The Complete Yes Minister (48 page)

[
Hacker’s diary continues – Ed
.]

I got back from Washington today. The visit was quite a success on the whole though I must say my speech didn’t exactly thrill them. I mustn’t leave speeches to the Department – they give me very worthy things to say but they’re always so bloody boring.

I’ve been met by a huge backlog of work, piles of red boxes, half a ton of cabinet papers, hundreds of memos and minutes and submissions to catch up on.

And I doubt if I can ever really catch up on it because tomorrow I go in front of a Select Committee and I’ve got to try to read the redrafted paper on Establishment levels beforehand. Not only read it, but understand it. And not only understand it, but remember it. And it’s been written by an Under-Secretary – therefore it’s not in English, but in Under-Secretaryese.

Still, at least the press did report my speech, so that’s all right.

Sir Humphrey popped in to welcome me home, and to brief me about the Select Committee.

‘You do realise the importance of this hearing, don’t you Minister?’

‘Of course I do, Humphrey. The press will be there,’ I explained.

[
Like many politicians, Hacker did not seem to believe in his own existence unless he was reading about himself in the newspapers – Ed
.]

‘It’s not just a question of the press,’ he said. ‘This is a scrutiny of the Department’s future operation. If we were to emerge from the hearing as extravagant or incompetent . . .’

I interrupted him with a penetrating question. ‘Are we extravagant or incompetent?’

‘Of course not,’ he replied with considerable indignation. ‘But there are hostile MPs on the Committee. Especially the member for Derbyshire East.’

I hadn’t realised that Betty Oldham was on the Committee.

Humphrey handed me a thick folder full of papers, with red and yellow and blue tags. ‘I urge you to master this brief, Minister,’ he said, and told me to ask if I found any problems.

I was fed up. I’m tired and jet-lagged today. I told him that I didn’t want another brief on the Select Committee, I only just mastered one on the plane.

‘What was in it?’ he asked.

That was a bit embarrassing. I couldn’t quite remember. I explained that it’s rather hard to concentrate on the plane, as they keep trying to serve you drinks and show you movies and wake you up.

‘I’m sure it’s frightfully difficult to concentrate if you keep being woken up, Minister,’ he said sympathetically. He added that this was the first and only brief containing possible questions from the Committee, all with the appropriate answers carefully presented to give the Department’s position.

‘Are they all absolutely accurate?’ I wanted to know.

‘It is carefully presented to give the Department’s position,’ he replied carefully.

‘Humphrey,’ I explained equally carefully. ‘These Select Committees are very important. I can’t be seen to mislead them.’

‘You will not be seen to mislead them.’

I wasn’t satisfied. I began to suspect that the brief was not strictly honest. I pressed him further.

‘Is it the truth?’

‘The truth and nothing but the truth,’ he assured me.

‘And the whole truth?’

‘Of course not, Minister,’ he replied with some impatience.

I was confused. ‘So we tell them we’re keeping some things secret, do we?’

He shook his head and smiled. ‘Indeed not.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

Sir Humphrey rose from his chair and announced magisterially: ‘He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep.’ Then he left the room.

I was interested in the quotation, which struck me as rather profound. ‘Who said that?’ I asked Bernard.

Bernard looked puzzled. He stared at me, and then stared at the doorway through which Sir Humphrey had just walked.

‘It was Sir Humphrey,’ he said.

[
It is significant that Hacker was not at all shocked at the suggestion that he should conceal information from the Select Committee, or indeed tell lies to it. Such lies would be regarded in government circles as white lies. There are a number of issues about which a Minister automatically tells lies, and he would be regarded as foolish or incompetent if he told the truth. For instance, he would always deny an impending devaluation, or a run on the pound. And he would always give the impression that the UK had adequate and credible defences – Ed
.]

I sat at my desk feeling utterly washed out after a night with British Airways and a day with the Civil Service, and gazed at the enormous brief that I had to master in one day.

