Yes! Yes! YES Minister! The classic sitcom, which once gave Margaret Thatcher a VERY racy dream about Sir Humphrey, is back as a West End show

By PETRONELLA WYATT



The television programme was Margaret Thatcher's favourite. It was the only thing that, during her long premiership, made her laugh real belly laughs. She used to get Denis to tape it if she was working late or there was a vote at the House of Commons. She even instructed her Cabinet ministers to watch it.

Douglas Hurd and others politicos, praising its verisimilitude, called it less of a TV series than a training manual. It won BAFTAS and set the whole nation giggling. Yes, reader, I refer to Yes, Minister.

It has been more than 20 years since Sir Humphrey Appleby, with his voice scary with sarcasm, last uttered the words 'Yes, Minister' and then 'Yes, Prime Minister', decades before we heard the phrases 'spin doctor' and 'touchy-feely politics'.

Mrs T even confessed to my father, Woodrow Wyatt, the late politician and Tote Chairman, with whom she had become friendly and who she spoke to on the phone every morning, that she had once had a 'romantic dream' about Sir Humphrey.

And now Whitehall's most adversarial couple, the Rt Honourable Jim Hacker MP and Sir Humphrey, his Permanent Secretary, immortalised by Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, are back - this time on the stage, thanks to their original creators Jonathan Lynn and Sir Antony Jay. 'We thought we'd said it all,' says Lynn, 'but last summer we decided we were wrong.'

You might have supposed that 20 years was a very long time in politics and that Hacker was spending more time with his grandchildren, having written three volumes of memoirs, while Sir Humphrey was enjoying his pension and bemoaning a decline in standards in public life. Moreover, since 1988 we've had Alastair Campbell, the rise of the spin doctor and the foul-mouthed The Thick Of It.

Lynn, 67, who lives in LA directing comedies such as Nuns On The Run and My Cousin Vinny, protests that Yes, Prime Minister is more about the workings of government, and that the cogs haven't really changed at all. 'We invented the idea of politicians using spin, through press spokesmen, and the high-profile spin doctor has fallen out of favour.'

He also points out that the premise of both shows, which ran between 1980 and 1988, is the eternal inversion, beloved by writers from Beaumarchais to Wodehouse, that the servant is more intelligent than his master.

Jay, 69, who lives in Somerset, says 'a stage version had been suggested before, but Paul and Nigel couldn't commit for long enough'. Then Eddington died in 1995, followed by Hawthorne in 2001.

Jay, whose own politics are to the Right (he received his knighthood for writing the Queen's Christmas speeches and once worked in public relations), will not be drawn as to whether it was MPs' expenses that made him decide that a stage version would be 'such fun'. But he insists, like Lynn, that government has only changed on the surface. Indeed, the Sir Humphreys of Whitehall have increased their influence. 'Despite what other people might like you to think, civil servants hold the power. They actually dominate more now because fewer politicians today have experience of real work and the real world. The civil servants have to teach them.'

The comedy of Yes, Prime Minister is in Hacker's frantic attempts to enact change in the face of Sir Humphrey's opposition. But will the public accept new actors in the roles that Eddington and Hawthorne made so much their own?

In the new version, Hacker is played by David Haig (Four Weddings And A Funeral) and Sir Humphrey by Henry Goodman ( London's Burning). Haig, with his black moustache, bears a mildly comic resemblance to Hercule Poirot, while Henry Goodman is a suave silver fox; more like an older George Clooney than Hawthorne's bulbous-nosed mandarin.

'Hacker and Sir Humphrey are paradigms, so any actors can play the part,' insists Jay, who points to the success of the play's recent out-of-town run in Chichester. 'It broke all box office records. David and Henry are so good that after two minutes the audience were really into them. Younger people might not have watched the original series and we have updated the props and gadgets.'

There are BlackBerries and Twitter accounts and a female special adviser who calls the Prime Minister 'Jim'. The words 'bloody' and 'b***job' also make a surprise appearance.

