A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  It was at this time, during a break from writing, that Jay began to reminisce with Lynn about one of the strongest and sharpest political memories they shared: that extraordinary moment, about a decade before, when Sir Frank Soskice stood up in the House of Commons and dismissed the demands of Sir Frank Soskice. They laughed again about the absurdity of the saga, and were further amused when they reflected on the fact that, soon after, Sir Frank was rewarded for his troubles by being elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Stow Hill of Newport.

  Warming to the subject, Jay then proceeded to tell Lynn other stories he had heard about the various ways that politicians, once they became drawn deep into Whitehall’s maw, had their plans rethought or thwarted. He talked, for example, about a memorably candid lecture that the redoubtable Labour MP Barbara Castle had given at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in 1972, bemoaning all of the problems that she had encountered, when Secretary of State for Transport, with her Department’s Permanent Secretary, and warning that the Civil Service (‘the best spying organisation I have ever known’) had now become ‘a state within a state’.40 He also recounted the various recent broadsides that Castle’s colleague, Tony Benn, had fired at Britain’s unelected bureaucracy for having the effrontery to undermine the plans of its elected representatives.41 It was through thinking about such things, Jay said, that he had come to the realisation that ‘there was something called “Ministry policy” which was not the Minister’s policy’,42 and that, as a consequence, he now saw ‘the conflict between the politicians in government and the civil servants as being far more interesting and far less understood in Britain than the conflict between Government and the Opposition’.43

  Jay then went further, and told Lynn that he found this dynamic so intriguing, so revealing and so rich in satirical potential, that it had given him an idea. It had given him an idea for a sitcom.

  2

  The Situation

  For fifty years he listened at the door. He heard some secrets and invented more. These he wrote down, and women, statesmen, kings, Became degraded into common things.

  Antony Jay’s idea for a sitcom concerned ‘the corridors of power’.1 It would be set in Whitehall, in a typical Ministerial Department, and would feature the chronic tug of war between a leading politician and a senior civil servant. Illuminating what had hitherto been secreted deep in the system’s Stygian gloom, this sitcom would be different, revealing, controversial and, potentially, very, very funny.

  There was only one problem. Jonathan Lynn did not want to do it: ‘I thought that was really the most boring suggestion that had come my way for a long time,’ he later explained.2 ‘Furthermore, I had just renounced sitcom writing. I told him I wasn’t interested’.3 That, it appeared, was that. Jay, for all his polymathic capacities, had no experience of writing a situation comedy, nor, on his own, did he feel confident about attempting to create one, and so, reluctantly, he shelved the idea and got on with his other projects, while, quite amicably, Lynn went off to concentrate on his new role at the Cambridge Theatre Company.

  The idea, however, did not fade away. As various new political stories came and went, Jay could not stop wondering how they might have been covered in his sitcom. Lynn, meanwhile, recharged his batteries through his stage work, and, slowly but surely, started having second thoughts.

  The two men got back in touch with each other early in 1977. Both of them agreed that, on reflection, this was indeed an idea that merited further consideration.

  Why did Lynn now want to pursue it? The answer, he had realised, in a cool hour, was that he had unfinished business as a writer of sitcoms. Once he had stopped obsessing over what had gone wrong with his previous efforts, and once (after overseeing other writers’ work in the theatre) he had regained some of the old hunger to write something himself, he realised that Jay’s idea might be worth reappraising.

  This time, the conversation was positive. They reacquainted each other with the basic premise, played around with possible options and reflected on real-life inspirations. The case of Sir Frank Soskice came up again, inevitably, as did a few more recent examples of politicians being caught with their hands looking distinctly dirty. Jay also related some of his memories of working with political guests during his early days at the BBC in Current Affairs (‘I realised how much difference there was between the way politicians spoke on air – as if they were responsible for everything – and the fact that behind the scenes they were constantly turning to their Private Secretary and asking, “What’s the answer to this?’”4) as well as the moans and groans about the struggles between political and bureaucratic officials that he was hearing while working with the recently retired Harold Wilson on his forthcoming television series, A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers.5 Reflecting on the obvious comic potential that lurked in such anecdotes, the pair of them laughed at the enduring truth of Will Rogers’ old saying: ‘There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you’.6

  Eagerly expanding on his theme, Jay talked more about the work that now went on in Whitehall instead of Westminster, and how the real discussions, debates and decisions were made there, behind closed doors, rather than out in the playhouse of Parliament as such. The power of the sitcom, therefore, would come from the fact that it would, in effect, be taking the audience behind the curtain, backstage, to show them what goes on in rehearsal before each polished political performance is put on.

  It would not only peel off all the masks and show politicians in a different, and far more realistic, light. It would also, Jay insisted, finally show civil servants as they really were, as individuals, as a community, in situ, behind the familiar but hopelessly old-fashioned caricature.

