The Complete Yes Minister

6 The Right to Know

February 9th

Today I had an environmental issue to deal with. A deputation of several environmentalists brought me a petition. Six fat exercise books, full of signatures. There must be thousands of signatures, if not hundreds of thousands.

They were protesting about my proposed new legislation to sort out all the existing confusions and anomalies in the present system — not that you can call it a system — which is a mess, a hotchpotch. Local authorities, tourist authorities, national parks, the National Trust, the Countryside Commission, the CPRE[11] are all backbiting and buckpassing and nobody knows where they are and nothing gets done. The sole purpose of the new legislation is to tidy all this up and make all these wretched committees work together.

I explained this to the deputation. ‘You know what committees are?’ I said. ‘Always squabbling and procrastinating and wasting everyone’s time.’

‘We are a committee,’ said one of them, an unprepossessing bespectacled female of indeterminate age but clear upper-middle-class Hampstead origins. She seemed rather offended.

I explained that I didn’t mean her sort of committee; all that I was trying to do was create a new authority with clear simple procedures. Public money will be saved. It seems to me that it should be welcome to everyone.

However, these representatives of the Hampstead middle class were worried about some place called Hayward’s Spinney. Apparently it is going to lose its protected status under the new scheme — like one or two other places — because it’s simply not economic to administer it properly.

But it seems that Hayward’s Spinney is regarded by some of these cranks as a vital part of Britain’s heritage. ‘The badgers have dwelt in it for generations,’ spluttered an elderly upper-class socialist of the Michael Foot patrician ilk.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, simply out of curiosity.

‘It said so in The Guardian,’ said an intense young man in hobnail boots.

Some reason for believing anything! You’ve only got to be in public life for about a week before you start to question if the newspapers are even giving you today’s date with any accuracy! However, the young man thrust a copy of The Guardian at me.

I looked at the story he had circled in red. Actually, what The Guardian said was: ‘The bodgers have dwelt in it for in it for generators.’

I read it aloud, and laughed, but they appeared to have absolutely no sense of humour. Then the middle-aged lady in a brown tweed skirt that enveloped mighty hips demanded, ‘How would you feel if you were going to have office blocks built all over your garden by a lot of giant badgers?’

Giant badgers? I tried not to laugh at this Monty Pythonesque vision, while another of these freaks continued self-righteously, ‘There’s nothing special about man, Mr Hacker. We’re not above nature. We’re all a part of it. Men are animals too, you know.’

Obviously I knew that already. I’d just come from the House of Commons.

Bernard helped me get rid of them after about ten minutes. I made no promises to them, and gave them the usual bromides about all views being taken into consideration at the appropriate stage. But I am concerned that no one in the Department warned me that unifying the administration of the countryside would mean removing special protected status from these blasted badgers. Not that I give a damn about badgers, but I have been allowed to tell Parliament and the press that no loss of amenity was involved.

I should take this matter up with Humphrey tomorrow.

I shall also take up the matter of why my time is being wasted with footling meetings of this kind, when I want to spend much more time meeting junior staff here, getting to know their problems, and generally finding out how to run the Department more efficiently.

[We discovered a remarkable exchange of memos between Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley, written during this week — Ed.]

[Translation: ‘Considered all the implications’ means ‘You are making a complete balls-up of your job.’ ‘Consequences which could be unfortunate, or even regrettable’ means ‘You are in imminent danger of being transferred to the War Graves Commission’ — Ed.]

SIR BERNARD WOOLLEY RECALLS:[12]

Being rather young and green at this time, I was still somewhat puzzled about how to put Sir Humphrey’s advice into practice, as the Minister made these diary appointments for himself and was getting thoroughly on top of his work.

I sought a meeting with Sir Humphrey, and began it by attempting to explain that I couldn’t prevent the Minister from doing what he wanted if he had the time.

Sir Humphrey was thunderously angry! He asked me why the Minister had free time. He told me to ensure that the Minister never had free time, and that it was my fault if he had. My job was to create activity. The Minister must make speeches, go on provincial visits, foreign junkets, meet deputations, work through mountains of red boxes, and be forced to deal with crises, emergencies and panics.

