The hospital without patients; a triumph of her majesty's civil service.
Washington Monthly › Nbr. 19, February 1987
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The hospital without patients; a triumph of her majesty's civil service.
THE HOSPITAL WITHOUT PATIENTS
In 1985, WETA, Washington's public television station, imported another one of those BBC series. It was called "Yes, Minister' and portrayed the relationship between the elected officials of Britain and its permanent civil service. The program was not wildly popular in Washington, possibly because both the bureaucracy and the politicians found it too true to be funny. Later, it played on 46 of the nation's 280 public TV stations. It wasn't too popular out there either: nobody outside Washington believed that government could possibly be run that zanily. The book that the show inspired consists of the fictional diaries of James Hacker, an aptly named member of parliament whose party has just won the elections and who finds himself a cabinet minister in charge (or so he thinks) of the Department of Administrative Affairs, which was created to control the civil service. Hacker's diaries are supplemented by those of his aide, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the senior civil servant in the department (who has no doubt about who's in charge), and by the recollections of Bernard Woolley, Hacker's private secretary. Appleby's and Woolley's notes are important because, as Lynn and Jay observe, Hacker was once a journ...See the full content of this document
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