The Complete Yes Minister (9 page)

When I got to the office Bernard offered me the paper and asked me if I’d read it. I told him I’d read it. Bernard told me that Frank had read it, and wanted to see me. Then Frank came in and asked me if I’d read it. I told him I’d read it.

Frank then read it to me. I don’t know why he read it to me. I told him I’d read it. It seemed to make him feel better to read it aloud. It made me feel worse.

I wondered how many copies they sell every day. ‘Two million, three million?’ I asked Bernard.

‘Oh
no
, Minister,’ he answered as if my suggested figures were an utterly outrageous overestimate.

I pressed him for an answer. ‘Well, how many?’

‘Um . . . four million,’ he said with some reluctance. ‘So only . . . twelve million people have read it. Twelve or fifteen. And lots of their readers can’t read, you know.’

Frank was meanwhile being thoroughly irritating. He kept saying, ‘Have you read this?’ and reading another appalling bit out of it. For instance: ‘Do
you
realise that more people serve in the Inland Revenue than the Royal Navy?’ This came as news to me, but Bernard nodded to confirm the truth of it when I looked at him.

‘“Perhaps,”’ said Frank,
still
reading aloud from that bloody paper, ‘“Perhaps the government thinks that a tax is the best form of defence.”’

Bernard sniggered, till he saw that I was not amused. He tried to change his snigger into a cough.

Frank then informed me, as if I didn’t already know, that this article is politically very damaging, and that I had to make slimming down the Civil Service a priority. There’s no doubt that he’s right, but it’s just not that easy.

I pointed this out to Frank. ‘You know what?’ he said angrily. ‘You’re house-trained already.’

I didn’t deign to reply. Besides, I couldn’t think of an answer.

[
The Civil Service phrase for making a new Minister see things their way is ‘house-training’. When a Minister is so house-trained that he automatically sees everything from the Civil Service point of view, this is known in Westminster as the Minister having ‘gone native’ – Ed
.]

Sir Humphrey came in, brandishing a copy of the
Daily Mail
. ‘Have you read this?’ he began.

This was too much. I exploded. ‘Yes. Yes! Yes!!! I have read that sodding newspaper.
I
have read it,
you
have read it,
we have all bloody read it
. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?’

‘Abundantly, Minister,’ said Sir Humphrey coldly, after a brief pained silence.

I recovered my temper, and invited them all to sit down. ‘Humphrey,’ I said, ‘we simply
have
to slim down the Civil Service. How many people are there in this Department?’

‘This Department?’ He seemed evasive. ‘Oh well, we’re very small.’

‘How small?’ I asked, and receiving no reply, I decided to hazard a guess. ‘Two thousand? . . . three thousand?’ I suggested, fearing the worst.

‘About twenty-three thousand I think, Minister?’

I was staggered. Twenty-three thousand people? In the Department of Administrative Affairs? Twenty-three thousand administrators, all to administer other administrators?

‘We’ll have to do an O & M,’ I said. [
Organisation and Method Study – Ed
.] ‘See how many we can do without.’

‘We did one of those last year,’ said Sir Humphrey blandly. ‘And we discovered we needed another five hundred people. However, Minister, we could always close your Bureaucratic Watchdog Department.’
¹

I’d been expecting this. I know Humphrey doesn’t like it. How could he? But we are not cutting it. Firstly, it’s a very popular measure with the voters. And secondly, it’s the only thing I’ve achieved since I’ve been here.

‘It is a chance for the ordinary citizen to help us find ways to stop wasting government money,’ I reiterated.

‘The public,’ said Sir Humphrey, ‘do not know anything about wasting public money. We are the experts.’

I grinned. ‘Can I have that in writing?’

Humphrey got very tetchy. ‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ he snapped. ‘The Watchdog Office is merely a troublemaker’s letter box.’

‘It stays,’ I replied.

We gazed at each other, icily. Finally Sir Humphrey said: ‘Well, offhand, I don’t know what other economies to suggest.’

This was ludicrous. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me,’ I asked, ‘that there’s nothing we can cut down on?’

He shrugged. ‘Well . . . I suppose we could lose one or two of the tea ladies.’

I exploded again. I told him not to be ridiculous. I told him I wanted facts, answers. I listed them:

How many people work here?

What do they all do?

How many buildings do we have?

Who and what is in these buildings?

I spelt it out. I demanded a complete study. First of all we’ll put our own house in order. Then we’ll deal with the rest of Whitehall. With a complete study, we’ll be able to see where to cut costs, cut staff, and cut procedures.

Sir Humphrey listened with some impatience. ‘The Civil Service, Minister,’ he responded when I paused for breath, ‘merely exists to implement legislation that is enacted by Parliament. So long as Parliament continues to legislate for more and more control over people’s lives, the Civil Service must grow.’

‘Ha!’ Frank made a derisive noise.

Sir Humphrey turned towards him with a glassy stare. ‘Am I to infer that Mr Weisel disagrees with me?’

‘Ha!’ repeated Frank.