If the Minister made spaces in his diary, I was to fill them up again. And I was to make sure that he spent his time where he was not under our feet and would do no damage — the House of Commons for instance.

However, I do recall that I managed to redeem myself a little when I was able to inform Sir Humphrey that the Minister was — even as we spoke — involved in a completely trivial meeting about preserving badgers in Warwickshire.

In fact, he was so pleased that I suggested that I should try to find some other threatened species with which to involve the Minister. Sir Humphrey replied that I need not look far — Private Secretaries who could not occupy their Ministers were a threatened species.

February 10th

This morning I raised the matter of the threatened furry animals, and the fact that I told the House that no loss of amenity was involved.

Sir Humphrey said that I’d told the House no such thing. The speech had contained the words: ‘No significant loss of amenity.’

I thought this was the same thing, but Sir Humphrey disabused me. ‘On the contrary, there’s all the difference in the world, Minister. Almost anything can be attacked as a loss of amenity and almost anything can be defended as not a significant loss of amenity. One must appreciate the significance of significant.’

I remarked that six books full of signatures could hardly be called insignificant. Humphrey suggested I look inside them. I did, and to my utter astonishment I saw that there were a handful of signatures in each book, about a hundred altogether at the most. A very cunning ploy — a press photo of a petition of six fat books is so much more impressive than a list of names on a sheet of Basildon Bond.

And indeed, the publicity about these badgers could really be rather damaging.

However, Humphrey had organised a press release which says that the relevant spinney is merely deregistered, not threatened; that badgers are very plentiful all over Warwickshire; that there is a connection between badgers and brucellosis; and which reiterates that there is no ‘significant loss of amenity’.

We called in the press officer, who agreed with Humphrey that it was unlikely to make the national press except a few lines perhaps on an inside page of The Guardian. The consensus at our meeting was that it is only the urban intellectual middle class who worry about the preservation of the countryside because they don’t have to live in it. They just read about it. Bernard says their protest is rooted more in Thoreau than in anger. I am beginning to get a little tired of his puns.

So we’d dealt satisfactorily with the problems of the animal kingdom. Now I went on to raise the important fundamental question: Why was I not told the full facts before I made the announcement to the House?

Humphrey’s reason was astonishing. ‘Minister,’ he said blandly, ‘there are those who have argued — and indeed very cogently — that on occasion there are some things it is better for the Minister not to know.’

I could hardly believe my ears. But there was more to come.

‘Minister,’ he continued unctuously, ‘your answers in the House and at the press conference were superb. You were convinced, and therefore convincing. Could you have spoken with the same authority if the ecological pressure group had been badgering you?’

Leaving aside this awful pun, which in any case I suspect might have been unintentional despite Humphrey’s pretensions to wit, I was profoundly shocked by this open assertion of his right to keep me, the people’s representative, in ignorance. Absolutely monstrous. I told him so.

He tried to tell me that it is in my best interests, a specious argument if ever I heard one. I told him that it was intolerable, and must not occur again.

And I intend to see that it doesn’t.

February 16th

For the past week Frank Weisel and I have been hard at work on a plan to reorganise the Department. One of the purposes was to have assorted officials at all levels reporting to me.

Today I attempted to explain the new system to Sir Humphrey, who effectively refused to listen.

Instead, he interrupted as I began, and told me that he had something to say to me that I might not like to hear. He said it as if this were something new!

As it happens, I’d left my dictaphone running, and his remarks were recorded for posterity. What he actually said to me was: ‘Minister, the traditional allocation of executive responsibilities has always been so determined as to liberate the Ministerial incumbent from the administrative minutiae by devolving the managerial functions to those whose experience and qualifications have better formed them for the performance of such humble offices, thereby releasing their political overlords for the more onerous duties and profound deliberations that are the inevitable concomitant of their exalted position.’

I couldn’t imagine why he thought I wouldn’t want to hear that. Presumably he thought it would upset me — but how can you be upset by something you don’t understand a word of?

Yet again, I begged him to express himself in plain English. This request always surprises him, as he is always under the extraordinary impression that he has done so.

