The Complete Yes Minister (34 page)

And indeed it is a brilliant idea. I was cock-a-hoop. It’s our only hold over the civil servants. Ministers can’t stop their pay rises, or their promotion. Ministers don’t write their reports. Ministers have no real disciplinary authority. But Bernard is right – I can withhold honours! It’s brilliant!

I congratulated him and thanked him profusely.

‘You thought of it, Minister!’

I didn’t get the point at first. ‘No, you did,’ I told him generously.

‘No,
you
did,’ he said meaningfully. ‘
Please
!’

I understood. I nodded, and smiled reassuringly.

He looked even more anxious.

[
Some days later Sir Humphrey Appleby was invited to dine at the High Table of his alma mater, Baillie College, Oxford. He refers to the dinner and subsequent discussion in his private diary – Ed
.]

Had an excellent high table dinner at Baillie, followed by a private chat over the port and walnuts, with the Master and the Bursar. Clearly they were worried about the cuts. Sir William [
Sir William Guthrie, the Master – Ed
.] was looking somewhat the worse for wear – and the worse for port. His face was red, his hair is now quite white but his eyes were still the same clear penetrating blue. Rather patriotic, really. Christopher [
Christopher Venables, the Bursar – Ed
.] still looked like the precise ex-RAF officer that he had been in the days before he became a don – tall, neat, and meticulous in manner and speech.

I asked the Master how he was feeling. He replied that he was feeling very old. But he smiled. ‘I’m already an anomaly, I shall soon be an anachronism, and I have every intention of dying an abuse.’ Very droll!

Guthrie and Venables started out by telling me that they intended to sell the rest of the rather delicious 1927 Fonseca
¹
which we were drinking. Baillie has a couple of pipes left and the Bursar told me they’d fetch quite a bit. I couldn’t think what they were talking about. I was astounded. Excellent shock tactics, of course. Then they told me that if they sold all the paintings and the silver, they could possibly pay off the entire mortgage on the new buildings.

They think – or want me to think – that Baillie College is going to the wall.

It transpired that the trouble is the government’s new policy of charging overseas students the full economic rate for their tuition. Baillie has always had an exceptional number of overseas students.

The Bursar tells me that they cannot charge the full economic fee of £4000 per annum. Hardly anyone will pay it.

He says he has been everywhere! All over the USA, raising funds, trying to sell the idea of an Oxford education to the inhabitants of Podunk, Indiana, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

But the competition is cut-throat. Apparently Africa is simply crawling with British Professors frantically trying to flog sociology courses to the natives. And India. And the Middle East.

I suggested that they do the obvious thing – fill up the vacancies with British students.

This idea met with a very cold response. ‘I don’t think that’s awfully funny, Humphrey,’ the Master said.

He explained that home students were to be avoided at all costs!
Anything
but home students!

The reason is simple economics. Baillie only gets £500 per head for the UK students. Therefore, it would have to take four hundred home students to replace a mere fifty foreigners. The number of students at a tutorial would quadruple. The staff/student ratio would go from one in ten to one in thirty-four.

I see their point. This could be the end of civilisation as we know it. It would certainly be the end of Baillie College as we know it. There would be dormitories. Classrooms. It would be indistinguishable from Wormwood Scrubs or the University of Sussex.

And Hacker is the Minister who has the authority to change it. I had not realised the implications of all this, it being a DES [
Department of Education and Science – Ed
.] decision. Ours not to reason why, ours just to put the administrative wheels in motion.
²

[
Although Sir Humphrey, and Jim Hacker, were responsible for the implementation of these cuts, characteristically the Department of Education and Science had made them without consulting any of the other interested departments – the Foreign Office, or the Department of Health and Social Security or the Department of Administrative Affairs – Ed
.]

I suggested that we must persuade Hacker of the special and unique importance of Baillie College. He should be invited to dinner at High Table and the case explained to him.

The Master was noticeably worried about Hacker – he was concerned whether he was of the intellectual calibre to understand the case.

I pointed out that the case is intelligible to anyone of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh.

They asked me if Hacker
is
of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. Clearly they’ve had dealings with politicians before.

I was able to reassure them on that point. I’m
fairly
sure that he is of the intellectual calibre of Winnie-the-Pooh. On his day.

I left Oxford convinced that I must find a way to get Baillie recognised as a special institution (like Imperial College) for the extraordinary work that they do. [
A well-chosen adjective! As this episode in Hacker’s life is fundamentally concerned with honours – deserved or undeserved, earned or unearned – we felt that at this point it might be of interest to the reader to know the principal honours conferred on the antagonists
:

Sir Arnold Robinson, GCMG, CVO, MA (Oxon) – Ed
.]

This morning Humphrey badgered me again.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, there is the matter of the Departmental recommendations for the Honours List.’

I told him we’d leave that on one side for a bit.

He became very tense and twitchy. I tried not to show amusement. He told me we can’t leave it as we are getting dangerously close to the five weeks.

[
All recipients of honours are notified at least five weeks before promulgation. Theoretically it gives them time to refuse. This is rare. In fact, the only time a civil servant is known to have refused a knighthood was in 1496. This was because he already had one – Ed
.]

I decided that I would not yet give my approval to the Department’s Honours List, because I’ve been doing some research. [
Hacker almost certainly meant that a party research assistant had been doing some research and he had read the report – Ed
.] I have found that twenty per cent of all honours go to civil servants. The rest of the population of this country have to do something extra to get an honour. Over and above their ordinary work, for which they get paid. You or I have to do something special, like work with mentally-handicapped children for twenty-seven years, six nights a week – then we might get an MBE. But Civil Service knighthoods just come up with the rations.

