Yes, Prime Minister: Re-elected Page #5

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Private Secretary."

And Hacker says, and this happened

to me in way, Hacker says,

"Does anyone type letters?"

I remember going to Japan

when I was Permanent Secretary

at the Treasury and they translated

my title into Japanese and back.

And

they laughed when I was introduced.

And I said, "What did they say?"

They said, "They described you

as an eternal typist."

THEY LAUGH:

Obviously,

that means I do the letters!

Do you mean to seriously tell me

that if I transfer everything

from here to here without even

reading it, that's all I have to do?

Yes.

It'll be dealt with?

Precisely.

Properly?

Immaculately.

Well, what's a minister

here for then?

Err...

Ministers have no managerial

experience in the

vast majority of cases.

And they run, they turn up to run

a giant bureaucracy,

and they've never run

anything before.

And there is no induction,

there is no training.

Ministers going in never,

very rarely,

even talk to the ones going out.

So it's not surprising that there

are these, I can't get on with,

I don't know what to do,

they won't do what I tell them.

They've never done

anything of a managerial nature.

And holding Jim's department

together

was his Principal Private

Secretary, Bernard Woolley,

whose job it was to remain the model

of professional impartiality.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

I don't think so, Minister.

I'm not thinking anything, really.

I think I begin to smell a rat.

Oh, shall I get an

Environmental Health officer?

Bernard is, is an ear.

He's somebody that the other

two can talk to.

He has his own character

and his own issues,

but structurally he's most

important because he's

a recipient of the point of view

of both of the two main characters.

Well, confidentially, Minister,

everything you tell me

is in complete confidence.

So equally,

and I'm sure you appreciate this,

and by appreciate I don't actually

mean appreciate, I mean understand

that everything Sir Humphrey tells

me is also in complete confidence.

As indeed, everything I tell you is

in complete confidence.

And for that matter,

everything I tell Sir Humphrey

is in complete confidence.

To discover just how difficult

the job of being a real-life

Bernard is, Derek Fowlds has been

granted top security access

to Whitehall's Cabinet Offices

to meet the man who was

a real-life Bernard, Robin Butler.

I remember once

when I went to Number Ten,

somebody came up to me

and said, "I'm Bernard".

I said, "No, I'm Bernard".

And he said,

"No, that person's Bernard,

"and the other bloke over

there's Bernard."

Yes.

So you were Bernard?

I was Bernard, yeah, for three years

to Margaret Thatcher.

So was it an

accurate portrayal of Bernard?

It was, yes.

It was very accurate.

I wouldn't say that

Paul Eddington, Jim Hacker,

was an accurate portrayal of

Margaret Thatcher.

No!

But in my life,

Derek, I've played Sir Humphrey,

and I've played Bernard.

Yes.

Never had the chance

to play Jim Hacker.

You know, when I was playing

Bernard, I always found it

very difficult

because I was in the middle.

And sometimes

I agreed with the Minister,

then I'd agree with Sir Humphrey.

And I had to walk a fence.

I want to know, is that familiar?

Very, very familiar.

You were always

absolutely charming, Derek.

You were...

Was I?

Yeah, charming, you sat there and

when you agreed with the Minister,

Sir Humphrey would put

you right quite quickly afterwards.

I remember he used to take

you into his study and sit you down,

and tell you the error of your ways,

if you agreed with the...

Yes.

Like a naughty schoolboy.

..with the Minister.

Who was doing that to you,

when you were...?

Well, the Sir Humphrey when I was you

was Robert Armstrong,

Sir Robert Armstrong.

Oh, I remember him, yes.

Yeah.

But he was a close friend.

He'd been Sir Humphrey,

he'd been Bernard before.

And so he understood

what it was all about.

So, I don't think

he ever had actually to reproach me.

Now, I want to ask you a question.

I've always wanted to ask you this.

Who really does run the country?

Is it the Government,

or is it the civil service?

The Government.

I mean, you know,

ministers, ministers...

You said that without a pause.

Well, because I've always

believed it, actually.

I think it's very important,

you know, for the civil service

to recognise that ministers

are the elected people.

They must have the final decision.

And then it was my job to carry it

out as efficiently as I could.

So the buck stopped with them.

The buck stopped with them.

They were the ones who had to

get re-elected.

And you had to carry,

carry it through?

Yes.

Even though you were against it?

Yes.

It's been a great pleasure.

And, as I say, an honour.

And it's lovely to see you again.

And thank you, thank you so much.

But for all Bernard and

Sir Humphrey's institutional

befuddlement, Hacker was about to be

propelled to the top job.

So, coming up, our committee casts

judgment on our favourite

fictional

Prime Minister, Jim Hacker.

No, no, look this is a good joke.

And he is a very good joke

but he's not a Prime Minister.

And we look at how the show's

number one fan

muscled her way in on the act.

I look forward to receiving

your plan for abolition soon.

Er, tomorrow, shall we say?

The greatest satire about

British bureaucracy is back.

The new series of

Yes, Prime Minister sees Jim Hacker

holed up at Chequers trying to

solve our financial woes.

"Jim Hacker Saves Europe!"

Yes.

Nothing else can go wrong

tonight, can it?

Whilst our modern day Jim Hacker is

tackling issues on a global scale,

back in the '80s, Mrs Thatcher's

problems were generally

much closer to home, with riots,

strikes and mass unemployment.

But none of this stopped her

tuning in to her favourite show.

When you have time to watch TV,

what's your favourite programme?

I've just finished watching

Yes, Minister.

Do you ever watch that?

No.

Well, it was a take-off of a

minister and his civil servant

and it was marvellous.

Some bits of it were totally true

and some not so true.

I'm not sure that Mrs Thatcher found

anything terribly hilarious

but she found it terribly amusing.

In fact, Mrs Thatcher was

so taken with the show that

she engineered a rather bizarre

meeting with its stars.

One of the BBC's most popular

comedy series won an award

today from the National Viewers

and Listeners Association.

The series is Yes, Minister,

about the conflicts

between politicians

and their civil servants.

The award was presented

by the programme's biggest fan.

We were asked if we would

accept an award from

the National Viewers

and Listeners Association.

We were then told that Mrs Thatcher

was going to present the award,

which disturbed me, because that made

it in some sense political.

Then, about two days before it

happened, we got the message

saying that she had written a

sketch, a really improbable notion!

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