I ask Lynn, whose early career after Cambridge University was stage acting and who is more to the Left than Jay, if they ever had arguments about politics. He guffaws: 'Not when it came to the show. It isn't about party politics. Hacker could be Labour, Conservative or even Lib Dem.'

Henry Goodman tells me: 'There is a quintessential truth about the characters, as there is with Sherlock Holmes. I didn't try to copy Nigel and I didn't feel I had to. 'The premise is all about the characters' position in political life - these Baroque figures who think they should be running the country. It sits on a very interesting border between taking the mick out of power and respecting the skills required in government.'

The show is remarkably topical. With uncanny prescience, Lynn and Jay, who finished the play last June, envisaged a situation where Hacker would be leading a minority government and a coalition and also having to deal with a financial crisis. 'I don't think we are soothsayers,' Lynn laughs. Jay adds that they wanted 'a precarious situation, but we did sort of have the feeling that no one would get an overall majority. So perhaps we are fortune tellers'.

The play is also uncannily topical in other ways, given the Coalition's plan to reduce the size of the Civil Service as part of its radical spending cuts. Jay is pessimistic about the outcome.
'I don't think they will be able to get real cuts to the civil service. The civil servants always win. They are so keen to maintain their power, job security, large pensions and automatic honours.'

There is an episode in Yes, Minister called The Economy Drive, which emphasised this point hilariously.

Hacker: 'How many people do we have in this department?'

Sir Humphrey: 'Ummm ... well, we're very small.'

Hacker: 'Two, maybe 3,000?'

Sir Humphrey: 'About 23,000 to be precise.'

Hacker: 'Twenty-three thousand!!! We need to do a time-and-motion study to see who we can get rid of.'

Sir Humphrey: 'We had one of those last year.'

Hacker: 'And what were the results?'

Sir Humphrey: 'It transpired that we needed another 500 people.'

Lynn says: 'Blair and Campbell made attempts to restyle government and so did Brown, but the civil servants are still running the country. 'Civil servants had to sort out the coalition between Cameron and Clegg. They had surged back when Brown was Prime Minister, as Brown was not a strong leader and power abhors a vacuum.'

Jay believes the present PM seems like a 'very decent, intelligent young man, but he has to avoid reliance on civil servants, by seeking advice from outside experts, academics and even journalists'. Jay explains: 'Blair tried to make government presidential, which took power away from the civil servants as it dealt a blow to ministerial autonomy. But under Brown the civil servants started regaining their power and they will go on trying to do so under the Coalition.'

Henry Goodman feels Sir Humphrey will always have the upper hand.
'His actions are motivated by his desire to maintain his prestige and power. Hacker sees his task as reforming departments, making economies and reducing the size of the civil service. But it never turns out his way.'

He insists there are lessons for the Coalition in Yes, Prime Minister. 'It's a dance of power. Civil servants use this florid language to baffle and intimidate new ministers. They are never on the same side.'

Jay concurs before making the point that politicians are only temporary, unlike civil servants. 'Occasionally you get a Nigel Lawson figure who is really on top of things, but most ministers are run by their departments. 'Of the new boys, Michael Gove (the Education Secretary) might succeed in mastering the Sir Humphreys. You have to have intelligence and strength. But, on average, a minister lasts 11 months and civil servants for 20 or 30 years.'

Both Jay and Lynn have been studying government and politics since the Wilson years. 'We read all the memoirs and diaries we could, like Richard Crossman's diaries, which were very good on the workings of Whitehall. We also got information from Wilson's close friend Marcia Falkender. Many of our comic situations are based on real events.'

Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister have been called as influential as George Orwell's 1984. They were indubitably more accurate. The television scripts are frequently used by schools and universities to enlighten students studying politics.

Jay says, sadly, that the play's the limit. 'This really will be the last outing for Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey.' 'Unless the play is made into a film,' counters Lynn, hopefully.

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