A Very Courageous Decision
Page 30
The episode focused on a radical plan, proposed by Dr Thorne, the Minister of State for the Department of Health and Social Security, to eliminate smoking. The phased plan to achieve this involved, first, a complete ban on all forms of tobacco sponsorship and advertising, even at the point of sale; second, Government investment in anti-smoking publicity; third, a ban on smoking in all public spaces; and, fourth, a series of progressive, deterrent tax rises over the course of the next five years until a packet of cigarettes cost about as much as a bottle of whisky.
Hacker is stunned by this proposal. Although he assures his Minister that he is sympathetic to the intention, he urges him to be realistic. The Treasury would only say that smoking brings in about £4 billion in revenue every year – roughly a third of the NHS’ funds – and so the Government cannot manage without it. ‘You can’t beat the Treasury,’ says Hacker solemnly.
Then he has an idea. It is a devious idea, rather than a noble one, but it excites him. He will let his idealistic Health Minister press on with his campaign, because, he reasons, it will make the Treasury come to see his own unpopular plan – to use some of the savings from his ‘Grand Design’ for a £1.5 billion tax cut (which will win Hacker ‘masses of votes’) – as far less unpalatable than the prospect of throwing away £4 billion a year by abandoning the tobacco industry.
Sir Humphrey, when he hears of Hacker’s supposed willingness to back the Health Minister’s demands, is greatly distressed. ‘No man in his right mind could possibly contemplate such a proposal,’ he exclaims. The Prime Minister, however, cites the estimated one hundred thousand deaths each year that stem from smoking, and insists that he is right behind the plan:
HACKER:
Smoking-related diseases cost the NHS 165 million pounds a year!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Yes, but we’ve been into that. It has been shown that if those extra one hundred thousand people had lived to a ripe old age, they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment! So financially speaking, it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate!
HACKER:
When cholera killed thirty thousand people in 1833, we got the Public Health Act. When smog killed two and a half thousand people in 1952, we got the Clean Air Act. A commercial drug kills half a dozen people and we get it withdrawn from sale. Cigarettes kill a hundred thousand people a year. And what do we get?
SIR HUMPHREY:
Four billion pounds a year. And twenty-five thousand jobs in the tobacco industry, a flourishing cigarette export business helping our balance of trade, two hundred and fifty thousand jobs related to tobacco in newsagents, packaging, transport––
HACKER:
Oh, these figures are just guesses!
SIR HUMPHREY:
No, they’re Government statis … They’re facts!
HACKER:
Oh, I see. So your statistics are facts and my facts are merely statistics!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Prime Minister, I’m on your side! I’m merely giving you some of the arguments that you will encounter!
HACKER:
Thank you, Humphrey, I’m so glad to know we will have support such as yours!
SIR HUMPHREY:
But Prime Minister, it will be pointed out that the tobacco companies are great sponsors of sport. Now, where would the BBC sports programmes be if cigarette companies couldn’t advertise – er, couldn’t sponsor – the events that they televise?
HACKER:
Humphrey, we are talking about one hundred thousand deaths a year!
SIR HUMPHREY:
Yes, but cigarette taxes pay for a third of the cost of the National Health Service. We’re saving many more lives than we otherwise could because of those smokers who voluntarily lay down their lives for their friends. Smokers are national benefactors!
Having endured Sir Humphrey’s predictable protestations, Hacker then has to put up with an unsolicited intervention from his Minister for Sport, a chronically coughing member of the tobacco lobby, who warns the Prime Minister that this plan will not only damage sporting events but will also affect voting at many marginal seats that are stuffed full of workers in the tobacco industry. Hacker, however, who is impatient to pursue his own deviously dirty-handed scheme, brushes all such complaints aside and presses on with the pose.
