A tongue-in-cheek reflection on the absurdities of British Goverment.

In 1980 the BBC first broadcast a satirical situation comedy called Yes Minister.  It was hugely popular. It attempted to illustrate through (slight!) exaggeration the arcane world of ministerial life and how the British Civil Service Mandarins, in the end, were the ones truly in charge of Her Majesty’s Government.  Here’s a taste of the programme:

Almost difficult to believe that that was broadcast nearly 30 years ago – could have been yesterday!  Here’s another clip:

Nothing much has changed since then … indeed, real as opposed to illusory change is something that the Civil Service strives constantly to avoid. For the information and instruction of a new generation of voters, our devious and doughty correspondent has managed to engage the services of a modern “Deep Throat” who has furnished us with transcripts of current conversations from one of the Ministries. To protect the identity of the individuals involved, we have renamed the former the Ministry of Misinformation, since – obviously – this could be any one of the multiple current ministries.

We intend to reveal further on-going communications in the fullness of time, hoping as always that the identity of “Deep Throat II” will not be revealed though the launch of a leak enquiry. We are fairly optimistic about this since leak enquiries have never provided any results in the past.

The first ‘communication’ is tomorrow at 16:00 GMT.

By Chris Snuggs

• Perkins at the Ministry
• Politics