No, Minister!

The whole world knows the “Yes, Minister” series which was shown on BBC from 1980-84 and much appreciated by Margaret Thatcher for the way it showed senior civil servants outfoxing Ministers. For those unfortunate few not familiar with the brilliance of the work, these are The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister in full and these are the entire Yes Prime Minister diaries based on the series which ran from 1986-88

What we didn’t know at the time was that the brilliant creator of the series – Anthony Jay – had based his script on the theories of the “public choice” economists who promulgated the view that all “public servants” were serving….their own interests. In 1980 Jay ran a full confession in the London Review of Books (paywall) some of which I will excerpt below

In other words, the series was laying the ground for the neoliberal doctrine which has led to such cynicism about politics…Despite this, I am a great admirer of Anthony Jay’s work which encompassed some great non-fictions books. “Management and Machiavelli” (1967) enthused me no end (I was battling a traditional bureaucracy at the time) - and he “almost single-handedly resurrected the academic study of that 15^th century genius. Jay followed it up with an equally brilliant book – “Corporation Man” – based on his observations of the BBC…… His talents even extended to tossing off elegant guides to running an effective meetings! Indeed some of my more regular readers will know that I have been known to use his “”Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped when discussing the workings of the political class. For my money, the article can’t be bettered

Here is Jay’s full confession about the background reading which inspired him to write “Yes Minister”

one that stands out above all the others for candour, authority, and sheer volume of precisely recorded detail - Richard Crossman’s “The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister”, especially volumes one and three which cover the years when he was at the head of two major spending departments, Housing and Health. I am in any case a sucker for diaries, and not just because they so often have a freshness, vividness and authenticity that reflective memoirs so rarely achieve. Above all, I love their lack of hindsight, their record of events as perceived and interpreted at the time. If your interest in history is in why people acted the way they did, then you need to know, not what the facts were, but what they believed them to be, and this wonderful fallibility is at the heart of a good diary’s appeal.

I am bound to admit to some personal moral ambivalence about the publication of the Crossman diaries. I have absorbed enough of the Establishment ethic and bureaucratic tradition to see how difficult government would be if you suspected that all your colleagues were busy noting down every informal discussion and chance remark for publication in a few years’ time: it could inhibit free debate and honest opinion in a very damaging way. But in the other scale I have to weigh the public service of bringing out into the open so many facets of that all-important relationship between an elected minister and the permanent officials of his department. George Moseley’s advice on how correspondence could be transferred unread from the out-tray to the in-tray is of course famous, - as is Crossman’s early battle with Evelyn Sharpe over the separation of land planning from housing, but there are many other fascinating revelations all the way through:

• the deliberate fixing of meetings at awkward times,

• the suppression of embarrassing reports by officials,

• the official bluff of saying some person or organisation will object when in fact they do not object at all,

• the freezing out of non-departmental advisers,

• the alteration of agreements when writing minutes and reports so as to bring them closer to what the officials wanted

Those 2,300 pages were an invaluable source for Johnny and me as we wrote the successive episodes of “Yes, Minister” – indeed we return to them again and again for refreshment and renewal but they brought us an additional benefit too: the simple fact that they had been published made all sorts of other people willing to give us, in confidence, a great deal of information that otherwise they might have kept to themselves. One of our small sorrows has been how much of this accurate information, carefully researched, is simply not believed by the general television public.

There was, of course, an imbalance in out sources of information: almost all the published information comes from politicians and not civil servants. A spectacular exception was Leslie Chapman’s “Your Disobedient Servant”, but even though it is one of the best documented and most revealing studies of British bureaucracy ever published, it can hardly be said to redress the balance. We sought to do so by private conversations with civil servants, but they were as you would expect – models of loyalty and discretion. Political journalists and former civil servants were a great deal more helpful, and we hope that with their help we managed to avoid making the minister into too much of a paragon or martyr. But there is a crying need for “The Diaries of a Permanent Secretary” to set alongside the Crossman epic, and if any present Permanent Secretary is reading this I can assure him of two immediate purchasers if his record of events contains anything like the same sort of detailed account and critical judgment of Cabinet Ministers that Crossman’s diaries give of civil servants. I have to admit, however, that I think it extremely unlikely that any present or future Permanent Secretary will ever publish such an account: tradition, nature and even etymology conspire to suggest that it will remain a permanent secret.

We may yet not have such a book but we do have What does Jeremy Think? Jeremy Heywood and the making of modern Britain from the widow of a Permanent Sec - Suzanne Heywood (2021). And for a good short piece on the power of a Prime Minister, I give you The Power of the Prime Minister (The Constitution Society 2016)

Further Reading; Machiavelliana – the living Machiavelli in modern mythologies Jackon and Grace 2018