Sir Humphrey, meanwhile, is frustrated to find that nothing looks likely to stop what he believes is a moral campaign. He could try the old ‘we don’t want a Nanny State’ conceit, he notes, but then rejects that on the grounds that it could just as easily be used for legalising the sale of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, arsenic and gelignite. He does try to embarrass Hacker by reminding him that, in the past, he has been the willing recipient of a great amount of VIP hospitality at tobacco company-sponsored sporting and cultural events, but even this fails to deflect the PM from his apparent course of action. ‘I’ve had drinks at the Soviet embassy,’ he observes calmly, ‘that doesn’t make me a Russian spy!’
It is at this point that Hacker, sensing that Sir Humphrey has, for once, run out of ways to frustrate him, seizes his moment and cuts to the chase. Reminding Sir Humphrey that the Treasury is not only blocking the Health Minister’s calamitously expensive plan but also his own far more modest one-off tax cut, the Cabinet Secretary takes the hint and departs to make some calls and pull some strings.
It does not take long for Sir Humphrey to return from the Treasury with the good news that, with the proviso that the anti-smoking policy is shelved, the tax cut can go through. The ruse has worked.
The only problem now is to find a way to stop the Health Minister from resigning in protest at this cynical betrayal, but Hacker solves that by promising him that his plans have only been temporarily postponed, and then promotes him away from trouble to a vacancy in the Treasury. He then selects the one person who can be trusted to take over as Minister for Health and drop the plans for good: the tobacco-addicted Sports Minister.
Antony Jay had drawn some inspiration for the theme by talking informally to Kenneth Clarke, who at the time was nearing the end of his very eventful spell as Minister of State for Health (he would soon be made both Paymaster General and Employment Minister).17 Clarke, notoriously, was an improbable-looking champion of issues relating to health, not only because of his tabloid image as a doughty trencherman with a fondness for cigars, beer and spirits, but also because of his increasingly close ties with the tobacco industry (he would become Deputy Chairman of British American Tobacco in 1997). ‘I can’t remember whether I gave him any brilliant ideas,’ he would say of his meeting with Jay, but he did admit that, after this episode had been broadcast, many people asked him if he was the model for the wheezing, chain-smoking Sports Minister, and he acknowledged that some of the on-screen conversations ‘were remarkably similar to the exchanges I was having with my own officials’.18
It was this mischievous association that aroused most interest at the time, causing plenty of amusement within Westminster, but it would be the broader theme itself that, with the benefit of hindsight, would seem more intriguing to those who watched the episode again in later years. Back in 1986, the sense that the idealistic Health Minister’s plan was doomed to failure was hard to resist, because, as the story suggested, the tobacco lobby was very strong and the revenue the industry generated continued to dazzle the Treasury (indeed, just one day after the episode was broadcast, an MP commented in the Commons: ‘Anyone who watched Yes, Prime Minister last night will have seen a programme which, in jest but also in all seriousness, showed the difficulty of introducing anti-smoking legislation, bearing in mind vested interests, electoral consequences, loss of taxation revenue and other issues’19). Eventually, however, the mood began to change, and, slowly but surely, the fictional plan started to be imitated by the facts.
The Health Minister in the sitcom had demanded a complete ban on all forms of tobacco sponsorship and advertising, even at the
point of sale. In reality, following the passing of the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act (2002), advertising in the press and on billboards was outlawed from February 2003, followed later the same year by a ban on sponsorship of UK sporting events. Further bans, on certain adverts in tobacconists and large adverts in pubs, clubs and shops, followed in 2004. The Health Act of 2009, together with regulations made under the Act, enabled further restrictions on tobacco sales and advertising. The Department of Health then announced that cigarettes and other products would have to be kept under the counter from 2012 for large stores and 2015 for small shops.
The second demand in the sitcom was for Government investment in anti-smoking publicity. In 2003, the British Government committed itself to investing £31 million in a succession of national anti-smoking campaigns. The European Commission followed this in 2005 with the launch of its Help campaign, targeting all Europeans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four through national media, television and web-based campaigns.