  This was something that seemed particularly pertinent, as far as the novelty of the proposed sitcom was concerned. Up to this point, as Lynn would acknowledge, ‘All comedy shows that featured civil servants portrayed them as boring people who wore bowler hats and drank a lot of tea’.7 Jay, though, was determined to change that perception once and for all. Having served on a government committee (and seen, next to one of his own suggestions, the word ‘RESIST’ underlined twice in sober mandarin handwriting8), he had first-hand knowledge of who these people were, how they acted and interacted, not only with each other but also with politicians. ‘He had drafted part of the Annan Report,’ Lynn noted, ‘and after working with some senior civil servants he knew that the popular image of them was false.’9

  It was this drive for accuracy as well as comedy, this conviction that the humour would be rooted in the truth, that most excited the two writers. This was going to be a sitcom very different from the normal formulaic fare. It was going to be about insight instead of escapism; a fiction founded on fact.

  As a consequence, the first step would be to do some serious research to get the details right. Jay knew some tantalising bits and pieces, but to write a proper sitcom, to structure a series of episodes, they would have to dig deeper, court some insiders and piece together the bigger picture.

  In this sense, it was their good fortune that an exceptionally rich, vivid and informative source had recently emerged in the public domain. Richard Crossman, a Labour Party politician and former Minister (who first served in the Cabinet at the same time as Sir Frank Soskice), had been a lifelong opponent of his country’s culture of secrecy, and of the multiple means whereby information was withheld from the masses in order to keep the demon of democracy safely at bay. In a principled act of rebellion, therefore, he had broken the Cabinet code of omertà and bequeathed to the nation an insider’s account of the workings of British politics.

  Since 1951, as a backbench MP and then as a Cabinet Minister during the second half of the 1960s, he had religiously recorded his experiences in a series of diaries. A disciple of Walter Bagehot (whom he hailed as ‘the only Englishman who saw right through our politics without losing faith in freedom’10), his original intention had been to use the material selectively and reasonab
ly discreetly as a source not only for his memoirs but also as the basis of a twentieth-century version of Bagehot’s 1867 classic, The English Constitution. By the early 1970s, however, when his health was failing rapidly and he realised that such projects were now beyond him, he changed his mind and resolved instead to publish the diaries as they were, in order to provide the public with ‘a daily picture of how a Minister of the Wilson Government spent his time, exactly what he did in his Department, in Cabinet Committee and in Cabinet itself, and … outside his office’. It would, he vowed, be ‘a true record of how one Minister thought and felt’ and would thus be of ‘quite special historical value’.11

  Crossman died in April 1974 at the age of sixty-six, but plans for the publication went ahead – much to the horror of the British political Establishment, which proceeded to do all it could to stifle the spilling of its secrets. Advance excerpts, scheduled to appear in The Sunday Times during the autumn of 1974, were delayed repeatedly by the Cabinet Office (which had insisted on assessing the proofs, extremely slowly, for possible breaches of confidentiality), and the publication date for the first of three intended volumes was also pushed back indefinitely due to various legal objections and veiled threats. Eventually, on 1 October 1975, after endless debates in Parliament and the press, the Lord Chief Justice brought the high-profile saga to an end when he refused to grant the Attorney General an injunction to prevent publication, ruling that an outright ban would not be in the public interest, and, at long last, the books began to appear.12

  The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975, 1976 and 1977) had very much the great impact that Crossman had expected and many of his former colleagues had feared, demystifying Cabinet government to an unprecedented extent and inviting the public not only to reflect on all the stories of unseemly political infighting but also, and more importantly, to consider the hitherto largely hidden influence of the Civil Service. The reviewers duly hailed the diaries as ‘a plain man’s guide to the political jungle’,13 bringing out the difference ‘between the way we are governed and the way our governors wish us to suppose that we are governed’,14 and the 688-page first volume sold more than twenty-five thousand copies within weeks of its publication.15

  What immediately engaged the reader was Crossman’s vivid depiction of himself as a newly appointed Cabinet Minister in October 1964: tumbling down the Whitehall rabbit hole and finding himself dazed and confused inside an unfamiliar office that seemed ‘like a padded cell’, feeling as though he had been ‘suddenly certified a lunatic’ who was ‘cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants’.16 It was in these first few diary entries that he shared with his readers the growing realisation about ‘the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service’.17

  Uprooted and disoriented, he reflected with a mixture of awe and alarm how the venerable machinery of each Whitehall department was more than capable of rumbling on, regardless of who the latest arrival was from Westminster. The new Minister might be male or female, young or old, left wing, right wing or centrist, but the undeniable fact was that they were a transient part of a permanent process, and ‘one has only to do absolutely nothing whatsoever in order to be floated forward on the stream’.18 This view was soon reinforced by the obliging Private Secretary who assured Crossman that, in every instance, his civil servants would draft every option for his consideration and, if ever he preferred not to make a choice, all he needed to do was move everything from his in tray to his out tray ‘and if you put it in without a mark on it then we will deal with it and you need never see it again’.19

  What further focused the attention as the entries continued was the growing significance of the relationship between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary. Crossman’s first Permanent Secretary was a strikingly redoubtable woman named Dame Evelyn Sharp, who had been in the Civil Service since 1926 and, in 1955, was the first woman to have reached the highest executive position within a Ministry. Having already served and seen off four Ministers, and achieved a level of expertise in her Department’s field of responsibility (Housing and Local Government) that by this stage in her long career was probably second to none, she looked upon her latest Minister, who (fresh from a stint in Opposition as Education spokesman) had neither the experience nor the expertise to stamp his signature on his new subject, with ill-disguised disdain.

