fees. Needless to say, the policy was drafted by civil servants and parliamentary draftsmen, i.e. lawyers.
The problem is, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?[22] — Ed.]
So how can civil servants possibly understand the way the rest of us live, if they are immune to the basic threats to economic well-being faced by the rest of us: inflation and unemployment?
And how did the civil servants get away with creating these remarkably favourable terms of service for themselves? Simply by keeping a low profile. They have somehow managed to make people feel that discussing the matter at all is in rather poor taste.
But that cuts no ice with me. I believe in action now!
I asked Humphrey how he accounted for twenty per cent of honours going to the Civil Service.
‘A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty,’ he said.
It’s a pretty nice duty to be devoted to, I thought.
Humphrey continued: ‘Her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small recompense for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty and to the nation.’
A pretty speech. But quite ridiculous. ‘A modest wage?’ I queried.
‘Alas, yes.’
I explained to Humphrey, since he appeared to have forgotten, that he earned well over thirty thousand a year. Seven and a half thousand more than me.
He agreed, but insisted that it was still a relatively modest wage.
‘Relative to whom?’ I asked.
I felt obliged to explain to Sir Humphrey that he was in no way relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.
‘Indeed,’ he agreed. ‘She did not get a First in Greats.’[23]
Then, undaunted and ever persistent, he again asked me if I had approved the list. I made my move.
‘No Humphrey,’ I replied pleasantly, ‘I am not approving any honour for anyone in this Department who hasn’t earned it.’
Humphrey’s face was a wonderful study in blankness.
‘What do you mean, earned it?’
I explained that I meant earned it. In other words, having done something to deserve it.
The penny dropped. He exploded. ‘But that’s unheard of,’ he exclaimed.
I smiled serenely. ‘Maybe so. But my new policy is to stop all honours for all civil servants who fail to cut their department’s budgets by five per cent a year.’
Humphrey was speechless.
So after a few moments I said: ‘May I take it that your silence indicates approval?’
He found his voice fast. ‘You may not, Minister.’ He was deeply indignant. ‘Where did you get this preposterous idea?’
I glanced at Bernard, who studied his right shoe-lace intently. ‘It came to me,’ I said.
Humphrey was spluttering incoherently. ‘It’s ridiculous. It’s out of the question. It’s unthinkable.’ Now that Humphrey had found his voice there was no stopping him. ‘The whole idea… strikes at the whole root of… this is the beginning of the end… the thin end of the wedge… Bennite solution. [Perhaps it was the word ‘wedge’ that reminded him of Benn — Ed.] Where will it end? The abolition of the monarchy?’
I told him not to be silly. This infuriated him even more.
‘There is no reason,’ he said, stabbing the air with his finger, ‘to change a system which has worked well in the past.’
‘But it hasn’t,’ I said.
‘We have to give the present system a fair trial,’ he stated. This seemed quite reasonable on the face of it. But I reminded him that the Most Noble Order of the Garter was founded in 1348 by King Edward III. ‘Surely it must be getting towards the end of its trial period?’ I said.
So Humphrey tried a new tack. He said that to block honours pending economies might create a dangerous precedent.
What he means by ‘dangerous precedent’ is that if we do the right thing now, then we might be forced to do the right thing again next time. And on that reasoning nothing should ever be done at all. [To be precise: many things may be done, but nothing must ever be done for the first time — Ed.]
I told him I wasn’t going to budge on my proposal. He resorted to barefaced lies, telling me that he was fully seized of my aims and had taken them on board and would do his best to put them into practice.
So I asked him point blank if he would put my policy into practice. He made me his usual offer. I know it off by heart now. A recommendation that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we would be in a position to think through all the implications and take a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action that might well have unforeseen repercussions. [In other words: No! — Ed.]
I wasn’t prepared to be fobbed off with this nonsense any longer. I told him I wanted action now. He went pale. I pointed out that, in my case, honours are fundamentally unhealthy. Nobody in their right mind can want them, they encourage sycophancy, snobbery and jealousy. ‘And,’ I added firmly, ‘it is not fair that civil servants get them all.’
Humphrey argued again. ‘We have done something to deserve them. We are civil servants,’ he said.
‘You just like having letters to put after your name to impress people,’ I sneered. ‘You wouldn’t impress people if they knew what they stood for: KCB? Knight Commander of the Most Noble Order of the Bath? Bloody daft. They’d think you were a plumber. I think they should shove the whole lot down the Most Noble Order of the Plughole.’
Humphrey wasn’t at all amused. ‘Very droll,’ he said condescendingly. ‘You like having letters after your name too,’ he continued. ‘PC,[24] MP. And your degree — BSc.Econ., I think,’ he sneered and slightly wrinkled up his elegant nose as if there were a nasty smell underneath it.
‘At least I earned my degree,’ I told him, ‘not like your MA. At Oxford they give it to you for nothing, when you’ve got a BA.’
‘Not for nothing. For four guineas,’ he snapped spitefully.