The third demand was for a ban on smoking in all public spaces. Just nine months after the episode was first broadcast, a Private Member’s Bill, sponsored by Joe Ashton MP, aimed at creating no-smoking areas in pubs, received its first reading in Parliament.20 Several more Private Members’ Bills on more or less the same subject were launched and debated over the course of the next few years. ‘Choosing Health’, a Government White Paper proposing a smoking ban in almost all public places in England and Wales, was published in 2004, and, in July 2007, a formal ban finally came into force.21
The fourth demand was for a series of progressive, deterrent tax rises. Between 1991 and 2001, the proportion of tax in the retail price of cigarettes rose from 73 per cent to 80 per cent, thanks in part to the introduction of a tobacco duty ‘escalator’ in the autumn 1993 Budget, whereby the Government committed itself to raising tobacco duties by at least 3 per cent per year in real terms.22
There was one sign of stubborn resistance: the price of a packet of cigarettes would continue to be considerably cheaper than that of a bottle of whisky. In every other way, however, the proposals made in a British sitcom had been turned into a reality, during the course of a couple of decades or so, by the British Government.
It is a strangely ironic experience, therefore, to witness, with the benefit of hindsight, the moment when Sir Humphrey first hears of these plans in the episode back in January 1986:
SIR HUMPHREY:
I was just wondering if you had an interesting chat with Dr Thorne?
HACKER:
Yes. He proposed the elimination of smoking.
SIR HUMPHREY:
[Erupts with laughter] By a campaign of mass hypnosis perhaps?
The studio audience joined Sir Humphrey in his loudly incredulous laughter. The whole proposal seemed absurd. Things, however, have changed, and that response, from this distance, now sounds quite hollow.
11
Series Two
There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others – birds, wild flowers, and Prime Ministers.
The pressure on Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn was immense as they worked on their next set of scripts. It was clear that, by this time, they were not just writing a sitcom. They were writing something that had become a genuine national institution.
The references to Yes, Prime Minister, during and after its first series, were striking in their ubiquity. MPs, the vast majority of whom watched the show religiously, were instinctively associating all kinds of real-life issues and events with the stories playing out on screen: ‘We are in danger of being overtaken by events in the form of the popular television programme Yes, Prime Minister’ (Robert Key)1; ‘That seems to have been written by a scriptwriter for Yes, Prime Minister’ (Lord Morton of Shuna)2; ‘There are of course some civil servants who want to have things all their own way, on the pattern of Yes, Prime Minister’ (Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos)3; ‘This is a matter for a connoisseur of Yes, Prime Minister’ (Denis Healey)4; ‘My honourable friend does not seriously imagine, does he, that Ministers write regulations? If so, he has not watched Yes, Prime Minister with sufficient perspicacity’ (Sir Nicholas Fairbairn)5; ‘I suspect that the whole elaborate bureaucratic farce would do credit to the authors of Yes, Prime Minister (John Home Robertson)6; ‘I cannot help but recall the series Yes, Prime Minister, which many of your Lordships will have seen on television’ (The Earl of Perth)7; and ‘I was wondering whether, if the BBC, which produces the programme Yes, Prime Minister, were to come along and ask you whether it could have a copy of the script of today’s events you would feel that it was a little over the top?’(Dennis Skinner).8
It was much the same in various countries overseas. When, for example, Margaret Thatcher arrived in Israel in May 1986 for an official visit, it was reported that the President, Chaim Herzog, joked that her arrival had finally convinced the Israeli people, who were avid viewers of Yes, Prime Minister, that ‘the name is not Hacker, but Thatcher’.9 The following year, when Paul Eddington was working in Australia shortly before the Federal Election, the incumbent Prime Minister, Bob Hawke (who had already staged a photo stunt in which he was shown wrestling ‘Hacker’ for possession of his seat in Parliament House), invited him along to a rally and said to the crowd, ‘You don’t want to listen to me, you want to listen to the real Prime Minister’, and then left the actor to improvise a Jim Hacker speech.10