‘Why,’ I wondered aloud, ‘are Ministers never allowed to go anywhere without their briefs?’

‘It’s in case they get caught with their trousers down,’ Bernard replied rather wittily. At least, I
think
it was wit, but it might just have been a lucky chance.

He had kept my diary free for the whole day, so we were not interrupted. It emerged, as we went through it, that the submission that I’d read on the plane was a rehash of the report the Department produced last year. And the year before. And the year before that. Ever since 1867 probably. I pointed out to Bernard that the first sentence was enough to cure anybody of any desire to read the thing: ‘The function of the DAA is to support and service the administrative work of all government departments.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that bit’s fascinating.’

I asked him how anyone could be fascinated by it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you look back to the first report in 1868, when Gladstone set up this Department’s predecessor, you find that the first sentence is, ‘The Department is responsible for the economic and efficient administration of government.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘is that what it was for?’

‘Yes,’ said Bernard, ‘but it proved a tough remit. They were responsible for every bit of waste and inefficiency. I suppose Gladstone meant them to be. So when it got too hot they did the usual.’

‘What is “the usual”?’ I asked.

It emerged that ‘the usual’ in Civil Service terms is to secure your budget, staff and premises and then quietly change your remit. In 1906 they changed the first sentence to ‘The Department exists to
further
the efficient and economic administration of Government.’ This removed the responsibility.

In 1931 they got it down to ‘The Department exists to support all government departments in
their
pursuit of economic and efficient administration’ which pushed the responsibility on to other departments. And by 1972 they had got rid of the embarrassing notions of economy and efficiency, and since then it has said ‘The purpose of the DAA is to support and service the administrative work of all government departments.’ The last vestige of the Department’s real purpose removed in a mere one hundred and four years, and the Department itself one hundred and six times its original size.

I now see why Bernard is fascinated, but I still could hardly stay awake to the end of paragraph one. Perhaps it was just the jet-lag. Anyway, Bernard reminded me that the press will be there tomorrow – so I had no choice but to get down to it.

I had my first experience of being grilled by a Select Committee today and I didn’t like it one bit.

It all happens in a committee room at the House, a large gloomy Gothic room with an air of Greyfriars school about it. I was made to feel a bit like Billy Bunter caught with his hands in someone else’s tuckbox.

Along one side of a long table sit about nine MPs with the Chairman in the middle. On the Chairman’s right is the secretary, a civil servant, who takes minutes. There are a few seats for the public and the press.

I was allowed to have Bernard with me, sitting slightly behind me of course, plus Peter Wilkinson and Gillian something-or-other from the Department. (
Assistant Secretaries – Ed
.)

I was allowed to make an opening statement. I’d done my homework well, and I reiterated everything that Sir Humphrey said in his submission: namely that the Department of Administrative Affairs is run to a high standard of efficiency and does indeed support and service the administrative work of all government departments.

Mrs Betty Oldham began the questioning. She tossed her red hair and smiled a thin, mirthless smile. Then she asked me if I’d heard of Malcolm Rhodes.

I hadn’t. I said so.

She went on to inform me that he is an ex-Assistant Secretary from the DAA. I started to explain that as there are twenty-three thousand people working for the DAA I can hardly be expected to know them all, when she shouted me down (well, spoke over me really) and said that he was eased out, became a management consultant in America and has written a book.

She waved a pile of galley proofs at me.

‘This is an advance proof,’ she announced, with a glance at the press seats, ‘in which Mr Rhodes makes a number of astounding allegations of waste of public money in the British Civil Service, particularly your Department.’

I was stumped. I really didn’t know how to reply. I asked for a quick private word with my officials.

I turned to Bernard. ‘Do we know anything about this?’ I whispered urgently.

Peter said, ‘I didn’t know Rhodes had written a book.’

Gillian just said: ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ That really filled me with confidence.

I asked who he was. Gillian said, ‘A troublemaker, Minister.’ Peter said he wasn’t sound, the ultimate insult.

