A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  There is also a fourth, amoral, answer, championed most notoriously by Machiavelli, which insists that, as we cannot even be sure that there are enough people around who believe in a moral code, let alone enough people who will adhere to it consistently, we have no choice but to get our hands dirty if we want to acquire and hold onto political power. The crucial thing to do, in this sense, is not to do bad things badly, but rather to do bad things well: ‘[H]ow men live is so different from how they should live,’ wrote Machiavelli, ‘that a ruler who does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power rather than maintain it. If a ruler who wants always to act honourably is surrounded by many unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable. Therefore, a ruler who wishes to maintain his power must be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary’.47

  Part of the brilliance of Yes Minister as a political satire was the way that it managed to weave this grandest of themes deep into the texture of its own episodic comedy, and use the regular tussles between a Minister and his Permanent Secretary as a delightfully subtle Socratic dialogue about the extent to which, if at all, our governors – and administrators – should dirty their own hands. Without the kind of strain or stress that one would find in an academic textbook or abstruse philosophical monograph, the show choreographed Hacker and Sir Humphrey through one ethical conundrum after another, as the hidden complexities of each idea were revealed and the obstacles in the way of its execution addressed.

  It was this, and all the rest, that impressed itself upon the consciousness of the viewer on that dark and chilly evening back in February 1980. Its effect, as a consequence, was revelatory.

  Suddenly, the ailing British sitcom seemed rejuvenated. Suddenly, Britain’s shrouded political system seemed unveiled. Now Britain’s television audience had a new show that not only entertained, informed and educated them, but also, in so doing, treated them with rare respect.

  This book will tell the story of how this happened, how it developed and how it helped to change the way that popular culture engaged with contemporary politics. It is the story of a very courageous decision that for once, quite spectacularly, paid off.

  PART ONE

  Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

  John Godfrey Saxe

  1

  The Writers

  Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

  It all started back in 1962. Two men, one a thirty-two-year-old BBC current affairs editor named Antony Jay and the other a nineteen-year-old Cambridge law undergraduate called Jonathan Lynn, were both drawn, quite independently of each other, to the widespread media coverage of a political saga that, as it developed, seemed to epitomise the strange effect that the political system could have on a supposedly ordinary individual.

  The story concerned the Labour MP Sir Frank Soskice, a sober-minded and well-regarded barrister turned politician (praised by the press for ‘his disdain for intrigue and his indifference to flattery’1) who was at that time the Shadow Cabinet’s spokesman for Home Affairs and a well-known campaigner against capital punishment. Sir Frank had just helped start a petition to secure a posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans, a semi-literate van driver with an estimated mental age of ten and a half, who had been executed back in March 1950 for the murder of his daughter inside the family’s top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill Gate, west London.

  During his trial, Evans had accused one of the chief witnesses against him, his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, of being the real killer of his wife as well as his daughter, but his claims had been dismissed. Three years after Evans’ execution, however, Christie was finally exposed as a serial killer who had murdered at least eight women in the same house, secreting some of their bodies in various parts of the building. Shortly before his own execution in July 1953, Christie confessed to murdering Evans’ wife, and, although he continued to deny it, was strongly suspected also of strangling the daughter.

  As public unrest over the soundness of the original ruling mounted, a private inquiry, led by John Scott Henderson QC, was promptly set up to examine the possible miscarriage of justice in Evans’ hanging. The result of the almost risibly perfunctory week-long investigation, however, was deemed such a whitewash in favour of the police that, far from defusing the situation, it only served to make it seem even more incendiary than before.

  Questions continued to be raised in Parliament over the handling of the matter and, in 1955, the editors of the Observer, the Spectator, the National and English Review and the Yorkshire Post formed a delegation to petition the Home Secretary to grant a new inquiry. In the same year, a book about the case, The Man on Your Conscience by the solicitor Michael Eddowes, provided a compelling argument suggesting that Evans had actually been innocent, thus further stimulating widespread debate. Although the demand for a new inquiry was denied,2 the campaign for justice continued into the next decade, when another book on the subject, the television journalist Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place (1961), dramatically revived public interest in the case.