‘They really did treat him like that everywhere he went,’ Derek Fowlds would recall. ‘I was in Australia with Paul when we were both working there in separate plays, and we often used to go around together and be interviewed about Yes, Prime Minister because the show was such a big hit there, and, seeing how they responded to him, I’d always walk behind him on those occasions, just like Bernard, and open doors for him. I think he liked that!’11
Paul Eddington was, indeed, by this time getting so used to being welcomed to other countries as if he genuinely was a political VIP (such as when he was invited to breakfast with the Prime Minister of Norway and lunch with Denmark’s Minister for Culture12), that he had grown increasingly sympathetic to, and protective of, his on-screen alter ego. ‘I am often asked if I base Hacker on a real person,’ he told reporters. ‘The answer is I do. That person is myself. He is as vain and greedy and easily swayed as I am. The main difference is that Hacker can bend to his civil servants. I lack his flexibility and for that reason would never make a successful politician.’13
It was this sense of personal investment, and professional pride, in his portrayal that had come to cause a certain amount of unacknowledged discomfort for his co-star Nigel Hawthorne. For all of Eddington’s brilliance as Hacker, capturing perfectly that deceptively complex and nervy mixture of cloudy idealism and earthbound pragmatism, he had been overlooked for the most prestigious acting awards time and again in favour of his supposed supporting (and thus less handsomely remunerated) colleague. Eddington himself was far too decent and gracious a man to complain about this, but Hawthorne had come to feel distinctly embarrassed by the ‘Hawthorne beats Eddington’ reports that greeted the announcement of each new list of BAFTA winners.
Although they remained very different people, with very different interests and dispositions, they had grown into a working relationship together that was not only exceptionally effective but also warm and mutually respectful. It therefore genuinely upset Hawthorne to think that any personal success was coming at his colleague’s expense. ‘It was unfortunate,’ he would say of the BAFTA awards, ‘that we should both have been selected for the same category [Best Light Entertainment Performance]; we were a team and should never have been put in competition.’14
‘Paul was upset that Nigel won the BAFTAs and he didn’t,’ Derek Fowlds would confirm. ‘He was totally brilliant as Hacker, and yet he was never acknowledged in the way that Nigel was. He used to say to me, “Why does Nigel always win?” And I just used to say, “Because he’s got longer speeches than you!”’15
Hawthorne, by this stage, had beat
en Eddington to the award on no fewer than three separate occasions, and was destined to do so once again. It was a fact that diminished the pleasure he could, and should, have taken from such public recognition. ‘I knew how desperate he was to get the award,’ he later reflected, ‘so it became increasingly difficult to know what to say to him.’16
It therefore came as something of a relief when, for once, they achieved parity in terms of the regalia of fame. In the New Year’s Honours List of 1987, both Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington were awarded the CBE for services to drama. The latter was working in Australia at the time, and when he went to Melbourne Airport to greet his wife, who had flown over to celebrate, he was mobbed by the media. It meant a great deal to him, and when, later that day, he joined Nigel Hawthorne ‘down the line’ for a BBC radio interview back in Britain, there was a palpable sense of camaraderie and real delight in each other’s achievement.
Thus the atmosphere was better than ever when the two of them, along with Derek Fowlds, were reunited in the autumn – after being awarded a modest pay rise (‘It had always gone up very, very slowly,’ Derek Fowlds would recall. ‘By the time we finished, the boys were on £3,000 an episode, and I was on £2,000’17) – to rehearse the second series of Yes, Prime Minister. They knew that, in all probability, this was going to be the final outing for the show. Nothing had been announced publicly, and internally nothing had been decided definitively, but this series would complete the deal that Jay and Lynn had agreed with Bill Cotton (who in any case was about to retire from the BBC), and the writers already felt that the time was probably right for the sitcom to bow out. It was also recognised, privately, that Paul Eddington’s health was deteriorating (he would seldom be seen, for this reason, moving from behind his desk), which only added to the feeling that this was the most prudent moment to bring things to a close.