The Complete Yes Minister

a sticky wicket, but on the whole I think I was able to reassure him that I’m handling these difficult problems as well as anybody could reasonably expect. [Appleby Papers 31/RJC/638]

[Hacker’s diary resumes – Ed.]

May 4th

Today was the Benefactor’s Dinner at Baillie College, Oxford, which was, I think, an unqualified success.

For a start, on the way up to Oxford I learned a whole pile of useful gossip from young Bernard.

Apparently Sir Humphrey was summoned by the Cabinet Secretary yesterday and, according to Bernard, got the most frightful wigging. The Cabinet Secretary really tore him off a strip, because of Bernard’s brilliant scheme linking economies to honours.

Interestingly, Bernard continues to refer to it as my scheme – on this occasion, because we were in the official car and of course Roy [the driver – Ed.] was quietly memorising every word we said, for future buying and selling. No doubt he can sell news of Sir Humphrey’s wigging for quite a price in the drivers’ pool, though, it should be worth several small leaks in exchange, I should think. So Roy should have some useful snippets in two or three days, which I must remember to extract from him.

I asked Bernard how the Cabinet Secretary actually goes about giving a wigging to someone as high up as Humphrey.

‘Normally,’ Bernard informed me, ‘it’s pretty civilised. But this time, apparently, it was no holds barred. Sir Arnold told Sir Humphrey that he wasn’t actually reprimanding him!’

‘That bad?’

‘He actually suggested,’ Bernard continued, ‘that some people might not think Sir Humphrey was sound.’

Roy’s ears were out on stalks.

‘I see,’ I said, with some satisfaction. ‘A real punch-up.’

Sir Arnold was so bothered by this whole thing that I wondered if he had a personal stake in it. But I couldn’t see why. I presumed he must have his full quota of honours.

I asked Bernard if Arnold already had his G. Bernard nodded. [You get your G after your K. G is short for Grand Cross. K is a Knighthood. Each department has its own honours. The DAA gets the Bath – Sir Humphrey was, at this time, a KCB, and would have been hoping for his G – thus becoming a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.

In the FCO the Honours are the Cross of St Michael and St George – CMG, KCMG, and GCMG. The Foreign Office is not popular throughout the rest of the Civil Service, and it is widely held that the CMG stands for ‘Call Me God’, the KCMG for ‘Kindly Call Me God’ and the GCMG for ‘God Calls Me God’ – Ed.]

However, Bernard revealed that although Sir Arnold has indeed got his G, there are numerous honours to which he could still aspire: a peerage, for instance, an OM [Order of Merit – Ed.] or a CH [Companion of Honour – Ed.], the Order of the Garter, the Knight of the Thistle, etc.

I asked him about the Knight of the Thistle. ‘Who do they award the Thistle to, Scotsmen and donkeys?’ I enquired wittily.

‘There is a distinction,’ said Bernard, ever the diplomat.

‘You can’t have met the Scottish nationalists,’ I replied, quick as a flash. I wasn’t bothered by Roy’s flapping lugs. ‘How do they award the Thistle?’ I asked.

‘A committee sits on it,’ said Bernard.

I asked Bernard to brief me about this High Table dinner. ‘Does Humphrey really think that I will change government policy on University Finance as a result?’

Bernard smiled and said he’d heard Baillie College gives a very good dinner.

We got to Oxford in little over an hour. The M40 is a very good road. So is the M4, come to think of it. I found myself wondering why we’ve got two really good roads to Oxford before we got any to Southampton, or Dover or Felixstowe or any of the ports.

Bernard explained that nearly all of our Permanent Secretaries were at Oxford. And most Oxford Colleges give you a good dinner.

This seemed incredible – and yet it has the ring of truth about it. ‘But did the Cabinet let them get away with this?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ Bernard explained. ‘They put their foot down. They said there’d be no motorway to take civil servants to dinners in Oxford unless there was a motorway to take Cabinet Ministers hunting in the Shires. That’s why when the Ml was built in the fifties it stopped in the middle of Leicestershire.’

There seemed one flaw in this argument. I pointed out that the M11 has only just been completed. ‘Don’t Cambridge colleges give you a good dinner?’

‘Of course,’ said Bernard, ‘but it’s years and years since the Department of Transport had a Permanent Secretary from Cambridge.’

[It is most interesting to compare Hacker’s account of the dinner with Sir Bernard Woolley’s recollections of the same event. First, Hacker’s version – Ed.]

The dinner itself went off perfectly.

I knew they wanted to discuss their financial problems, so when we reached the port and walnuts I decided to open up Pandora’s box, let the cat out of the bag and get the ball rolling. [Hacker never really learned to conquer his mixed metaphor problem – Ed.] So I remarked that, for a college on the edge of bankruptcy we had not had a bad little dinner. In truth, of course, we’d had a wildly extravagant banquet with four courses and three excellent wines.

The Master countered by informing me that the Fitzwalter Dinner is paid for by a specific endowment – Fitzwalter was a great sixteenth-century benefactor.