Like many of my generation, I nurture a nostalgia for the satirical TV comedies that were popular in our youth. The Christmas holidays are an ideal time to indulge in viewing again some of the more successful episodes of our favourite comedies. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister were my choice for this year.
How little has changed in over three decades of political and social life in western societies! The manipulation of politicians and civil servants to ensure that they push their own self-serving agenda has persisted over the years. Of course, today’s politicians like to wear on their Armani lapel, the badge of ‘anti-establishment’.
As far as I am concerned, most of our politicians militating on the opposite sides of the political spectrum are as much a part of the political establishment as their predecessors were in the 1980s.
One of my favourite episodes from the Yes Prime Minister series is when Jim Hacker wanted to get rid of his health minister who was insisting on introducing measures to discourage smoking that would have made the government unpopular.
He first praised his minister for his admirable commitment to do what was good for the country, then offered him a more senior post in cabinet and in the process killed the laudable initiative which risked losing Hacker’s party votes and income from cigarette taxation. For some reason, this strategy sounds so ‘modern’.
The head of the civil service, Sir Humphrey Appleby, is arguably the best character in the series in that he personifies evergreen Machiavellian skills that we see used even in today’s political sphere.
Sir Humphrey could have been an excellent politician himself. He was the master of ‘brain wrenching sentences designed to confuse people – and often succeeding’. It is difficult to say who was more manipulative, devious, dishonest and hypocritical – was it Sir Humphrey or Prime Minister Hacker?
The authors of this series excellently avoided giving an ideological hue to their characters. The party affiliation of Hacker and Sir Humphrey is never stated and the implication is that once in power politicians behave very much in the same way whether they are Conservative or Labour.
Political satire is an excellent tool to understand the way a country is run
They surround themselves with their persons of trust, some from the civil service and others parachuted from some other job, all to ‘assist’ the minister in delivering the party’s political programme.
Bernard Woolley is a typical civil servant who is superficially committed to supporting Hacker. But Sir Humphrey is dead against mid-ranking civil servants becoming too supportive of their minister. He threateningly reminds Bernard that “his civil servant superiors will have much to say about the course of his future career”.
Trying to please your civil service boss and your minister at the same time is a frustrating ordeal some people have to face, especially if bending rules in not part of their ethos.
Like politicians today, Hacker had to employ a party crony to ensure that the will of the people as expressed in the last election was not frustrated by civil servants’ manipulation. When he was minister, he appointed Frank Weisel (often depreciatingly pronounced weasel by Sir Humphrey). Weisel was a party zealot determined to ensure that the people got what they voted for.
Sir Humphrey considered the minister’s trusted adviser as a nuisance, but Hacker himself resented the political orthodoxy of his political adviser who he considered as “tiresome”. He eventually sent Weisel to a lengthy worldwide fact-finding assignment to get him out from under his feet.
Political satire is an excellent tool to understand the way a country is run. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister series were well researched. They helped ordinary people understand the murky world of politics and its interaction with the world of business and social life in general. Most politicians start life as idealists with a genuine desire to improve the society they live in.
Many, eventually, focus their attention on getting re-elected and promoted to higher office. Often they are sadly prepared to pay any price to achieve their aim. Civil servants believe that they are the bedrocks of ‘good governance’ and that only they know what is really good for the country.
Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister expose in a gentle way the hypocrisy and doubletalk that ordinary people associate with political life. If the series were to be rewritten to reflect today’s realities, they would have to include references to the sleaze that has become so pervasive in the political scene.
Johncassarwhite@yahoo.com