  A large number of politicians, citing the evidence that had been set out so clearly and powerfully in Kennedy’s recent book, urged the then Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, to order a second inquiry, but Butler stood firm and refused. Claiming that ‘witnesses’ recollection of the events of 1949 must inevitably have been dimmed by the [passage] of time’, and deeming Kennedy’s book to be of interest only ‘in its presentation of the case for believing Evans to have been innocent rather than in its addition to the information already available’, he concluded that ‘a further inquiry could not bring any new information to light’.3 This only exacerbated the anger among many Opposition MPs, and one of them, Patrick Gordon Walker, initiated a new House of Commons debate on the subject in June 1961.

  Sir Frank Soskice, predictably, was one of the first MPs to rise and contribute to the proceedings. ‘I desire to make a most earnest appeal to the Home Secretary,’ he said, ‘to accept the suggestion that there should be a further investigation into the circumstances of this case. […] If ever there was a debt due to justice, and to the reputation both of our own judicial system and to the public conscience of many millions of people in this country, that debt is one that the Home Secretary should now pay’.4

  Once again, the Opposition was defeated and the controversy dragged on, with Sir Frank and others pledging their support the following year for the petition demanding that Evans be granted a posthumous pardon. It was at this point, as the various media summaries of the saga so far started to circulate, that Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, along with many other people, refreshed their memories of the case and looked forward with interest to how it might finally be resolved.

  It did not seem as though they would have long to wait. When the Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell died at the beginning of 1963, he was replaced by the more incisive Harold Wilson, who, among other things, was an outspoken opponent of capital punishment and a strong critic of how the Evans case had been handled. One of the first promises he made, as the new Leader of the Opposition, was a vow to do whatever he could to push through a bill that abolished the death penalty.5 It seemed only a matter of time, therefore, once Labour won the October 1964 General Election, that Sir Frank Soskice and his fellow campaigners would finally see Evans declared innocent.

  The next time the issue was raised in Parliament, however, in February 1965, the new Home Secretary summarily declined the request, explaining without any sound or sign of regret that too many years had passed ‘to elicit the truth about this tragic case’, claiming that he himself was ambivalent about the matter (‘I certainly think it would be kinder not to express views one way or the other’), and then adding: ‘Even if the innocence of Evans were established, I have no power to make an official declaration of it’.6 In spite of a succession of loud and passionate pleas to think again, he flatly refused to relent, insisting: �
��I think it is much better that the matter should be left as it is’.7 Many people both inside and outside of Parliament would have been surprised at the Home Secretary’s ruling, no matter who he happened to be. In this particular instance, however, they were especially shocked, because this new Home Secretary happened to be none other than Sir Frank Soskice.

  The sheer irony of the situation was astounding. Here was a Home Secretary effectively snubbing himself, or at least his slightly younger self, after years of campaigning, now that he finally had the power to do what he had always demanded.

  The most cynical of insiders put this seemingly bizarre volte-face down simply to the exigencies of ambition: ‘Such are the unfortunate effects of office in general,’ observed the Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas, while betraying more than a trace of a smirk, ‘and the Home Office in particular’8. More idealistic voices raged at what they regarded as Sir Frank’s brazen hypocrisy (a visibly furious Ian Gilmour, a Conservative MP who had formerly campaigned alongside Sir Frank for justice on this very matter, asked him to explain to the House ‘why it would be kinder to the relatives of Timothy Evans not to say that he was innocent if he was, in fact, innocent’9). While Roy Jenkins, the man who would soon replace him as Home Secretary, was content to explain it away as the consequence of personal incompetence (claiming that Sir Frank had ‘practically no political sense and an obsessive respect for legal precedent’10).

  The most common explanation, among the broader public, was simply that here was yet another politician whose principles had proven to be far more pliable than his passion for self-preservation. Following on from such recent political embarrassments as Tam Galbraith’s entanglement in a sex and espionage scandal;11 Harold Macmillan’s self-serving purge of one-third of his own Cabinet;12 John Profumo’s Parliamentary perjury when challenged about his alleged affair with the mistress of a Soviet spy;13 and the 14th Earl of Home’s eager use of the new Peerage Act – which he had formerly seemed so disinclined to support during its passage through the Lords – in order to disclaim his title and return to the House of Commons as Prime Minister;14 Sir Frank’s perverse case of self-betrayal struck many disenchanted onlookers as more or less par for the course in British politics.

  A thoughtful few, however, were left pondering what could possibly go on within the country’s dimly lit and labyrinthine political system to convince such characters that there was any real logic to their illogicality. Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn were certainly among those whose imaginations were captured by this question.

  It made them think more rigorously about politics. It also made them think more carefully about comedy. This was, after all, a sequence of events that, while very serious, also seemed, in a sense, far more strangely, sardonically amusing than anything most playwrights might have plotted. Truth, it appeared, really could be much funnier than fiction.

  What both of these men shared, at this stage, was a perspective on such things that owed much to the modus operandi cultivated at their shared alma mater. Marked by a stringency less urbane and more restlessly reductive than the equivalent intellectual culture evident at Oxford at the same time, the dominant disposition in Cambridge, during that post-war age, was, as far as the humanities were concerned, the kind of dogged and disciplined disputatiousness epitomised by the followers of F.R. Leavis and the disciples of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Every discussion, at every level, seemed to rock to the same relentless rhythm of the classic Cantabrigian conjunction: ‘But what do you mean by … But could it … But should it … But what if …?’

  Antony Jay had gone to Cambridge in 1949 to study Classics and Comparative Philology at Magdalene College. Jonathan Lynn had arrived in 1961 to read Law at Pembroke College.

  Both of them witnessed at close hand the kind of characters who were already intent on becoming part of Britain’s political Establishment, rushing to sign up to the student version of their favoured political party and wasting no time before making their voice heard in the main debates. Jay was a contemporary of future Conservative Party Cabinet Ministers Douglas Hurd, John Biffen, Norman St John-Stevas and Cecil Parkinson, as well as the Labour MP Greville Janner. Lynn found himself stuck in the middle of a veritable glut of future Thatcherites that included Norman Lamont, Michael Howard, John Selwyn Gummer, Peter Bottomley and Peter Lilley, as well as a Liberal-leaning economist called Vince Cable.

  Although both Jay and Lynn were, if anything, just as preoccupied by political ideas, neither was impressed by the naked ambition and tunnel vision these contemporaries all displayed. Lynn, in particular, found the vast majority of them ‘smug young men’ who oozed the kind of confidence that suggested they saw themselves as predestined for prominence in Parliament.

  Their natural habitat was the unnatural habitat of the Union Society’s debating chamber, situated behind the Round Church in Bridge Street. A wooden-floored, leather-seated, stuffy Victorian construction modelled loosely on the House of Commons, it was the place where these young men, looking prematurely middle-aged with their flat, brilliantined hair, bow ties and dinner jackets, spouted their ‘pimply puerility’ on a regular basis. ‘Their unwarranted confidence in their own abilities,’ Lynn would later recall, ‘was a sight to behold’.15

  It was, in its own quaint way, a kind of theatre, but this was a theatre devoid of all deliberate irony. The only appeal it held for Jay and Lynn was of a limited anthropological nature, suited to a short period of study before being consigned to the mind as a memory. The only effect that it had on either of them was to push them away from conventional political participation and towards critical commentary: ‘It became clear to me,’ Lynn would recall, ‘that my only role in politics could be to ridicule the system’.16

