36 See Plutarch, Greek Lives trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 150–1.
37 Thomas Hobbes, Part 1, Chapter 4, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 28–9.
38 Ibid. ‘A Review, and Conclusion’, p. 483.
39 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book III, Chapter 10, par. 34 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 508.
40 George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), in Why I Write (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 116.
41 The classic discussion of this topic is generally seen as being Michael Walzer’s essay ‘Political Action: The problem of Dirty Hands’, first published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2, Winter 1973, pp. 160–80.
42 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mains Sales, 1948, translated as Dirty Hands in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 224.
43 In Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now (a biting critique of the corruption of late-Victorian morals), one of its central characters, the shamelessly shallow Lady Carbury, asserts her conviction that the praiseworthy deeds of the powerful escape the normal categories of morality: ‘If a thing can be made great and beneficent, a boon to humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a benefactor to his race by creating that belief?’ When accused of being ‘an excellent casuist’ in the defence of her position, she responds by describing herself as ‘an enthusiastic lover of beneficent audacity’. See The Way We Live Now (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2001), p. 227.
44 Immanuel Kant, First Section, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 15: ‘[A]n action from duty has its moral worth not in the aim that is supposed to be attained by it, but rather in the maxim in accordance with which it is resolved upon; thus that worth depends not on the actuality of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of the volition, in accordance with which the action is done, without regard to any object of the faculty of desire.’
45 See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter II, in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 137: ‘[A]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the opposite of happiness.’
46 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 171: ‘Pluralism [unlike either deontology or utilitarianism] does, at least, recognise that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform.’ See also Thomas Nagel, ‘Ruthlessness in Public Life’, in Mortal Thoughts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Bernard Williams, ‘Ethical Consistency’, in Christopher Gowans, ed., Moral Dilemmas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
47 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), eds Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter XV, ‘The things for which men, and especially rulers, are praised or blamed’, pp. 54–5.
PART ONE
Header quotation: John Godfrey Saxe, in a lecture cited by The University Chronicle (Michigan), 27 March 1869, p. 4. The saying is often wrongly attributed to Otto von Bismarck.
1 The Writers
Header quotation: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 78c.
1 Daily Express, 25 January 1963, p. 8.
2 Hansard, HC Deb. 27 October 1955, vol. 545 c. 51W.
3 R.A. Butler, Hansard, HC Deb. 16 March 1961, vol. 636 c. 1412W.
4 Sir Frank Soskice, Hansard, HC Deb. 15 June 1961, vol. 642 cc. 698–702.
5 Wilson made this clear, shortly after becoming Leader of the Labour Party, in a speech at the annual meeting of the Society of Labour Lawyers. See also the report in The Times, 21 April 1964, p. 10, and the reminiscence in Tony Benn’s Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963–1967 (London: Arrow, 1987), p. 36.
6 Sir Frank Soskice, speaking in the House of Commons on 4 February 1965 (see Hansard, HC Deb. 04 February 1965, vol. 705 cc. 1256–7), also quoted by the Daily Mirror, 5 February 1965, p. 2 and 5 November 1965, p. 1.
7 Hansard, HC Deb. 04 February 1965, vol. 705 c. 1257.
8 Norman St John-Stevas, Catholic Herald, 4 June 1985, p. 4.
9 Ian Gilmour, Hansard, HC Deb. 4 February 1965, vol. 705 c. 1257.
10 Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 175. Sir Frank did eventually bow to pressure on 4 November 1965, allowing a new inquiry and granting permission to the surviving family of Timothy Evans to have his body exhumed from prison grounds and re-buried by his relations at Greenford, Middlesex. Roy Jenkins then replaced Sir Frank as Home Secretary in Harold Wilson’s first Cabinet reshuffle, in December 1965. Sir Frank was made Lord Privy Seal and in 1966, upon being made a Life Peer, took a seat in the House of Lords as Baron Stow Hill of Newport. He died in Hampstead on 1 January 1979. Soon after becoming Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins recommended a Royal Pardon for Timothy Evans, which was granted in October 1966.
11 Thomas ‘Tam’ Galbraith was a Conservative MP, Government Minister and former Civil Lord of the Admiralty who was plunged into controversy when it was discovered, in September 1962, that his former Assistant Private Secretary, an Admiralty clerk called John Vassall, was a Soviet spy. Vassall, who was homosexual, had appeared so close to the married MP that – entirely unfounded – rumours began to circulate about a possible sexual liaison between them. Encouraged by an Opposition that had raised numerous questions in the Commons about the modestly paid Vassall’s extravagant lifestyle and frequent visits both to Galbraith’s family home in London and also to his mansion in Scotland, the press, alarmed at the thought that a KGB spy had enjoyed privileged access to a Minister for several years without apparent detection, subjected both Galbraith and the Government as a whole to a prolonged investigation, designed to pressurise the powers that be into revealing the full extent of a presumed cover-up. Vassall had already been tried and sentenced to eighteen years in jail, but Galbraith, eventually, resigned from office, insisting on his innocence from any wrongdoing but admitting that his continuing presence in the Cabinet had become an embarrassment. The controversy, however, showed no signs of abating, with the press searching for more officials who might have been implicated. Rattled by the affair and furious with Fleet Street, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, set up an independent inquiry, which, much to the anger of the media, ended up being just as critical of the press as it was of politicians and civil servants, and, in the bitter fallout, two journalists were sent to prison for refusing to reveal their sources. (See The Times, 26 April 1963, p. 18 and C. Andrew and O. Gordievsky, KGB: The inside Story of its foreign operations, from Lenin to Gorbachev [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990]).
