The Complete Yes Minister

This list of suggestions would save ?21 million on capital account over five years, and ?750,000 a year on revenue account.

Stanley read the list. There followed a bemused silence. Finally he came up with an answer.

‘That’s just stupid,’ he said.

I asked why.

‘Because,’ he explained laboriously, ‘it’s depriving the disadvantaged of indispensable services.’

‘Jacuzzi pools?’ I asked innocently.

He knew only too well that he was on a very sticky wicket, so changed his line of defence.

‘Look,’ he said, completely abandoning the argument that Thames Marsh couldn’t find the necessary money, ‘I don’t care whether we can afford fall-out shelters or not. This is a unilateralist borough. We don’t believe in nuclear war in Thames Marsh.’

‘Mr Stanley,’ I replied carefully. ‘I don’t believe in nuclear war either. No sane man does. But the provision of fall-out shelters is government policy.’

‘It is not Thames Marsh policy,’ he snarled. ‘Thames Marsh has no quarrel with the USSR.’

‘It’s not just the USSR we’re scared of, it could be the Fr. . . .’

I stopped myself just in time. Had I completed that word I could have caused the biggest international incident of the decade.

‘The who?’ he asked.

I though fast. ‘The fr . . . frigging Chinese’ was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. But it served its purpose, and the crisis passed. And I kept talking. I thought I’d better. Not that it was difficult. The idea of each borough in the UK having its own foreign policy was too absurd to contemplate. The TUC has its own foreign policy, each trade union, now each borough, where is it going to end? Soon they’ll all want their own Foreign Office – as if we haven’t enough problems with the one we’ve got.

The irony is, in practice it is virtually impossible for any institution to have its own foreign policy, even the Government. The Foreign Office sees to that, with the help of Washington, NATO, the EEC and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

So I attempted to show him that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur.

‘If the Russians ever invade us,’ I suggested sarcastically, ‘I suppose they’ll stop at the borough boundaries, will they, and say: Hang on, we’re not at war with the London Borough of Thames Marsh. Right wheel Comrades. Annex Chelsea instead’?

The discussion was becoming fairly heated. [What the press statement would later describe as a ‘frank exchange of views’ – Ed.]

But at this moment Bernard intervened and, excusing himself for interrupting us, handed me a little note. It was most revealing. In no time at all I grasped its contents, and its political significance.

I looked at Comrade Ben. ‘Oh Mr Stanley,’ I said, trying not to smile, ‘it seems that you would not be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice, in any case.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, knowing perfectly well what I meant.

The note contained the information that there is a fall-out shelter under Thames Marsh Town Hall, with a place reserved in it for, among others, the Leader of the Council. I asked if it was true.

‘We didn’t build it.’ I’d got him on the defensive.

‘But you maintain it?’

‘It’s only a very small one,’ he muttered sullenly.

I asked him about his own place in it.

‘I was persuaded with deep reluctance that my preservation was a necessity in the interests of the ratepayers of Thames Marsh.’

So I asked him what provision he had made for other essential people: doctors, nurses, ambulance men, firemen, civil rescue squads, emergency radio and television services? ‘People who might be almost as important as councillors,’ I added sarcastically.

‘One of them’s a chemist.’

‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘Nothing like an aspirin for a nuclear holocaust.’

[Later that week Sir Humphrey Appleby lunched with Sir Arnold Robinson, the Cabinet Secretary, at the Athenaeum Club. As usual Sir Humphrey kept a memo of the meeting – Ed.]

Arnold observed that my Minister had enjoyed quite a little publicity triumph down at Thames Marsh. He seemed pleased, which surprised me.

I’m always worried when this Minister has a triumph of any sort. It invariably leads to trouble because he thinks he has achieved something.

Arnold thinks it’s good when Ministers think they have achieved something. He takes the view that it makes life much easier, because they stop fretting for a bit and we don’t have to put up with their little temper tantrums.

My worry, on the other hand, is that he will want to introduce his next idea.

Arnold was most interested to learn that we have a Minister with two ideas. He couldn’t remember when we last had one of those.