No, Minister: the long and lamentable shadow of Sir Humphrey

Alex Thomas looks back at the venerable series’ effect on our perceptions of the Civil Service

Dorothy Wainwright is a minor character in the Yes, Minister universe, but she is one of the sharpest. We meet her in the first series of Yes, Prime Minister where she acts as a counter to the circumlocutory and obstructive Sir Humphrey Appleby.

It is an exchange between Dorothy and Prime Minister Jim Hacker that sums up the ethos of the television programme. She asks Hacker what someone should do when “an ordinary person wants to stop a major government policy”. Hacker replies “join the civil service!”

I was in the Civil Service for 17 years and have been closely observing it from the Institute for Government for the last five. I have had thousands of discussions about the Civil Service; Yes, Minister features in most of them. It is, of course, a brilliant programme. Well observed, sharp, funny and with much to say about the human condition.

But Yes, Minister is so all-pervasive in discussions about Whitehall and Westminster that, for a long time, its tropes have obscured more than illuminated. With thanks for careers well spent, it is time to send Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker into retirement. 

Why do we need to move on from the programme that Margaret Thatcher said “has given me hours of pure joy”? For several reasons.

First, and most importantly, the power dynamic between Sir Humphrey and Hacker is presented the wrong way around. In the series Sir Humphrey has the power, while Hacker is bumbling and outmanoeuvred. In Yes, Minister world “Ministers with a grip on the job are a bit of a nuisance, you know … if they’ve got a grip on the job there’s a real danger that they might be right.” Ministers “should never know more than they need to know. Then they can’t tell anyone.”

The truth is that civil servants in the real world are desperate to please their Minister, or at least their Secretary of State. Junior ministers, to be fair, can have cause for frustration if officials are too focused on the top of the office. Just as often, though, the block is because the Secretary of State disagrees with their junior Minister, or does not trust them, but has not brought this conflict to the surface. The perceived obstructiveness of civil servants can be cover for political disagreement.

The Secretary of State in any department is the source of power, career enhancement and the arbiter of risk. Few permanent secretaries survive for long without the confidence of their Secretary of State. And many of the recent failures of government are the result of officials either not giving robust advice for fear of their position, or ministers not hearing that advice. Early problems with universal credit, failed probation reforms and the questionable allocation of levelling-up funding stemmed at least in part from disempowered civil servants over-anxious to please, or ministers failing to listen.

Second, Yes, Minister attributes order to what is, in fact, chaos. Sir Humphrey is all-knowing, all-powerful and in control. Anybody who has worked in government knows that those sublime states can actually never be achieved. 

The TV mandarin’s desperation for control also takes him to a disturbingly anti-democratic place. “If the right people don’t get power, the wrong people get it”, he declares, explaining that “ever since 1832 the Civil Service has been gradually excluding the voters from government.” Playing to such paranoia about the deep state is nonsense. No civil servant wants to spin free of ministerial control; democratic instincts run too deep. 

In some ways The Thick of It, that other comedy which casts its shadow over British political life, paints a more credible picture of the inside of government. For obvious reasons it is hard to find a suitable quote from that programme, but describing a policy disaster as “like a clown running across a minefield” will have to do.

Any government department, even a small one, is too complicated, with too many different actors and impossible problems, to control Yes, Minister style. Ministers and permanent secretaries succeed to different degrees, but they are up against a constant barrage of events, complaints, debates, news stories, scandals and potential disasters. It is as much as anyone can do to take two-steps-forward-one-step-back on a few priority policies, let alone keep control in a neat narrative arc.

The challenge can be seen at present as the Government works to build its ‘missions’ into the Whitehall architecture. The only way to manage the natural disorder is to set strong direction from the centre. Prime ministers have found that difficult – in part because it involves making difficult or unpopular choices about what to prioritise, but also because the Cabinet Office and No. 10 are too fluid and organisationally weak, often outfaced by the Treasury.

And finally Yes, Minister is a male world, one happily very much at odds with the modern Whitehall. The cabinet secretary, Sir Arnold, sits deep in his leather armchair smoking and drinking brandy, while Sir Humphrey tells his Minister that if he is “going to promote women just because they’re the best person for the job, you will create a lot of resentment throughout the whole of the Civil Service!”

In this the sitcom reflects its time. The Civil Service of the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by men. But no longer. Our latest Institute for Government Whitehall Monitor notes that half of the permanent secretaries who head ministerial departments are women. The proportion of women in the senior Civil Service has grown steadily and is now at 48.2%. The Civil Service has much more to do to improve its culture, to recruit and promote more non-white and disabled people and to give those from lower socio-economic backgrounds the chance to get to the top. But it has made progress in all these areas, and especially on gender.

The truth is that Yes, Minister is too good. Too many memorable lines, and too psychologically convincing about the dynamic that operates inside bureaucracies. But can something that good be completely wrong?

Well perhaps not. It is true that ministers can feel disempowered, as Hacker does with Sir Humphrey. They see the masses of civil servants working to the permanent secretary and wonder what the bureaucrats are doing all day, (wrongly) suspecting plots to sidetrack their latest policy idea.

A regular topic of conversation amongst Westminster politicians and civil servants these days is the frustration of ministers who say they want the Civil Service to be fizzing with policy ideas, bringing tough and challenging ideas to the table. Instead, they too often find a civil service that has been disempowered and beaten up in recent years. Ministers are right to demand a more confident civil service, and today’s officials must respond or they will miss the opportunity afforded by the government reset.

Government officials will recognise Hacker’s plea when he says “I don’t want the truth. I want something I can tell Parliament!” When Sir Humphrey describes the Treasury’s approach as being “if something has to be done, the Cabinet shouldn’t have too much time to think about it”, he’s not wrong. And there is truth to the observation that “the purpose of minutes is not to record events, it is to protect people”, or “a good speech isn’t one where we can prove he’s telling the truth. It’s one in which nobody else can prove he’s lying!” More seriously, the Covid Inquiry revealed a boy’s club No. 10 in which central characters competed to dump on their colleagues, and where women’s voices appeared at times sidelined.

And it is easy to forget, amid what has become bureaucratic cliché, that Hacker does sometimes get one over on Sir Humphrey, especially as Yes, Minister turns into Yes, Prime Minister. Sir Humphrey makes mistakes, like calling young unemployed people “parasites” on a live mic, or when his botched inquiry into a spy catches up with him. It was Hacker who bamboozled Sir Humphrey on funding cuts for the National Theatre or – most famously – locked the Cabinet Secretary out of No. 10, to Sir Humphrey’s apoplectic fury.

The most realistic moments are when Minister and mandarin work together to achieve their goals. Hacker and Sir Humphrey collaborate to see off a threat by No. 10 to abolish the Department for Administrative Affairs. And when Sir Humphrey is promoted to cabinet secretary he connives with Hacker to make him prime minister, by way of a hyped-up scandal about the Great British Sausage. 

In their moment of success the mandarin and the politician are working together. The same is true of governing in the real world. So perhaps Yes, Minister has something salutary to offer after all. 

It is time for him to retire, but maybe it’s farewell Sir Humphrey; arise Lord Appleby.

How might Sir Humphrey and Malcolm react?

Alex Thomas is Programme Director at the Institute for Government, an independent think tank on the British public sector.