  Jay, outside of his formal studies, preferred to seek out the kind of pastimes that would relax and refresh him, rather than frittering away his free hours squabbling with the student politicians. His extra-curricular interests included ‘cricket, hockey, bridge, squash and editing the college magazine. I did think about joining the Footlights – my parents were both on the stage – but it would have meant abandoning my hopes of a decent degree, which considering I had a major classical scholarship seemed a pity. After all, I could act later, but I couldn’t get a degree later’.17

  He also began to feed what would be a lifelong fascination with the politics of organisations, quickly understanding, in his own environment, how the image of Cambridge as one big university ruling over a collection of little colleges obscured a reality that was its opposite, with the colleges (which he likened to ‘feudal baronies’18) combining to keep the university impotent and thus ensure that any proposed reforms (unless the biggest and wealthiest colleges really wanted them) would be thwarted.

  Jonathan Lynn, once alienated from the Union debates (the fact that his parents had paid for him to be a life member, in the hope that he might end up as its president, obliged him to linger a little longer than he would otherwise have liked), was soon drawn to the more conventional and inclusive form of theatre provided by the University’s Footlights Society. He continued to find elements of interest in his studies (and was particularly impressed by the teachings of Brian King, an unusually progressive Lecturer in Jurisprudence, who brought a more worldly, sociological and psychological perspective to how laws actually work in practical reality19), but, increasingly, it would be the Footlights that consumed most of his time. It was here, along with such talented contemporaries as future Pythons John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, and Goodies Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, as well as future director Richard Eyre, writer/actor Tony Hendra and producers David Hatch and Humphrey Barclay, that Lynn first explored his potential both as a writer and performer.

  It was certainly propitious that he was based at Pembroke, because, in those days, the place had acquired the informal name of ‘the comedy college’. The huge influence of its most precociously talented alumnus Peter Cook, who had graduated in 1960 and immediately gone on to find n
ational fame as part of the Beyond the Fringe quartet, remained rich and widespread in Cambridge when Lynn, along with his friend Eric Idle, performed a sketch together at a Pembroke ‘smoker’ (an annual revue that served as a showcase for new talent), which led in turn to a reprise at a Footlights smoker and earned them entry into the University’s broadest-based comedy troupe.

  There was no instant impact: at the end of Lynn’s second year as a student, his first contribution to a Footlights revue (A Clump of Plinths), saw him limited to playing the drums (he was a keen jazz drummer) down in the orchestra pit. He did much better at the end of his third and final year, however, appearing onstage as a bona fide member of the cast in a revue entitled Stuff What Dreams Are Made Of, which also featured Graeme Garden, Eric Idle, John Cameron (later known for his work on TV and in movies as a composer and arranger), David Gooderson (an actor and director who would end up being best known for playing ‘Davros’ in Dr Who), Sue Heber-Percy, Flick Hough, Mark Lushington (who went on to serve as a union leader for the NUT in Hackney) and Guy Slater (another member who would forge a career as an actor, writer and director).

  As with so many students whose attention was distracted from their formal studies by the glare and glamour of the Footlights, Lynn ended up in the summer of 1964 underperforming academically with a disappointing Lower Second degree, and consequently abandoned the idea of a life in Law in favour of pursuing his interest in writing and performing. Jay, on the other hand, had graduated in 1952 with a flawless First and, after a couple of years of compulsory National Service in the Royal Signals (where he rose to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant), had embarked on a broadcasting career at the BBC.

  Jay would later describe his outlook during the nine years that he spent working in talks and current affairs at the Corporation as that of ‘a card-carrying media liberal’,20 and, according to his own recollections, such an outlook was fast becoming the norm in Britain’s metropolitan culture. He was part of a new generation of young writers, editors, producers and reporters who, having grown up during an era defined by a world war, in a country ruled by censorship, identity cards, rationing and relentless regimentation, were now, as adults, eager for greater freedom and deeply suspicious of those who seemed content with the status quo.