The Complete Yes Prime Minister

PUNCH
Christmas Number 1986

"NO, PRIME MINISTER": Sir Humphrey Appleby reviews Yes, Prime Minister: The Diaries of the Rt. Hon. James Hacker MP

When I entered the civil service in the 1950s it was still possible for a man of intelligence and ingenuity to defend the thesis that politics was an honourable profession. Ministers did not divulge Cabinet proceedings. Leaking to the press was regarded as a breach of confidence, not as an instrument of government. And if a department fell down badly on a job, the minister resigned. Equally, members of civil service preserved a cloak of anonymity and a tradition of discreet silence which concealed from the rest of the country the fact that they were running it.

I state this as a preface since it may otherwise be hard to communicate to the reader the reasons why Yes Prime Minister: The Diaries of the Rt Hon James Hacker MP is so reprehensible a work (if the word "work" may appropriately be used in connection with its author). The uninstructed may gain pleasure, and believe they are being vouchsafed privileged insights, by reading these distressingly frank accounts of how the author reached his main political decisions (or, more frequently, indecisions). The style has a certain liveliness, often achieved by those without the reflective profundity to appreciate, or the intellectual apparatus to communicate, those qualifications and modifications which may make the account less readable but which render it reliable. As a result, the seeker after truth, if he is unwise enough to pick up this book at all, must be aware that any statement of Mr Hacker's may describe

a. what happened
b. what he believed happened
c. what he would like to believe happen
d. what he wanted others to believe happened
e. what he wanted others to believe he believed happened.

Taken at this level, the book may be regarded as entertaining gossip, but should not be used as source material and indeed would be better treated as fiction than history.

More important, however, than the book itself is the fact that revelations of this sort should ever be published at all. The old tradition of the responsible minister and his obedient servant is apparently transformed into a totally misleading portrait of scheming officials manipulating innocent politicians. Although those at the heart of government are aware that this is an absurd travesty, there is a danger that simple-minded souls may be deceived into believing there may be some truth in it.

Perhaps Hacker is not to blame. The rot began with the Crossman Diaries: and once one Minister reveals the secrets of the Cabinet, the others rush in to "set the record straight" which of course means so to distort events as to show themselves in a favourable light. After reading a succession of descriptions of the same period from opposed ministers, all of whom were by their own account uniformly honourable in their dealings and right in their judgments, it is hard to see where to lay the responsibility for decades of unprecedented and unrelieved political squalor.

The only scapegoat available must therefore logically be the Civil Service. This has culminated in a distressing and regrettable change in public opinion, so that the necessary role of the Civil Service in advising caution, taking soundings, consulting colleagues, examining precedents, preparing options, and advising ministers on the likely consequences of their proposals if they reached the statute books, is perceived as ingrained bureaucratic obstructiveness rather than an attempt to translate narrow political expediency into broad national benefit.

I realize that in criticizing the Hacker diaries from this standpoint one may be laying oneself open to the charge of defending the narrow interests of the Civil Service against the great benefits of more openness about government. Paradoxically, this has not been the case. When I first attended Cabinet as a Private Secretary in the 1960s, members were irritated at the stultifying boredom of the proceedings and would interrupt with diverting outbursts of truth which would cause much more conflict and dissent. When I returned to Cabinet in the 1980s, they were all peacefully occupied making notes for their memoirs and would make only the statements they wanted the others to record in theirs. This has been enormously beneficial to the Civil Service, for an interesting reason: the fact is that the movement to "open up" government, if successful, always achieves a gratifying increase in level of secrecy. The reason is obvious. Once a meeting - Parliament, local council, Cabinet - is opened up to the public, it is used by those attending as a propaganda platform and not as a genuine debating forum. The true discussions take place privately in smaller informal groups. In government these smaller groups often contain one or more senior civil servants, so that some element of intelligence and practicability can be built into proposals before they become public and have to be defended with arguments which represent a victory of personal pride over commonsense. So the move to greater openness in public affairs has greatly strengthened the level of secrecy and therefore the quality of decision-making in the higher echelons of government.

I started out on a somewhat gloomy note about the decline in the quality of government over the period in which I have been privileged to serve it. Perhaps I should end on a more genial reflection. This period of decline in political standards and national standing has been matched (though obviously not caused) by a gratifying growth in the size and influence of the civil Service. Many of its members might reflect that the title Paradise Postponed does not describe the post-war period as they have observed it. "Paradise Achieved" would be more apt. It has seen a tremendous growth in the peacetime civil service as compared with the pre-war period, a vast surge in public expenditure, the welcome adjustment of salary levels in the top echelons of the service to render them broadly comparable with similar rewards in banking and oil, the indexation of pensions and the continuation of honours for service. Since Mr Hacker was in the Cabinet for an important part of this period, we can perhaps forgive him those lapses in discretion and accuracy that mar his book in recompense for the greater good his period of office achieved, even if only by accident.

Like "Yes, Prime Minister" itself, this book review is by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay.