Humphrey intervened. ‘I assure you, Minister, it is just the sort of thing the Prime Minister desperately wants not to know about.’
I told him we’d see. And I left for lunch.
SIR BERNARD WOOLLEY RECALLS:3
I well remember that I felt fearfully downcast after that fateful meeting. Because I couldn’t help wondering if the Minister was right. I voiced this fear to old Humphrey. ‘Most unlikely,’ he replied. ‘What about?’
I explained that I too was worried about ends versus means. I asked Humphrey if I too would end up as a moral vacuum. His reply surprised me. ‘I hope so,’ he told me. ‘If you work hard enough.’
This made me feel more melancholy than before. At that time, you see, I still believed that if it was our job to carry out government policies we ought to believe in them.
Sir Humphrey shook his head and left the room. Later that day I received a memorandum from him. I have it still.
I have been considering your question. Please bear in mind the following points.
I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies I would have been:
1) passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market.
2) passionately committed to going into the Common Market.
3) utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel.
4) utterly convinced of the rightness of denationalising steel.
5) utterly convinced of the rightness of renationalising steel.
6) fervently committed to retaining capital punishment.
7) ardently committed to abolishing capital punishment.
8) a Keynesian.
9) a Friedmanite.
10) a grammar school preserver.
11) a grammar school destroyer.
12) a nationalisation maniac.
13) a privatisation freak.
14) a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.
H.A.
The following day he sent for me, to check that I was fully seized of his ideas and had taken them on board.
Of course, his argument was irrefutable. I freely admitted it. And yet I was
He suggested that we should both believe in stopping Hacker from informing the PM.
Of course he was right. Once the PM knew of this business, there would have to be an enquiry. It would be like Watergate, in which, as you know, the investigation of a trivial break-in led to one ghastly revelation after another and finally to the downfall of a President. The Golden Rule is, was, always has been and always will be: Don’t Lift Lids Off Cans of Worms.
‘Everything is connected to everything else,’ Sir Humphrey explained. ‘Who said that?’
I ventured a guess that it might have been the Cabinet Secretary.
‘Nearly right,’ Sir Humphrey encouraged me. ‘Actually, it was Lenin.’
He then set me the task – to stop my Minister from talking to the PM.
At first I couldn’t see how this could be achieved, and was unwise enough to say. This earned me a sharp rebuke.
‘Work it out,’ he snapped. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a high-flyer – or are you really a low-flyer supported by occasional gusts of wind?’
I could see that this was one of those make-or-break moments in one’s career. I went off and had a quiet think, and I asked myself some questions.
Could I stop my Minister from seeing the PM? Clearly not.
Could Sir Humphrey? No.
Could my friends in the Private Office at Number Ten? Or the Cabinet Office? No.