Nevertheless, he thought hard for a moment and then, plainly, opted for expressing himself in words of one syllable.

‘You are not here to run this Department,’ he said.

I was somewhat taken aback. I remarked that I think I am, and the public thinks so too.

‘With respect,’ he said, and I restrained myself from punching him in the mouth, ‘you are wrong and they are wrong.’

He then went on to say that it is his job to run the Department. And that my job is to make policy, get legislation enacted and — above all — secure the Department’s budget in Cabinet.

‘Sometimes I suspect,’ I said to him, ‘that the budget is all you really care about.’

‘It is rather important,’ he answered acidly. ‘If nobody cares about the budget we could end up with a Department so small that even a Minister could run it.’

I’m sure he’s not supposed to speak to me like this.

However, I wasn’t upset because I’m sure of my ground. ‘Humphrey,’ I enquired sternly, ‘are we about to have a fundamental disagreement about the nature of democracy?’

As always, he back-pedalled at once when seriously under fire. ‘No, Minister,’ he said in his most oily voice, giving his now familiar impression of Uriah Heep, ‘we are merely having a demarcation dispute. I am only saying that the menial chore of running a Department is beneath you. You were fashioned for a nobler calling.’

Of course, the soft soap had no effect on me. I insisted on action, now! To that end, we left it that he would look at my reorganisation plan. He promised to do his best to put it into practice, and will set up a committee of enquiry with broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we can take the right decisions based on long-term considerations. He argued that this was preferable to rushing prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived actions which might have unforeseen repercussions. This seems perfectly satisfactory to me; he has conceded the need for wide-ranging reforms, and we might as well be sure of getting them right.

Meanwhile, while I was quite happy to leave all the routine paperwork to Humphrey and his officials, from now on I was to have direct access to all information. Finally, I made it clear that I never again wished to hear the phrase, ‘there are some things it is better for a Minister not to know.’

February 20th

Saturday today, and I’ve been at home in the constituency.

I’m very worried about Lucy. [Hacker’s daughter, eighteen years old at this time — Ed.] She really does seem to be quite unbalanced sometimes. I suppose it’s all my fault. I’ve spent little enough time with her over the years, pressure of work and all that, and it’s obviously no coincidence that virtually all my successful colleagues in the House have highly acrimonious relationships with their families and endlessly troublesome adolescent children.

But it can’t all be my fault. Some of it must be her own fault! Surely!

She was out half the night and came down for a very late breakfast, just as Annie and I were starting an early lunch. She picked up the Mail with a gesture of disgust — solely because it’s not the Socialist Worker, or Pravda, I suppose.

I had glanced quickly through all the papers in the morning, as usual, and a headline on a small story on an inside page of The Guardian gave me a nasty turn. HACKER THE BADGER BUTCHER. The story was heavily slanted against me and in favour of the sentimental wet liberals — not surprising really, every paper has to pander to its typical reader.

Good old Grauniad.

I nobly refrained from saying to Lucy, ‘Good afternoon’ when she came down, and from making a crack about a sit-in when she told us she’d been having a lie-in.

However, I did ask her why she was so late home last night, to which she replied, rather pompously, ‘There are some things it is better for a father not to know.’ ‘Don’t you start,’ I snapped, which, not surprisingly, puzzled her a little.

She told me she’d been out with the trots. I was momentarily sympathetic and suggested she saw the doctor. Then I realised she meant the Trotskyites. I’d been slow on the uptake because I didn’t know she was a Trotskyite. Last time we talked she’d been a Maoist.

‘Peter’s a Trot,’ she explained.

‘Peter?’ My mind was blank.

‘You’ve only met him about fifteen times,’ she said in her most scathing tones, the voice that teenage girls specially reserve for when they speak to their fathers.

Then Annie, who could surely see that I was trying to work my way through five red boxes this weekend, asked me to go shopping with her at the ‘Cash and Carry’, to unblock the kitchen plughole, and mow the lawn. When I somewhat irritably explained to her about the boxes, she said they could wait!

‘Annie,’ I said, ‘it may have escaped your notice that I am a Minister of the Crown. A member of Her Majesty’s Government. I do a fairly important job.’

