The Complete Yes Minister

To my surprise he heaped abuse upon the scheme. ‘It’s a most imaginative idea. Very novel.’

I wondered what he’d got against it, and invited him to go on.

‘Well . . .’ He returned from the door to my desk, ‘I just wondered if it might not be a little unwise.’

I asked him why.

‘A valuable civic amenity,’ he replied.

I pointed out that it is a monstrosity.

He amended his view slightly. ‘A valuable civic monstrosity,’ he said, and added that it contained a most important collection of British paintings.

He’s obviously been misinformed. In fact, as I told him then and there, the collection is utterly unimportant. Third-rate nineteenth-century landscapes and a few modern paintings so awful that the Tate wouldn’t even store them in its vaults.

‘But an important representative collection of unimportant paintings,’ insisted Sir Humphrey, ‘and a great source of spiritual uplift to the passing citizenry.’

‘They never go in,’ I told him.

‘Ah, but they are comforted to know it’s there,’ he said.

I couldn’t see where this was leading, what it had to do with Humphrey Appleby, or how he could possibly have any views about this collection of paintings at all. He’s hardly ever been north of Potters Bar.

I took a stand on a principle. I reminded him that this is a constituency matter, that it concerns the Borough Council and me as constituency MP – not as Minister – and that it was nothing at all to do with him or Whitehall.

He pursed his lips and made no reply. So I asked him why he was interested. To my surprise he told me that it was a matter of principle.

This astonished me. Throughout our whole fight on the question of the bomb detonators he had insisted with religious fervour that principles were no concern of his. I reminded him of this.

‘Yes Minister.’ He conceded the point. ‘But principle is what you’ve always told me that government is all about.’

I was baffled. ‘What principle is at stake here?’

‘The principle of taking money away from the Arts and putting it into things like football. A football club is a commercial proposition. There is no cause for subsidising it if it runs out of money.’

He seemed to think that he had just made an irrefutable statement of fact.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Why not what?’

‘Why is there no cause? There’s no difference between subsidising football and subsidising art except that lots more people are interested in football.’

‘Subsidy,’ he replied, ‘is to enable our cultural heritage to be preserved.’

But for whom? For whose benefit? For the educated middle classes. For people like Humphrey, in other words. Subsidy means they can get their opera and their concerts and their Shakespeare more cheaply than if the full cost had to be recouped from ticket sales. He thinks that the rest of the country should subsidise the pleasures of a middle-class few who want to see theatre, opera and ballet.

‘Arts subsidy,’ I told him simply, ‘is a middle-class rip-off. The middle classes, who run the country, award subsidies to their own pleasures.’

He was shocked. Genuinely shocked, I think. ‘How can you say such a thing? Subsidy is about education and preserving the pinnacles of our civilisation. Or hadn’t you noticed?’ he added scathingly.

I ordered him not to patronise me. I reminded him that I also believe in education – indeed, I am a graduate of the London School of Economics.

‘I’m glad to learn that even the LSE is not totally opposed to education,’ he remarked. I rose above his pathetic Oxbridge joke, and remarked that there is no possible objection to subsidising sport. Sport is subsidised in many ways already. And sport is educational.

Sir Humphrey’s sarcasm was in full swing. ‘Education is not the whole point,’ he said, having said that it was the whole point not two minutes earlier. ‘After all, we have sex education too – should we subsidise sex perhaps?’

‘Could we?’ asked Bernard, waking up suddenly like a hopeful Dormouse. Humphrey scowled at him.

I was enjoying the cut and thrust of our intellectual debate, particularly as I seemed to be doing most of the cutting and thrusting.

I proposed to Humphrey that we might, in fact, choose what to subsidise by the extent of public demand. I certainly can’t see anything wrong with the idea. It’s democratic at least.

Humphrey normally ignores me when I’m being provocative, unless a serious policy decision of mine is at stake. But for some reason it seemed important to him to persuade me to change my mind.

‘Minister,’ he said, pleading for me to understand his elitist point of view, ‘don’t you see that this is the thin end of the wedge. What will happen to the Royal Opera House, on this basis? The very summit of our cultural achievement.’

As a matter of fact, I don’t think that the Royal Opera House is the summit of our achievement. It’s a very good case in point – it’s all Wagner and Mozart, Verdi and Puccini. German and Italian. It’s not our culture at all. Why should we subsidise the culture of the Axis Powers?