I was tired of this juvenile bickering. And I had him on the run. I told him that I had made my policy decision and that was the end of it. ‘And what was your other point?’ I enquired.
Humphrey was in such a state of shock about the Honours List that he had forgotten his other point. But after a few moments it came back to him.
It seems that Baillie College, Oxford, will be in serious trouble over the new ruling on grants for overseas students.
Humphrey said that nothing would please Baillie more than to take British students. Obviously that’s true. But he explained that Baillie has easily the highest proportion of foreign students and that the repercussions will be serious at the schools of Tropical Medicine and International Law. And the Arabic Department may have to close down completely.
I’m sympathetic to all this, but hard cases make bad law. I just don’t see how it’s possible for us to go on educating foreigners at the expense of the British taxpayer.
‘It’s not just foreigners, Minister,’ explained Humphrey. ‘If, for instance, our Diplomatic Service has nowhere to immerse its recruits in Arab culture, the results could be catastrophic — we might even end up with a pro-Israeli Foreign Office. And what would happen to our oil policy then?’
I said that they could send their diplomatic recruits elsewhere.
‘Where else,’ he demanded, ‘can they learn Arabic?’
‘Arabia?’ I suggested.
He was stumped. Then Bernard chipped in. ‘Actually, Minister, Baillie College has an outstanding record. It has filled the jails of the British Empire for many years.’
This didn’t sound like much of a recommendation to me. I invited Bernard to explain further.
‘As you know,’ he said, ‘the letters JB are the highest honour in the Commonwealth.’
I didn’t know.
Humphrey eagerly explained. ‘Jailed by the British. Gandhi, Nkrumah, Makarios, Ben-Gurion, Kenyatta, Nehru, Mugabe — the list of world leaders is endless and contains several of our students.’
Our students? He had said our students. It all became clear.
I smiled benignly. ‘Which college did you go to, Humphrey?’
‘Er… that is quite beside the point, Minister.’
He wasn’t having a very good day. ‘I like being beside the point, Humphrey,’ I said. ‘Humour me. Which college did you go to? Was it Baillie, by any strange coincidence?’
‘It so happens,’ he admitted with defiance, ‘that I am a Baillie man, but that has nothing to do with this.’
I don’t know how he has the face to make such a remark. Does he really think I’m a complete idiot? At that moment the buzzer went and saved Humphrey from further humiliation. It was the Division Bell. So I had to hurry off to the House.
On my way out I realised that I had to ask Bernard whether I was to vote ‘aye’ or ‘no’.
‘No,’ he replied and began to explain. ‘It’s an Opposition Amendment, the second reading of…’
But I had left by then. The man’s a fool. It doesn’t matter what the debate is, I just don’t want to go through the wrong door.
[Meanwhile, rumours about Hacker’s plan to link economies with honours had travelled fast along the two major Whitehall grapevines — the private secretaries’ and the drivers’. It was only a matter of hours before news reached Sir Arnold Robinson,
the Secretary to the Cabinet. Sir Humphrey was asked to drop in for a chat with Sir Arnold, and an illuminating interview followed — illuminating not only for Sir Humphrey, but also for historians who learn that although the Cabinet Secretary is theoretically primus inter pares[25] he is in reality very much primus. It seems that all Permanent Secretaries are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The notes that Sir Arnold made on Sir Humphrey’s report have been found among the Civil Service files at Walthamstow and were of course released some years ago under the Thirty-Year Rule.
Sir Humphrey never saw these notes, because no civil servant is shown his own report, except in wholly unusual circumstances — Ed.]
Told Appleby that I was a little bit worried about this idea of his Minister’s, linking Honours to economies.
Appleby said that he could find no effective arguments against this plan.
I indicated that we would regard it as the thin end of the wedge, a Bennite solution. I asked where it would end?
Appleby replied that he shared my views and had emphasised them to the Minister. He added, somewhat strangely, that the scheme was ‘intolerable but yet irresistible’.
I took a dim view. I informed Appleby that, while I was not in any sense reprimanding him, I wanted his assurance that this plan would not be put into practice.
He looked very shaken at the mention of no reprimand. [Civil Service Code: the mere mention of a reprimand so high up the ladder is severe and deeply wounding criticism. It suggests that the Cabinet Secretary was flying in the face of the ‘Good Chap Theory’ — the theory that states that ‘A Good Chap Does Not Tell A Good Chap What A Good Chap Ought To Know.’ Sir Arnold was implying that Sir Humphrey was not a sufficiently good chap — Ed.]
Appleby was unable to give me the assurance I required. He merely voiced a hope that Hacker would not be acting on this plan.
I was obliged to point out that hopes are not good enough. If honours were linked to economies in the DAA, the contagion could spread throughout government. To every department.
Again I invited him to say that we could count on him to scotch the scheme. He said he would try. Feeble! I was left with no alternative but to warn him most seriously that, although I was quite sure he knew what he was doing, this matter could cause others to reflect upon whether or not he was sound.
The Complete Yes Minister Page 23