Annie was strangely unsympathetic. She merely answered that I have twenty-three thousand civil servants to help me, whereas she had none. ‘You can play with your memos later,’ she said. ‘The drains need fixing now.’

I didn’t even get round to answering her, as at that moment Lucy stretched across me and spilled marmalade off her knife all over the cabinet minutes. I tried to scrape it off, but merely succeeded in buttering the minutes as well.

I told Lucy to get a cloth, a simple enough request, and was astounded by the outburst that it provoked. ‘Get it yourself,’ she snarled. ‘You’re not in Whitehall now, you know. “Yes Minister”… “No Minister”… “Please may I lick your boots, Minister?”’

I was speechless. Annie intervened on my side, though not as firmly as I would have liked. ‘Lucy, darling,’ she said in a tone of mild reproof, ‘that’s not fair. Those civil servants are always kowtowing to Daddy, but they never take any real notice of him.’

This was too much. So I explained to Annie that only two days ago I won a considerable victory at the Department. And to prove it I showed her the pile of five red boxes stuffed full of papers.

She didn’t think it proved anything of the sort. ‘For a short while you were getting the better of Sir Humphrey Appleby, but now they’ve snowed you under again.’

I thought she’d missed the point. I explained my reasoning: that Humphrey had said to me, in so many words, that there are some things that it’s better for a Minister not to know, which means that he hides things from me. Important things, perhaps. So I have now insisted that I’m told everything that goes on in the Department.

However, her reply made me rethink my situation. She smiled at me with genuine love and affection, and said:

‘Darling, how did you get to be a Cabinet Minister? You’re such a clot.’

Again I was speechless.

Annie went on, ‘Don’t you see, you’ve played right into his hands? He must be utterly delighted. You’ve given him an open invitation to swamp you with useless information.’

I suddenly saw it all with new eyes. I dived for the red boxes — they contained feasibility studies, technical reports, past papers of assorted committees, stationery requisitions… junk!

It’s Catch-22. Those bastards. Either they give you so little information that you don’t know the facts, or so much information that you can’t find them.

You can’t win. They get you coming and going.

February 21st

The contrasts in a Minister’s life are supposed by some people to keep you sane and ordinary and feet-on-the-ground. I think they’re making me schizoid.

All week I’m protected and cosseted and cocooned. My every wish is somebody’s command. (Not on matters of real substance of course, but in little everyday matters.) My letters are written, my phone is answered, my opinion is sought, I’m waited on hand and foot and I’m driven everywhere by chauffeurs, and everyone addresses me with the utmost respect as if I were a kind of God.

But this is all on government business. The moment I revert to party business or private life, the whole apparatus deserts me. If I go to a party meeting, I must get myself there, by bus if necessary; if I go home on constituency business, no secretary accompanies me; if I have a party speech to make, there’s no one to type it out for me. So every weekend I have to adjust myself to doing the washing up and unblocking the plughole after five days of being handled like a priceless cut-glass antique.

And this weekend, although I came home on Friday night on the train, five red boxes arrived on Saturday morning in a chauffeur-driven car!

Today I awoke, having spent a virtually sleepless night pondering over what Annie had said to me. I staggered down for breakfast, only to find — to my amazement — a belligerent Lucy lying in wait for me. She’d found yesterday’s Guardian and had been reading the story about the badgers.

‘There’s a story about you here, Daddy,’ she said accusingly.

I said I’d read it. Nonetheless she read it out to me. ‘Hacker the badger butcher,’ she said.

‘Daddy’s read it, darling,’ said Annie, loyally. As if stone-deaf, Lucy read the whole story aloud. I told her it was a load of rubbish, she looked disbelieving, so I decided to explain in detail.

‘One: I am not a badger butcher. Two: the badger is not an endangered species. Three: the removal of protective status does not necessarily mean the badgers will be killed. Four: if a few badgers have to be sacrificed for the sake of a master plan that will save Britain’s natural heritage — tough!’

Master plan is always a bad choice of phrase, particularly to a generation brought up on Second World War films. ‘Ze master plan, mein Führer,’ cried my darling daughter, giving a Nazi salute. ‘Ze end justifies ze means, does it?’