12 On 12–13 July 1962, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, reacting with what he later admitted was panic over the poor performance of his Government, dismissed, or accepted the resignations of, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and six other Cabinet members, followed by numerous junior ministers. It was the most extensive reconstruction of a Cabinet by a Prime Minister since Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, but, on this occasion, it failed to have a positive effect. Macmillan’s Conservative Party was confused, the public unimpressed and the Labour Opposition greatly encouraged. (See Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day [London: Macmillan, 1973], p. 92.)
13 The Conservative MP John Profumo was Secretary of State for War when, in July 1961, he began a clandestine relationship with a young model and ‘occasional prostitute’ named Christine Keeler. Although, as both a married man
and a Government Minister, he soon realised the damage that would be done if the affair was ever exposed, his decision to end it after a few weeks failed to prevent it from being uncovered by the press, and Profumo then found himself caught up in a controversy. Soon after, however, another rumour surfaced, suggesting that Keeler had also had a relationship with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London at the height of the Cold War, and, as a consequence, the size of the controversy thus suddenly grew from being merely a personal embarrassment into a full-blown national scandal. When pressed in private by Government officials to answer the allegations, Profumo vehemently protested his innocence and vowed to sue all of his accusers for libel. The story, however, refused to go away, and it was decided that Profumo would have to make a public denial in Parliament. The Minister duly stood up in the Commons on 22 March 1963 and, in a blatant lie, insisted that there had been ‘no impropriety whatsoever’ in his ‘acquaintanceship’ with Christine Keeler, and he repeated his threat ‘to issue writs for libel and slander if scandalous allegations are made or repeated outside the House’. The sense of doubt and unrest, however, continued both in Parliament and in the media, and, on 29 May, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan finally acceded to a demand for an inquiry into the matter. On 31 May, Profumo and his wife left for a holiday in Venice, where he confessed to her that he had indeed had an affair with Keeler. She advised him to return home at once and come clean – which he did. In his letter of resignation from the Government on 4 June, he admitted his lie, apologised, and said that he had lied ‘to protect, as I thought, my wife and family’. He also stood down from his seat in the House of Commons, after which he dedicated himself for the rest of his life to doing good works, eventually receiving a CBE for his efforts in 1975. He died on 9 March 2006. (See Hansard, HC Deb. 22 March 1963, vol. 674 cc. 809–10 and HC Deb 17 June 1963, vol. 679 cc 34–176, and David Profumo, Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir [London: John Murray, 2006]).
14 When Harold Macmillan’s health deteriorated to the extent that, in October 1963, he decided to step down as Prime Minister, the 14th Earl of Home, who had been serving the Government from the House of Lords as Foreign Secretary, emerged after some widely reported infighting as his surprise successor. As it was, by this stage, deemed to be against constitutional convention (though not against the law) for a Prime Minister to be a member of the House of Lords (the last person to have been so was the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who resigned in 1902), the hunting, fishing, shooting aristocrat Home made use of the 1963 Peerage Act – which, ironically, had been prompted when a Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, had been denied his current seat in the Commons when on 17 November 1960 he inherited his father’s hereditary peerage and became, overnight and profoundly reluctantly, the second Viscount Stansgate. After a very public campaign by Benn and the Labour Opposition to change the law, the Conservative Government finally agreed to introduce the Peerage Bill in 1963, which would allow individuals to disclaim their peerages for their lifetime. Once passed into law on 31 July of that year, Benn was the first peer to make use of the Act, and (after the man who replaced him in the Commons, the Conservative Malcolm St Clair, stood down as a matter of principle) he was subsequently re-elected as an MP. It was therefore considered ironic when one of the next high-profile figures to follow suit was the Earl of Home, who gave up all of his hereditary titles (the Earldom of Home, the Lordship of Dunglass, the Lordship of Home, the Lordship of Home of Berwick, the Barony of Douglas and the Barony of Home of Berwick) became Sir Alec Douglas-Home, stood successfully for election to the Commons in the safe and vacant Conservative seat of Kinross and West Perthshire, and entered the Commons as the new Prime Minister. Defeated at the October General Election of 1964, he resigned as Leader of the Conservative Party in 1965 and was replaced by Edward Heath, but remained an MP for another nine years. On leaving the Commons in 1974, he returned to the House of Lords when (under the rules set out in the 1958 Life Peerages Act – another law that he had shown little interest in supporting) he accepted a life peerage, becoming known as Baron Home of the Hirsel, of Coldstream in the County of Berwick. (See the Daily Express, 24 November 1960, p. 1 and 18 October 1964, p. 10, and the Daily Mirror, 24 July 1965, p. 6.)