  Crossman’s initial opinion of her, in turn, was similarly negative. He described her as a ‘tremendous patrician’ who was ‘utterly contemptuous and arrogant’, treating local authorities as ‘children which she has to examine and rebuke for their failures’, most external experts as ‘utterly worthless’, the general public as ‘incapable of making a sensible decision’ and her own Minister as a lowly creature of ‘stupidity and ignorance’ who represented a threat to the efficiency of a Department that she treated like her own ‘personal domain’.20

  As a consequence, the earliest stage of Crossman’s time as Minister was marked by his chronicling the constant tension and struggles between his Permanent Secretary and himself, with his retiring at the end of each day, bloodied and bruised, to record the many times when she had failed to consult him, or furnish him with information, or blocked his access to outside advisors and alternative ideas and generally contrived, albeit very discreetly, to frustrate all of his personal schemes. Complaining bitterly of how her loyalty was obviously exclusively to the Civil Service rather than even partially to him, he ended up, after no more than a month, exclaiming to his Prime Minister: ‘I have had enough of the Dame’.21

  In time, the dynamic, and mood, began to change. She warmed, subtly, to his indefatigable commitment to certain policies, and he (after realising that she had been fighting hard to prevent their Department from being broken up and abolished) came to admire, just as subtly, her desire to do what she believed was the right thing.

  He actually started to feel a strange kind of affinity with her, acknowledging that, although both of them had started off wanting to see the back of each other, they had come, in time, to see each other as something more like kindred spirits. ‘[We] really do quite like each other,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and regard each other as exceptions to a dreary rule,’ adding that ‘we are two people who know their own value and know the other’s value’.22

  There was also a more pragmatic reason for the change of heart. Dame Evelyn, who was edging ever closer to retirement, knew that it was not in her interests to antagonise her latest Minister too acutely when her beloved Department badly needed stability. Crossman, meanwhile, realised that any sign from him to suggest that he was planning to push her out would mean that ‘the whole of Whitehall hierarchy would be against me’, as well as ‘questions in Parliament’ and ‘a hell of a row’. Moreover, he was reminded, privately but somewhat brusquely by the Head of the Civil Service, that a new Permanent Secretary would last much, much, longer than a new Minister ever would (the average was several years compared to several months23), and that it was therefore deemed far more important that any replacement should suit the Department over whoever happened to be its current Minister.24

  The result was that, until Dame Evelyn finally moved on, the two of them continued working together, while working apart, to ensure that their Department remained intact. She guided him, and sometimes manipulated him, as well as she could, while he drew on her expertise, and sometimes defeated her preconceived designs, as well as he could.

  During this uneasy truce, Crossman reflected on the routine processes that linked Whitehall with Westminster, and realised, as a consequence, how quietly effective the Civil Service was at influencing government policy. It achieved it, he believed, mainly through two basic means: first as the ‘keeper of the muniments’, and second via the imposition of a single ‘official’ view on all of the Ministers.25

  The Civil Service was keeper of the muniments in the sense that, through the Cabinet Secretariat, it not only recorded but also minuted Cabinet discussions.
This duty, quite unintentionally, bestowed on permanent officials, in Crossman’s view, an extraordinary power of discretionary prerogative. As only what was recorded ranked officially as precedent, it followed that precedent had become whatever the Civil Service chose to recognise as such.

  It also imposed its own ‘official’ view on politicians, in two intimately linked ways. First, each Permanent Secretary could work to convince his or her own Minister of a certain opinion about a policy, and then, if anything remained disputed, some discreet coordination could ensure that a ‘cohesive interdepartmental view’ would be echoed by most if not all of the other Ministers once they assembled together in Cabinet.

  First-hand experience of this deft, devious and discreet manner of manipulating the decision-making process more or less convinced Crossman, within six months or so of arriving in Whitehall, that unless an individual Minister had the full backing of the Prime Minister, or at least one of his most eminent lieutenants, ‘the chance of prevailing against the official view is absolutely nil’.26 Here, he concluded, ‘is the way in which Whitehall ensures that the Cabinet system is relatively harmless.’27

  This insight was more than enough to guide Jay and Lynn a fair distance in the right direction. It gave them an invaluably authentic model for the basic situation, dynamics and key relationship of the sitcom that they wanted to craft, and would remain an essential source of authoritative information (‘We referred continuously to it,’ Jay would confirm28).