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The Right Honourable The Lord Hacker of Islington | |
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First appearance | "Open Government" |
Last appearance | "The Tangled Web" |
Portrayed by |
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In-universe information | |
Occupation |
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Spouse | Annie Hacker |
Children | Lucy Hacker plus possible unknown others |
Nationality | British |
James George Hacker, Baron Hacker of Islington, KG , PC , BSc (Lond.), Hon. D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a fictional character in the 1980s British sitcom Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. He is the minister of the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs, and later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was portrayed originally by Paul Eddington, with David Haig taking on the part for the 2013 revival.
Hacker attended the London School of Economics (around 25 years before his appointment to the cabinet [1] ) and graduated with a third class honours degree. [2] He had a career in political research, university lecturing and journalism [3] – including editorship of a publication named Reform [4] – and was elected as a Member of Parliament, initially serving as a backbencher. [5]
While his party was in opposition, Hacker served for seven years as Shadow Minister of Agriculture. [6] During an internal contest for leadership of his party, Hacker ran the campaign of his colleague Martin Walker, but this was unsuccessful, leaving Hacker with a strained relationship with the party leader. [6]
When Hacker was in his late 40s, his party won a general election victory, with Hacker himself being re-elected in the Birmingham East constituency with an increased majority. Hacker expected to be appointed Minister of Agriculture, due to his extensive knowledge of the subject, but the Civil Service, for the same reason, encouraged the new Prime Minister to appoint him elsewhere. [6] Hacker was appointed Minister of Administrative Affairs. The Department of Administrative Affairs (DAA) was described by a commentator as a "political graveyard", implying the Prime Minister may have chosen it as an act of revenge. [7]
Hacker worked with the ministry's Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, who as a senior civil servant tries to control the ministry and the minister himself, and his own Principal Private Secretary, Bernard Woolley.
Hacker had been helped in his re-election by political adviser Frank Wiesel, saying of him, "I depend on him more than anyone." Initially Hacker brought Wiesel with him to the DAA, but his presence was resented by the civil servants, who referred to him as "the weasel". Eventually Hacker and Wiesel came to conflict when Wiesel proposed reforming the quango system, as he put it, "ending the scandal of ministerial patronage". Sir Humphrey arranged a situation where Hacker could avoid a scandal only by appointing an unqualified candidate to chair such a quango. When Hacker agreed, Wiesel was disgusted and threatened to go to the press, but instead accepted Hacker's offer of heading a well compensated "super-quango" on the abolition of quangos. This left Hacker to be advised entirely by civil servants for the remainder of his time at the DAA. [8]
Hacker hoped for promotion to a more prestigious Cabinet post, such as Foreign Secretary. [9] [10] He considered the "top jobs" to be Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, and dreaded the prospect of being made Secretary of State for Northern Ireland [11] or Minister with General Responsibility for Industrial Harmony. [12] The Prime Minister still saw Hacker as a supporter of his rival, Martin Walker, and at one point almost abolished the Department of Administrative Affairs, in which case Hacker may have been "kicked upstairs" to the House of Lords. Hacker was able to blackmail the Prime Minister into abandoning the idea. [12] However, fearing demotion in an upcoming Cabinet reshuffle, he seriously considered accepting an offer to become an EEC Commissioner, a move he considered to be "curtains as far as British politics is concerned. It's worse than a peerage... You're reduced to forming a new party if ever you want to get back," in reference to Roy Jenkins. Sir Humphrey persuaded Hacker to refuse the offer, and Hacker remained Minister of Administrative Affairs. [9]
Hacker was pleased to take on additional responsibilities while remaining at the same department, including the role of "Transport Supremo", responsible for an integrated transport policy. [13] Following a cabinet reshuffle, his department absorbed the Local Authority Directorate. [14]
Hacker was awarded an honorary doctorate of Law from Baillie College, Oxford (a possible reference to Balliol College), in return for allowing them to continue taking overseas students. [15]
Hacker was appointed Chair of his party. When he had held this position for less than a year, [11] and been a minister for two, the Prime Minister unexpectedly retired following the resignation of the Home Secretary due to a drink-driving scandal (but which Hacker himself surmised was the result of the Prime Minister merely wishing to deny the premiership to his then deputy). Sir Humphrey, who was now Cabinet Secretary, encouraged and assisted Hacker in using the position of Chair to his advantage, resulting in Hacker becoming party leader and Prime Minister. [11]
Although Hacker had believed the Prime Minister had more freedom to act than Cabinet ministers, [12] he found that in his new role Sir Humphrey was still able to prevent him implementing many of his ideas. Early in his premiership, Hacker intended to implement what he called his "Grand Design" – actually the idea of the Chief Scientific Adviser – which involved cancelling the Trident missile programme, enlarging the armed forces and reintroducing conscription. [16] Sir Humphrey, through the Permanent Secretaries of the various departments, was able to persuade the Cabinet to oppose the scheme. [17]
The former Prime Minister posed a problem for Hacker by describing him unflatteringly in his memoirs. [18] Hacker was delighted by his sudden death, not only because the memoirs would not be finished, but because the funeral offered the opportunity for him to host an unofficial summit of world leaders, during which he discussed with the French President the terms of joint British-French management of the Channel Tunnel. [19]
Notable policies that Hacker supported throughout the series have included:
The original television series ended in 1988 with Hacker still in office as Prime Minister; however, both before and after this, writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn made references to Hacker's career in print which reveal his life after the series ended.