Frank was getting on
my
nerves too. ‘Frank, either laugh thoroughly, or not at all,’ I instructed.

‘Minister.’ Humphrey stood up. ‘I am fully seized of your requirements, so if you’ll excuse me I think I’d better set the wheels in motion.’

After Sir H. left Frank told me that there was a cover-up going on. Apparently a North-West Regional controller has achieved cuts of £32 million in his region alone. And the Civil Service has suppressed news of it. I asked why. ‘They don’t want cuts,’ said Frank impatiently. ‘Asking Sir Humphrey to slim down the Civil Service is like asking an alcoholic to blow up a distillery.’

I asked Bernard if this story were true. Bernard said that he didn’t know, but, if so, he would be aghast. I asked them both to check up on it. Bernard said he’d find out through the grapevine, and I arranged with Frank to do some more ferreting.

[
Sometime in the next few days Bernard Woolley had an interview with Sir Humphrey Appleby. Sir Humphrey wrote a memo following the meeting, which we found in the DAA Personnel Files at Walthamstow – Ed
.]

Woolley came at 5.15 p.m. to discuss the £32 million saved by the NW controller. I remarked that I was aghast.

Woolley said he also was aghast, and that it was incredible that we knew nothing of this.

He sometimes reveals himself as worryingly naïf. I, of course, know all about it. I am merely aghast that it has got out. It might result in our getting less money from the Treasury in next year’s PESC review. [
PESC is the Public Expenditure Scrutiny Committee – Ed
.]

I felt I would learn more about Bernard Woolley if I made the conversation informal. [
To do so, Sir Humphrey would have moved from behind his desk to the conversation area, remarking that it was after 5.30 p.m. and offering Woolley a sherry – Ed
.] Then I asked him why he was looking worried. He revealed that he genuinely wanted the DAA to save money.

This was shocking. Clearly he has not yet grasped the fundamentals of our work.

There has to be some way to measure success in the Service. British Leyland can measure success by the size of its profits. [
British Leyland was the name of the car manufacturer into which billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was paid in the 1980s in an attempt to produce full employment in the West Midlands. To be more accurate, BL measured its failure by the size of its losses – Ed
.] However, the Civil Service does not make profits or losses.
Ergo
, we measure success by the size of our staff and our budget. By definition a big department is more successful than a small one. It seems extraordinary that Woolley could have passed through the Civil Service College without having understood that this simple proposition is the basis of our whole system.

Nobody had asked the NW controller to save £32 million. Suppose everybody did it? Suppose everybody started saving money irresponsibly all over the place?

Woolley then revealed another curious blind-spot when he advanced the argument that the Minister wanted cuts. I was obliged to explain the facts of life:

Ministers come, and Ministers go. The average Minister lasts less than eleven months in any Department.

[
In his ten years as Chairman of British Steel, Sir Monty Finniston dealt with no less than nineteen Ministers at the Department of Industry – Ed
.]

It is our duty to assist the Minister to fight for the Department’s money despite his own panic reactions.

However, the Minister must be allowed to panic. Politicians like to panic. They need activity – it is their substitute for achievement.

The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been ‘democratically chosen’ does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by ‘the people’ – they are chosen by their local constituency party,
i.e
. thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further ‘selection’ process is equally a nonsense: there are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government – and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers, and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all.

It follows that as Ministers have had no proper selection or training, it is our patriotic duty to arrange for them to make the right decision as often as possible.

I concluded by teaching Woolley how to explain the saving of £32 million to the Minister. I offered the following possibilities. Say that:
(a)
they have changed their accounting system in the North-West.
or
(b)
redrawn the boundaries, so that this year’s figures are not comparable.
or
(c)
the money was compensation for special extra expenditure of £16 million a year over the last two years, which has now stopped.
or
(d)
it is only a paper saving, so it will all have to be spent next year.
or
(e)
a major expenditure is late in completion, and therefore the region will be correspondingly over budget next year. [
Known technically as phasing – Ed
.]
or
(f)
there has been an unforeseen but important shift of personnel and industries to other regions whose expenditure rose accordingly.
or
(g)
some large projects were cancelled for reasons of economy early in the accounting period with the result that the expenditure was not incurred but the budget had already been allocated.

Woolley seemed to understand. I am concerned that he has not had adequate training so far. I intend to keep a close watch on him because, in spite of all this, I still think he shows promise.

He volunteered information that Frank Weisel was ferreting. Naturally, I arranged a government car to assist him. [
It was standard Civil Service practice to provide government cars for troublesome outsiders. The driver would, at the very least, be relied on to report where he had been, if only to account for the mileage
.

Drivers are one of the most useful sources of information in Whitehall. Their passengers are frequently indiscreet, forgetting that everything they say in the back seat can be overheard in the front. Furthermore, Ministers tend to forget confidential documents, and leave them behind in the car
.

Information is Whitehall’s most valuable currency. Drivers barter information – Ed
.]

[
The following series of memos between Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Frederick Stewart were found in a Ministry file – Ed
.]