Apart from the sheer absurdity of a supporter of the Loony Left having the nerve to criticise someone else for believing that the end justifies the means — which I don’t or not necessarily, anyway — she is really making a mountain out of a ridiculous molehill.

‘It’s because badgers haven’t got votes, isn’t it?’ This penetrating question completely floored me. I couldn’t quite grasp what she was on about.

‘If badgers had votes you wouldn’t be exterminating them. You’d be up there at Hayward’s Spinney, shaking paws and kissing cubs. Ingratiating yourself the way you always do. Yuk!’

Clearly I have not succeeded in ingratiating myself with my own daughter.

Annie intervened again. ‘Lucy,’ she said, rather too gently I thought, ‘that’s not a very nice thing to say.’

‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’ said Lucy.

Annie said: ‘Ye-e-es, it’s true… but well, he’s in politics. Daddy has to be ingratiating.’

Thanks a lot.

‘It’s got to be stopped,’ said Lucy. Having finished denouncing me, she was now instructing me.

‘Too late.’ I smiled nastily. ‘The decision’s been taken, dear.’

‘I’m going to stop it, then,’ she said.

Silly girl. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘That should be quite easy. Just get yourself adopted as a candidate, win a general election, serve with distinction on the back benches, be appointed a Minister and repeal the act. No problem. Of course, the badgers might be getting on a bit by then.’

She flounced out and, thank God, stayed out for the rest of the day.

[Meanwhile, Bernard Woolley was becoming increasingly uneasy about keeping secrets from the Minister. He was finding it difficult to accustom himself to the idea that civil servants apply the ‘need to know’ principle that is the basis of all security activities. Finally he sent a memo to Sir Humphrey, asking for a further explanation as to why the Minister should not be allowed to know whatever he wants to know. The reply is printed below — Ed.]

[It is worth examining Sir Humphrey Appleby’s choice of words in this memo. The phrase ‘the common ground’, for example, was much used by senior civil servants after two changes in government in the first four years of the 1970s. It seemed to mean policies that the Civil Service can pursue without disturbance to the party in power. ‘Courageous’ as used in this context is an even more damning word than ‘controversial’. ‘Controversial’ only means ‘this will lose you votes’. ‘Courageous’ means ‘this will lose you the election’ — Ed.]

February 22nd

[The above letter was found by Bernard Woolley when he opened Hacker’s boxes in the office on Monday 22 February. The envelope was addressed to ‘Daddy’ but rules state that Private Secretaries open every letter of every classification up to and including TOP SECRET, unless specifically marked PERSONAL. This was a letter not marked PERSONAL. Hacker’s diary continues — Ed.]

This afternoon seemed to last an eternity. I think I’ve more or less got over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but it was one of the worst afternoons of my political life so far. However, I shall relate it from the start. Firstly, there was Jak’s cartoon in the Standard.

Then, on my return from cabinet Committee after lunch, Bernard and Humphrey edged into the office looking extremely anxious. I asked if anything was wrong.

For the next four minutes they appeared to speak in riddles.

‘Shall we say, a slight embarrassment,’ said Sir Humphrey.

‘How slight?’ I asked.

First he rambled on about not wishing to overstate the case or suggest that there was any cause for under alarm, but nevertheless… etc. etc. I told him to get on with it, he told me he had a confession to make, and I told him to make a clean breast of it.

‘Not the happiest of phrases, in the circumstances,’ he replied engimatically. I still hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about, although it was soon to become only too clear.

But Humphrey couldn’t find a way to tell me the bad news. Extraordinary. First he said there was to be a twenty-four-hour protest vigil in Hayward’s Spinney, conducted by a girl student and her boyfriend. I could see no problem in two irresponsible layabouts trying — and failing — to attract attention to themselves.

And like an idiot, I said so. (If there’s one lesson I learned today it is not to shoot from the hip. Wait until you know the full facts before giving any response, if you don’t want to finish up looking like a proper Charlie.)

But I got an attack of verbal diarrhoea. ‘Nobody’s interested,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s fed up with these ghastly students. They’re just exhibitionists, you know.’

