Sir Antony Jay’s ‘Yes Minister’: How a 1980s Show Foresaw Brexit

An ode to the ‘Yes Minister’ co-writer Sir Antony Jay who passed away recently; his show had made Thatcher laugh.

‘Yes Minister’ sitcom was known to highlight the typical follies committed by people once they attain a position of power. (Photo courtesy: @globalsnewsroom/ Twitter)

Sir Antony Jay, co-writer of Yes Minister, the world’s finest television political comedy, died on 26 August at the age of 86.The show was a global favourite. My grandfather, a health administrator in the central government, spoke of it with great fondness. My dad, a technocrat in his home state of Jammu and Kashmir, counts it among his all-time favourite shows.

Driven by their mirth, I watched Yes Minister videos. It was easy to figure out why they loved it so much.The show came to be seen as the bedrock programme in the comedy genre. It ran for three series between 1980 and 1984 and followed the travails of MP James Hacker, minister for administrative affairs, and his battles against unflappable Whitehall civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby.

It is famously said of Yes Minister: It embodied the early 1980s attitude to authority and politics as a gently hypocritical world replete with double-talk. Michael Dobbs, who wrote House of Cards, said the show “really got to the heart of so much of what goes on in Whitehall and Westminster”.

The subsequent Yes, Prime Minister episodes, broadcast for two seasons between 1986 and 1988, portrayed Hacker’s life after he entered 10 Downing Street.

Sir Anthony Jay, co-writer of ‘Yes Minister’ passed away on 26 August. He was 86. (Photo courtesy: @globalsnewsroom/ Twitter)

Satire on Bureaucracy

Yes Minister maintained a timeless quality. It has endured for decades, moving far beyond the Thatcherite politics it satirised. In Yes Minister, Sir Antony Jay and co-writer Jonathan Lynn gave us British satire at its best.

Then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was known to be a great fan of the series.Yes Minister brought to us Member of Parliament James Hacker, Minister for Administrative Affairs, and his attempts to make officialdom and administration make sense. Throughout his career, he was up against Sir Humphrey Appleby, the unflappable symbol of the British bureaucratic machine “that has no gears, only brakes”.

The humour was in Jim’s efforts to cut costs or streamline red tape. These were always sabotaged by the Machiavellian skills of the civil servant. Sir Humphrey Appleby, described as the avatar of the British state, came up with complex sentences which thoroughly confused Hacker.

Totally snobbish and elitist, Sir Humphrey was blind to anything that did not serve the power corridors of the state.The satirical brilliance of Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn ensured that MP Hacker could never be clearly labelled as Labour or Conservative. The duo removed the trappings of a particular party that would slot the MP. This gave them space to exhibit the worst of both parties, to the hilarity of its worldwide audience.

Predicted Britain’s Foreign Policy

After Brexit earlier this year, a 1980 clip from Yes Minister went viral. The video was widely circulated on WhatsApp the world over, because it pretty much summed up the fiasco.

The clip gave the millennium generation a glimpse of the total brilliance of this fantastic political comedy.The scene was first aired in March 1980. It saw the unflappable bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby attempting to explain Britain’s relationship with the European Union to MP and government minister Jim Hacker. Appleby’s monologue is outstanding. It totally confounds MP James Hacker, who sits through it with an incredulous, baffled expression.

Appleby: “The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it’s so anti-Europe. Britain has had the same foreign objective policy for at least the last five hundred years; to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well? We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work.”

And then Appleby concluded triumphantly, “Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing.”

(The writer is a social activist from Jammu and Kashmir and can be reached at @AfanYesvi. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)