These honours are, in any case, intrinsically ridiculous – MBE, for instance, according to
Whitaker’s Almanack
, stands for Member of the Most Honourable Order of the British Empire. Hasn’t anyone in Whitehall noticed that we’ve lost the Empire?

The civil servants have been having it both ways for years. When Attlee was PM he got £5000 a year and the Cabinet Secretary got £2500. Now the Cabinet Secretary gets more than the PM. Why? Because civil servants used to receive honours as a compensation for long years of loyal public service, for which they got poor salaries, poor pensions and few perks.

Now they have salaries comparable to executives in the most successful private enterprise companies (guess who’s in charge of the comparability studies), inflation-proof pensions, chauffeur-driven cars – and they
still
get automatic honours.

[
Hacker was right. The civil servants were undoubtedly manipulating the honours system to their own advantage. Just as incomes policies have always been manipulated by those that control them: for instance, the 1975 Pay Policy provided exemptions for Civil Service increments and lawyers’ fees. Needless to say, the policy was drafted by civil servants and parliamentary draftsmen, i.e. lawyers
.

The problem is
, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
³
–
Ed
.]

So how can civil servants possibly understand the way the rest of us live, if they are immune to the basic threats to economic well-being faced by the rest of us: inflation and unemployment?

And how did the civil servants get away with creating these remarkably favourable terms of service for themselves? Simply by keeping a low profile. They have somehow managed to make people feel that discussing the matter at all is in rather poor taste.

But that cuts no ice with me. I believe in action now!

I asked Humphrey how he accounted for twenty per cent of honours going to the Civil Service.

‘A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty,’ he said.

It’s a pretty nice duty to be devoted to, I thought.

Humphrey continued: ‘Her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small recompense for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty and to the nation.’

A pretty speech. But quite ridiculous. ‘A modest wage?’ I queried.

‘Alas, yes.’

I explained to Humphrey, since he appeared to have forgotten, that he earned well over thirty thousand a year. Seven and a half thousand more than me.

He agreed, but insisted that it was still a relatively modest wage.

‘Relative to whom?’ I asked.

He was stuck for a moment. ‘Well . . . Elizabeth Taylor for instance,’ he suggested.

I felt obliged to explain to Sir Humphrey that he was in no way relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.

‘Indeed,’ he agreed. ‘She did not get a First in Greats.’
⁴

Then, undaunted and ever persistent, he again asked me if I had approved the list. I made my move.

‘No Humphrey,’ I replied pleasantly, ‘I am not approving any honour for anyone in this Department who hasn’t earned it.’

Humphrey’s face was a wonderful study in blankness.

‘What do you mean, earned it?’

I explained that I meant earned it. In other words, having done something to deserve it.

The penny dropped. He exploded. ‘But that’s
unheard
of,’ he exclaimed.

I smiled serenely. ‘Maybe so. But my new policy is to stop all honours for all civil servants who fail to cut their department’s budgets by five per cent a year.’

Humphrey was speechless.

So after a few moments I said: ‘May I take it that your silence indicates approval?’

He found his voice fast. ‘You may
not
, Minister.’ He was deeply indignant. ‘Where did you get this preposterous idea?’

I glanced at Bernard, who studied his right shoe-lace intently. ‘It came to me,’ I said.

Humphrey was spluttering incoherently. ‘It’s ridiculous. It’s out of the question. It’s unthinkable.’ Now that Humphrey had found his voice there was no stopping him. ‘The whole idea . . . strikes at the whole root of . . . this is the beginning of the end . . . the thin end of the wedge . . . Bennite solution. [
Perhaps it was the word ‘wedge’ that reminded him of Benn – Ed
.] Where will it end? The abolition of the monarchy?’

I told him not to be silly. This infuriated him even more.

‘There is
no reason
,’ he said, stabbing the air with his finger, ‘to change a system which has worked well in the past.’

‘But it hasn’t,’ I said.

‘We have to give the present system a fair trial,’ he stated. This seemed quite reasonable on the face of it. But I reminded him that the Most Noble Order of the Garter was founded in 1348 by King Edward III. ‘Surely it must be getting towards the end of its trial period?’ I said.

So Humphrey tried a new tack. He said that to block honours pending economies might create a dangerous precedent.

What he means by ‘dangerous precedent’ is that if we do the right thing now, then we might be forced to do the right thing again next time. And on that reasoning nothing should ever be done at all. [
To be precise: many things may be done, but nothing must ever be done for the first time – Ed
.]

I told him I wasn’t going to budge on my proposal. He resorted to barefaced lies, telling me that he was fully seized of my aims and had taken them on board and would do his best to put them into practice.

So I asked him point blank if he would put my policy into practice. He made me his usual offer. I know it off by heart now. A recommendation that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we would be in a position to think through all the implications and take a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action that might well have unforeseen repercussions. [
In other words: No! – Ed
.]

I wasn’t prepared to be fobbed off with this nonsense any longer. I told him I wanted
action now
. He went pale. I pointed out that, in my case, honours are fundamentally unhealthy. Nobody in their right mind can want them, they encourage sycophancy, snobbery and jealousy. ‘And,’ I added firmly, ‘it is not fair that civil servants get them all.’