‘In this case,’ remarked Sir Humphrey, suddenly becoming less enigmatic, ‘they seem to have something to exhibit. It is to be a nude protest vigil.’

This did seem to present a problem. It would clearly attract considerable press interest, and could even get onto the front pages of the tabloids. Regrettably, however, Humphrey hadn’t given me the full picture, so I went on and on talking, making myself seem more idiotic every minute. ‘Really, I don’t know what gets into these students. Appalling. Quite shameless. And it’s their parents’ fault. Don’t bring them up properly, let them run wild and feed them all this trendy middle-class anti-establishment nonsense.’ Then I wittered on about the lack of authority nowadays, and how all this student anarchy is a shocking indictment of their parents’ lack of discipline.

At this point Humphrey was kind enough to reveal to me that the student’s name was Miss Hacker. For a moment I thought it was a coincidence. And then the penny dropped. I’ve never felt so foolish in my whole life. I’m sure (at least I think I’m sure) that Humphrey didn’t intend to make any humiliation as complete as possible. But he succeeded. And I’ll get him for it one day!

After I picked myself up off the floor, I expressed the hope that the press might not think it worth going all the way to Warwickshire. Even as I spoke I knew I was talking rubbish — for a story like this the press would go all the way to the South Pole.

Humphrey and Bernard just looked pityingly at me, and then showed me the letter.

I noted that Lucy was giving out the press release at five p.m. Very professional. Misses the evening papers, which not too many people read, and therefore makes all the dailies. She’s learned something from being a politician’s daughter.

Then Bernard said that he thought he’d better mention that Lucy was ringing up in ten minutes, from a call-box, for an answer.

I asked how we could kill the story. Silence from them both. ‘Advise me,’ I said.

‘What about a bit of parental authority and discipline?’ suggested Sir Humphrey. I told him not to be silly.

‘If you could make her listen to reason…’ volunteered Bernard.

I explained to him that she is a sociology student.

‘Oh I see,’ he said sadly.

Another long pause for thought. Then I suggested calling the police.

Humphrey shook his head, and composed the inevitable headline: MINISTER SETS POLICE ON NUDE DAUGHTER.

‘I’m not sure that completely kills the story, Minister,’ he said.

We sat in one of our tragic silences. Occasional sighs filled the room. Then Humphrey suddenly perked up. ‘What if…’ he said.

‘Yes?’ I said hopefully.

‘What if…’ he said again, ‘… I looked at the files?’

I’m ashamed to say that I completely lost my temper with him. ‘Bloody marvellous!’ I shouted. ‘Is that what you get over thirty thousand a year for? My daughter’s about to get herself all over the front page of the Sun and probably page three as well, and all you can think of is the files! Brilliant!’

He waited till I finished yelling. ‘Nevertheless…’ he said.

‘They’re all out there,’ said Bernard, quickly indicating the Private Office. Humphrey disappeared as fast as he could, before I could shout at him again.

Bernard and I gazed at each other in despair. ‘I wonder what sort of angle they’ll take?’ I said.

‘Wide angle, I should think.’ I glared at him. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry.’

All I could think of was the fun the Opposition was going to have with this, next time I had to face questions in the House. ‘Does the proud father want to make a statement?’ ‘Is the Minister’s family getting too much exposure?’ ‘Did the Minister try to conduct a cover-up?’ Or even: ‘Does the Minister run the Department of Administrative Affairs any better than he runs his family?’

I mentioned the last question to Bernard, because it is my Achilles’ heel. I added bitterly that I supposed Bernard would want me to tell the world that Sir Humphrey runs the Department.

Bernard seemed genuinely shocked.

‘Certainly not, Minister, not I,’ he said indignantly. ‘I am your Private Secretary.’

‘You mean,’ I enquired disbelievingly, ‘that when the chips are down, you’ll be on my side, not Humphrey’s?’

Bernard answered very simply: ‘Minister, it is my job to see that the chips stay up!’

[This is, in fact, a precise definition of the Private Secretary’s role — Ed.]

At that moment Lucy rang in. She was in a call-box. I grabbed the phone. First I tried bluffing. ‘I got your little note,’ I said, trying to laugh it off. ‘You know, for a moment I was taken in. I thought it was serious.’ My little laugh sounded false even to me.