In 1981, Jay and Lynn adapted the first series of Yes Minister into book form, presenting it in the form of Hacker's diaries, ostensibly edited by Jay and Lynn more than thirty years later in 2017. In summarizing his career, they say that he "failed upwards from one senior cabinet post to the next, culminating with his ultimate failure at Number Ten and his final demise on his elevation to the House of Lords (as it then was)." [6] This would be partly contradicted by the 1984 episode "Party Games", as Hacker does not hold any other cabinet post between being Minister for Administrative Affairs and becoming Prime Minister.
The foreword to the third volume of the book series (published 1983, but dated September 2019) makes clear that Hacker has died, not merely suffered a political demise. [20] All five volumes of the book series are supposedly written at "Hacker College, Oxford", an institution apparently named after him.
In 2003, Jay and Lynn wrote an obituary for Hacker for The Politico's Book of the Dead. [3] It gives his dates of birth and death as 18 June 1927 and 4 November 1995, the same as Paul Eddington, the actor who portrayed him. The obituary states that Hacker was Minister of Administrative Affairs (the events of the three series of Yes Minister) for a period of two years. His time as Prime Minister is also described as brief, finishing in a general election defeat for his party. Despite re-election being Hacker's main motivation throughout the series, it appears that he was in government for only a single term, a maximum of five years.
The obituary confirms that Hacker was elevated to the House of Lords, taking the title Lord Hacker of Islington, and also reveals that he was made a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter. Both are customary retirement honours for former Prime Ministers. Hacker is described as an "Hon. D. Phil", indicating that his honorary law degree from Baillie college was as a Doctor of Philosophy rather than Doctor of Civil Law.
Hacker and his wife, Annie, are seen to have one daughter, Lucy, a left-wing activist and sociology student at the University of Sussex. [21] [22] Hacker mentions having more than one child, saying, "Our children are reaching the age where Annie and I are hoping to spend much more time with each other." [11]
Jim Hacker first appears in Yes Minister having been recently re-elected as Member of Parliament for Birmingham East, soundly defeating his opponents. His early character is that of a very gung-ho, albeit naïve, politician, ready to bring sweeping change into his department, unaware that Sir Humphrey and the civil service are out to stop any semblance of change, despite their insistence that they are his allies. Hacker is also noted as having challenged Humphrey while he was a member of the Opposition by asking difficult questions when Sir Humphrey was testifying to a Parliamentary committee: Sir Humphrey stated that Hacker had asked "...all the questions I hoped nobody would ask," showing his new Minister to be at least a reasonably capable politician.
Before long, Hacker begins to notice that the Civil Service has been preventing any of his changes from actually being put into practice. Bernard is sympathetic to Hacker's plight and tries to enlighten his Minister as to the tricks and techniques employed by government staff, but his ability to help is limited by his own loyalties in the Civil Service. Hacker soon learns and becomes more sly and cynical, using some of these ploys himself. While Sir Humphrey nearly always gets the upper hand, Hacker now and again plays a trump card, and on even fewer occasions, the two of them work towards a common goal.
Hacker also learns that his efforts to change the government or Britain are all really for naught, as he discovers in the episode "The Whisky Priest", when he attempts to stop the export of British-made munitions to Italian terrorists. [10]
Throughout Yes Minister, there are many occasions when Hacker is portrayed as a publicity-mad bungler, incapable of making a firm decision, and prone to blunders that embarrass him or his party, eliciting bad press and stern lectures from the party apparatus, particularly the Chief Whip. He is continually concerned with what the newspapers of the day will have to say about him, and is always hoping to be promoted by the Prime Minister (Hacker ran the unsuccessful campaign for a political ally during the party's last leadership election – his man lost, becoming Foreign Secretary, and leaving Hacker nervous about his prospects under the winner, now Prime Minister). He is equally afraid of either staying at his current level of Cabinet seniority, or being demoted.
Just prior to the start of Yes, Prime Minister, Hacker shows a zeal for making speeches and presents himself as a viable party leader after the Prime Minister announces his resignation in the episode "Party Games". He is given embarrassing information about the two front-runner candidates, and manages to persuade them (by insinuating that secret information pertaining to both may be revealed to the public) to drop out of the race, and lend their support to him. With help from the recently promoted Sir Humphrey and other senior civil servants, Hacker emerges as a compromise candidate and becomes head of his party unopposed – and Prime Minister.