Bernard, who clearly knew even less about him than Peter and Gillian, asked what was in the book.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Well, what do I say about it?’ I whispered hysterically, aware that time was running out.

‘Stall,’ advised Peter.

That was a big help. I’d have to say
something
. ‘Stall?’ I said indignantly. ‘What do you mean by it, stall?’

‘Stall, meaning avoiding answering, Minister,’ interjected Bernard. Like headless chickens in a crisis, these civil servants.

I gritted my teeth. ‘I know what stall means, Bernard.’ I was trying, not altogether successfully, to keep my temper. ‘But what do you mean by sending me out into a typhoon without even giving me an umbrella?’

‘An umbrella wouldn’t be much use in a typhoon, Minister, because the wind would get underneath and . . .’

The Chairman called upon me at that moment, which was just as well or Bernard might never have lived to tell the tale.

‘Have you had sufficient consultation with your officials?’ asked the Chairman.

‘More than enough,’ I replied grimly.

The Chairman nodded to Betty Oldham, who smiled and said: ‘Let me read you some of the scandalous facts that Mr Rhodes reveals.’

She then read me the following passage: ‘At No. 4 regional supply depot in Herefordshire there are two former aircraft hangars used only for stores, but which are centrally heated to 70° Fahrenheit day and night.’ [
Quoted verbatim from Rhodes’s book – Ed
.] ‘What have you got to say about that?’ she asked.

Naturally I had absolutely nothing to say. I pointed out that I couldn’t possibly be expected to answer that sort of detailed question without prior notice.

She conceded the point, but claimed that she was asking about a principle. ‘What I’m asking is, what conceivable reason could there be for such appalling extravagance?’

The Chairman and the Committee seemed to think I should answer. So I made a stab at it. ‘Some materials deteriorate badly at low temperatures. It would depend on what was being stored.’

I’d played right into her hands. ‘Copper wire,’ she said promptly, and smiled.

‘Well . . .’ I made another guess at what conceivable reason there could be. ‘Er . . . copper can corrode in damp conditions, can’t it?’

‘It’s plastic-coated,’ she said, and waited.

‘Plastic-coated,’ I said. ‘Ah well. Yes.’ They still seemed to want something of me. ‘Well, I’ll have it looked into,’ I offered. What else could I say?

I’d hoped that would be the end of it. But no. It was only the beginning.

‘Mr Rhodes also says that your Department insists on ordering all pens, pencils, paper-clips and so on centrally, and then distributing them against departmental requisitions.’

‘That seems very sensible to me,’ I replied cautiously, scenting a trap. ‘There are big savings on bulk purchases.’

There
was
a trap. ‘He demonstrates,’ she continued, ‘that this procedure is four times more expensive than if local offices went out and bought what they wanted in the High Street.’

I thought of remarking that you can prove anything with figures, but decided against it. Clearly he, and she, wouldn’t make this claim without
some
evidence. And my experience of the DAA suggests that Rhodes was probably absolutely right anyway. So I told her that I found this information very interesting and that I’d be happy to change the system if it were shown to be necessary. ‘We’re not a rigid bureaucracy, you know,’ I added.

This remark proved to be a tactical error. ‘Oh no?’ she enquired acidly. ‘Mr Rhodes says that he gave these figures and proposed this change when he was in your Department, and it was turned down on the grounds that people were used to the existing procedure. How’s that for a rigid bureaucracy?’

I’d led with my chin there. I really had no defence immediately available to me. Again I offered to have the matter looked into.

‘Looked into?’ she smiled at me contemptuously.

‘Looked into, yes,’ I asserted defiantly, but I was losing my nerve.

‘You did say in Washington last week that your Department conducted a ruthless war on waste and could teach the world a lesson?’ I nodded. She went for the kill. ‘How would you reconcile that with spending seventy-five thousand pounds on a roof garden on top of the supplementary benefits office in Kettering?’