Free The Complete Yes Minister by Paul Hawthorne Nigel Eddington

him feel better to read it aloud. It made me feel worse.
    I wondered how many copies they sell every day. ‘Two million, three million?’ I asked Bernard.
    ‘Oh
no
, Minister,’ he answered as if my suggested figures were an utterly outrageous overestimate.
    I pressed him for an answer. ‘Well, how many?’
    ‘Um . . . four million,’ he said with some reluctance. ‘So only . . . twelve million people have read it. Twelve or fifteen. And lots of their readers can’t read, you know.’
    Frank was meanwhile being thoroughly irritating. He kept saying, ‘Have you read this?’ and reading another appalling bit out of it. For instance: ‘Do
you
realise that more people serve in the Inland Revenue than the Royal Navy?’ This came as news to me, but Bernard nodded to confirm the truth of it when I looked at him.
    ‘“Perhaps,”’ said Frank,
still
reading aloud from that bloody paper, ‘“Perhaps the government thinks that a tax is the best form of defence.”’
    Bernard sniggered, till he saw that I was not amused. He tried to change his snigger into a cough.
    Frank then informed me, as if I didn’t already know, that this article is politically very damaging, and that I had to make slimming down the Civil Service a priority. There’s no doubt that he’s right, but it’s just not that easy.
    I pointed this out to Frank. ‘You know what?’ he said angrily. ‘You’re house-trained already.’
    I didn’t deign to reply. Besides, I couldn’t think of an answer.
    [
The Civil Service phrase for making a new Minister see things their way is ‘house-training’. When a Minister is so house-trained that he automatically sees everything from the Civil Service point of view, this is known in Westminster as the Minister having ‘gone native’ – Ed
.]
    Sir Humphrey came in, brandishing a copy of the
Daily Mail
. ‘Have you read this?’ he began.
    This was too much. I exploded. ‘Yes. Yes! Yes!!! I have read that sodding newspaper.
I
have read it,
you
have read it,
we have all bloody read it
. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?’
    ‘Abundantly, Minister,’ said Sir Humphrey coldly, after a brief pained silence.
    I recovered my temper, and invited them all to sit down. ‘Humphrey,’ I said, ‘we simply
have
to slim down the Civil Service. How many people are there in this Department?’
    ‘This Department?’ He seemed evasive. ‘Oh well, we’re very small.’
    ‘How small?’ I asked, and receiving no reply, I decided to hazard a guess. ‘Two thousand? . . . three thousand?’ I suggested, fearing the worst.
    ‘About twenty-three thousand I think, Minister?’
    I was staggered. Twenty-three thousand people? In the Department of Administrative Affairs? Twenty-three thousand administrators, all to administer other administrators?
    ‘We’ll have to do an O & M,’ I said. [
Organisation and Method Study – Ed
.] ‘See how many we can do without.’
    ‘We did one of those last year,’ said Sir Humphrey blandly. ‘And we discovered we needed another five hundred people. However, Minister, we could always close your Bureaucratic Watchdog Department.’ 1
    I’d been expecting this. I know Humphrey doesn’t like it. How could he? But we are not cutting it. Firstly, it’s a very popular measure with the voters. And secondly, it’s the only thing I’ve achieved since I’ve been here.
    ‘It is a chance for the ordinary citizen to help us find ways to stop wasting government money,’ I reiterated.
    ‘The public,’ said Sir Humphrey, ‘do not know anything about wasting public money. We are the experts.’
    I grinned. ‘Can I have that in writing?’
    Humphrey got very tetchy. ‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ he snapped. ‘The Watchdog Office is merely a troublemaker’s letter box.’
    ‘It stays,’ I replied.
    We gazed at each other, icily. Finally Sir Humphrey said: ‘Well, offhand, I don’t know what other economies to suggest.’
    This was ludicrous. ‘Are you seriously