In Yes, Prime Minister Hacker strives to perfect all the skills needed by a statesman, giving more grandiose speeches, dreaming up "courageous" political programmes, and honing his diplomatic craft, nearly all of these attempts landing him in trouble at some point.
In a Radio Times interview to promote the latter series, Paul Eddington stated, "He's beginning to find his feet as a man of power, and he's begun to confound those who thought they'd be able to manipulate him out of hand." [23]
Hacker becomes a more competent politician by the end. Though primarily interested in his personal career survival and advancement, he, unlike Sir Humphrey, views government as a means rather than an end in itself.
Hacker has many prominent habits that feature throughout the series:
Hacker's political party is never explicitly stated – a deliberate ploy by the series' creators to prevent the show from having a partisan affiliation. [24] This begins in the very first scene of the Yes Minister pilot episode, where the victorious Hacker's party rosette is white, as opposed to the red (for Labour) and blue (for the Conservatives) rosettes worn by the other candidates. The party that formed the previous government, which is now the opposition, is not explicitly identified either. In Yes Minister, the Prime Minister was unseen and unnamed, but established as male, whereas the real Prime Minister of the day was Margaret Thatcher. (The book adaptation by Lynn and Jay gives the Prime Minister a name — Herbert Attwell — but it is only mentioned once, and the character remains completely offscreen.)
The Labour and Conservative parties are eventually compared in "The National Education Service", when Sir Humphrey tells Bernard, "When there is a Labour government, the education authorities tell them that comprehensives abolish the class system and when there's a Tory government we tell them that it's the cheapest way of providing mass education; to Labour we explain that selective education is divisive and to the Tories we explain that it is expensive." but Sir Humphrey then goes on to tell Hacker neither of these things, forgoing any suggestion that Hacker is from either party.
In "Party Games", following the Prime Minister's surprise announcement of his retirement, Sir Humphrey and his predecessor Sir Arnold Robinson discuss who should succeed him. With the Home Secretary, previously the Prime Minister's likely successor, being forced to resign following a spectacular drink-driving incident (with Hacker speculating that the Prime Minister only served for as long as he did to prevent the Home Secretary from succeeding him), the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary seemed to be the most likely successors. Humphrey relayed the concerns of the Chief Whip that as each candidate represented the extreme wings of their party, the election of either could antagonise the other's supporters and split the party. However, it is not mentioned what positions either candidate or wing support or oppose. With both candidates expressing desires to take proactive roles in governing and posing significant security risks, Hacker was positioned to succeed the Prime Minister unopposed as a moderate (otherwise described as a "compromise" or "less interventionist") candidate.
Throughout the show, Hacker's political opinions tend towards reform of administration and are neither left nor right wing. [24] On first becoming a minister, Hacker intends to implement his party's manifesto commitment to "open government", but backs down when he is shown the dangers of the policy. [7] He is known as "a good European", a believer in "the European ideal" embodied in the European Economic Community, but a critic of the bureaucracy in Brussels, [9] such as EEC officials being tasked with encouraging farmers to create and destroy agricultural surpluses, the introduction of the compulsory Europass (albeit as a means of ending his ministerial career alongside the abolition of the Department of Administrative Affairs), and the standardisation of word processing equipment. In "Party Games", in his bid to become his party's new leader, and thus become Prime Minister, he engineers media and public outrage over the EEC's "Eurosausage" Plan involving the designation of British sausages as "emulsified high-fat offal tubes" due to insufficient meat content, despite being guaranteed an exemption for British sausages by the relevant EEC Commissioner; whilst admonishing the EEC in a Churchillian speech to party members, Hacker strikes a more amicable tone whilst being interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy.
Throughout the series, the party is mentioned as having constituencies in the West Midlands (such as Hacker's seat of Birmingham East), Merseyside, Glasgow, Nottingham and (oddly for a governing British political party) Northern Ireland. [25] Most of these are described as marginal seats, often mentioned when a potentially unpopular decision is under consideration, such as the revitalisation of a nationalised chemical plant through the production of propanol using metadioxin (a chemical similar to dioxin, linked to the Seveso disaster and purported to cause foetal damage) or introducing ameliorative measures to deter smoking (to the detriment of tax revenue, jobs in the tobacco industry and patronage for culture and sports). The party is also mentioned as controlling the South Derbyshire Council (criticised by Sir Humphrey for not submitting its records to Westminster but which turned out to be the most effective and efficient local authority in Britain) as well as contesting a by-election in Newcastle.
In a radio broadcast spoof of Yes Minister performed by both Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, both of whom played their respective parts from the show, Hacker is a Minister in the government of the day, that of Margaret Thatcher, who also played herself as Prime Minister. In the sketch, she asks that Hacker and Sir Humphrey abolish economists.
In the 2010 stage production of Yes, Prime Minister, the role was played by David Haig; [26] Graham Seed took the role in a touring production of the play. [27]
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There are marginal seats in Bristol, Nottingham, Glasgow, Basildon and Northern Ireland, all with tobacco workers.