15 Jonathan Lynn, Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), pp. 31–2.
16 Jonathan Lynn, quoted in Michael David Kandiah (1994), ‘Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister (2): Jonathan Lynn’, Contemporary Record, 8:3, p. 525.
17 Antony Jay, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
18 Antony Jay, Management and Machiavelli (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 19.
19 Jonathan Lynn would say of Brian King’s teaching: ‘He did not define law as a system of rules, which was how most people defined it. Rules are not necessarily effective, he argued, and therefore not real rules unless society agrees to honour them. So a legal system is in reality, he said, a system of norms. International law, so-called, exemplifies this view’ (interview with the author, 1 February 2014).
20 Antony Jay, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 2007), p. 2.
21 Donald Baverstock, explaining the moral quality of the Tonight programme, wrote: ‘Little things, [for example] where you put on a man you think is dishonest and he’s made some witty remarks and the interviewer may have smiled in the middle and enjoyed it. You feel that’s slightly immoral because you have endorsed this man’s successful hypocritical projection of himself,’ quoted by Grace Wyndham Goldie, Facing the Nation: Television & Politics 1936–76 (London: The Bodley Head, 1977), p. 215.
22 Wyndham Goldie, Facing the Nation, p. 214.
23 Jay, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, p. 1.
24 Terry Jones, quoted by Kim Johnson, Life Before and After Monty Python (London: Plexus, 1993), p. 37.
25 The episode of Doctor at Large was called ‘Pull the Other One’ and was first broadcast on LWT on 1 August 1971.
26 Lynn later acknowledged (Comedy Rules, p. 74) that his usual writing partner of the time, George Layton, ‘had always been willing to go along with my satirical ideas, although temperamentally he was, I think, more in tune with [producer Humphrey Barclay’s] cosier approach.’
27 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 78.
28 The most common criminology case study, on this topic, that was taught in Lynn’s days at Cambridge would have been Johannes Lange’s classic 1929 study of identical ‘monozygotic’ (MZ) and fraternal ‘dizygotic’ (DZ) twins. Thirteen pairs of MZ twins and seventeen DZ pairs were studied with regard to variety of ‘criminal indicators’, such as having a criminal record. The MZ twins had a concordance rate of 77 per cent compared to just 12 per cent of the DZ twins. This suggested strongly, in the context of the traditional ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, that there is a genetic element in criminality. As subsequent critiques pointed out, however, the sample sizes were very small, and the contentious nature of the findings thus inspired countless other experiments and studies in this area over the course of the next few decades. See Johannes Lange, Crime as Destiny (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929).
29 Jonathan Lynn, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
30 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 78.
31 See The Times, 18 May 1973, p. 28.
32 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 81.
33 Who Sold You This, Then? won a Gold Award at the 1973 British Sponsored Film Festival.
34 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 82.
35 Antony Jay, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
36 Ernest Jay was an actor whose best-known performances included such movies as The House of the Spaniard (1936), O.H.M.S. (1937), Top Secret (1952), Grand National Night (1953) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while a certain generation of children would forever associate him more readily with the voice of Larry the Lamb’s mischievous companion Dennis the Dachshund in BBC radio’s long-running Toytown series.
37
Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 97.
38 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 83.
39 Antony Jay, speaking in Comedy Connections, series six, episode two: Yes Minister, first broadcast on BBC1 on 25 July 2008.
40 The transcript of Barbara Castle’s speech was published (belatedly) in the Sunday Times, under the title ‘Mandarin Power’, on 10 June 1973, pp. 17–19.
41 See, for example, the Guardian, 14 January 1974, p. 9.
42 Antony Jay, quoted by Michael White, ‘Men Behind the Ministry’, Radio Times, 21–7 February 1981, p. 6.
43 Antony Jay, quoted in Michael David Kandiah (1994), ‘Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister (1): Sir Antony Jay, CVO’, Contemporary Record, 8:3, p. 507.
2 The Situation
Header quotation: Lord Winchilsea, writing in 1875 on the occasion of the posthumous publication of Charles Greville’s notoriously indiscreet diaries about the political affairs that he had observed at close hand while serving as Clerk to the Privy Council.
1 Antony Jay, speaking in Comedy Connections, series six, episode two: Yes Minister, first broadcast on BBC1 on 25 July 2008.
2 Jonathan Lynn, speaking in Comedy Connections, series six, episode two: Yes Minister, first broadcast on BBC1 on 25 July 2008.
3 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 83.
4 Antony Jay, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
5 Antony Jay worked as series editor on A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers, a thirteen-part series in which Harold Wilson looked back at some of his predecessors and contemporaries at Number Ten. Made by Yorkshire TV, it was broadcast by ITV from 11 May 1977 to 22 February 1978.
6 Quoted by Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 95.
7 Ibid. p. 96.
8 Quoted by Michael White, ‘Men Behind the Ministry’, Radio Times, 21 to 27 February 1981, p. 6.
9 Lynn, Comedy Rules, p. 96.
A Very Courageous Decision Page 40