‘It is serious,’ she replied coldly. ‘Pete and I are just going to ring the Exchange Telegraph and Press Association, and then we’re off to the Spinney.’

Then I grovelled. I begged her to think of the damage to me. She replied that it was the badgers who were going to be exterminated, not I.

She’s quite wrong about that! This could have been the end of a promising career.

It was clear that she was about to go ahead with her dreadful plan, because I couldn’t change my policy on her account, when Humphrey came running through the door waving a file. I’ve never seen him run before. He was burbling on about a new development and asked if he could speak to Lucy.

He took the phone, opened the file and began to explain his finding. ‘I have just come upon the latest report from the Government’s Wildlife Inspectors. It throws a new light on the whole issue.’

He went on to explain that, apparently, there is no badger colony in Hayward’s Spinney. Apparently the wording of the report says: ‘The last evidence of badger habitation — droppings, freshly-turned earth, etc. — was recorded eleven years ago.’

Lucy was plainly as astonished as Bernard and I. I was listening in on my other phone. So was Bernard, on his. She asked how come the newspaper had said badgers were there. Humphrey explained that the story about the poor badgers had been leaked to the press, untruthfully, by a local property developer.

Lucy was immediately willing to believe Humphrey. As far as the Trots are concerned, property developers are Satan’s representatives on earth. She asked for the explanation.

‘The Local Authority have plans to use the Spinney to build a new College of Further Education, but the developer wants to buy it for offices and luxury flats.’

‘But,’ interrupted Lucy, ‘if it’s protected, he can’t.’

‘No,’ agreed Sir Humphrey, ‘but nor can the Council. And he knows that, if they can’t, they’ll spend the money on something else. Then, in twelve months, he’ll move in, show that there’s no badgers after all, get the protection removed and build his offices.’

From the complete silence, I could tell that Lucy was profoundly shocked. Then Humphrey added: ‘It’s common practice among property developers. Shocking isn’t it?’

I had no idea Humphrey felt this way about property developers. I had thought he rather liked them.

Lucy asked Humphrey if there was any wildlife at all in the Spinney.

‘Yes, there is some,’ said Humphrey, looking through the file. ‘It’s apparently been used as a rubbish dump by people from Birmingham, so there are lots of rats.’

‘Rats,’ she said quietly. Lucy hates rats.

‘Yes, thousands of them,’ said Humphrey and added generously, ‘Still, I suppose they’re wildlife too, in their way.’ He paused and then remarked: ‘It would be a pity to play into the developer’s hands, wouldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it would,’ she answered. Clearly the Save-the-Badgers vigil was off!

Humphrey added, with great warmth and total hypocrisy: ‘But do let me say how much I respect your views and commitment.’

She didn’t ask to speak to me again. She just rang off. The crisis was over as suddenly as it had begun. There was no way she was going to conduct a nude love-in with lots of rats in the vicinity — other than the press, of course.

I congratulated Humphrey profusely. ‘It was nothing, Minister,’ he said self-effacingly, ‘it was all in the files.’

I was amazed by the whole thing. What a cunning bastard that property developer must be. I asked Humphrey to show me the report.

Suddenly he became his old evasive self. He told me it wasn’t awfully interesting. Again I asked to see it. He held it behind his back like a guilty schoolboy.

Then I had an extraordinary insight. I asked him if the story were true. He claimed he didn’t understand my question. So I asked him, again, clearly, if there had been one word of truth in that amazingly convenient story which he had just told Lucy.

He eyed me, and then enquired slowly and carefully: ‘Do you really want me to answer that question, Minister? Don’t answer hastily.’

It was a good question. A very good question. I could think of no advantage in knowing the truth, if my suspicions were correct. And a huge disadvantage — I would be obliged to be dishonest with Lucy, something I have never done and will never do!

‘No,’ I said after a few moments, ‘um, Humphrey, don’t bother to answer.’

‘Quite so,’ he said, as smug as I’ve ever seen him. ‘Perhaps you would care to note that there are some things that it is better for a Minister not to know.’