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The lines were clever, but the delivery was great!
By way of tribute to Sir Nigel, the following had been included in an article that I’ve just read.
I thought some of you might get a chuckle of memory, so I copy them here.
Commiserating with a fellow bureaucrat worried about reforms:
Sir Arnold: “But once they have accepted the principle that senior civil servants could be removed
for incompetence, that would be the thin end of the wedge. We could loose dozens of our chaps,
perhaps hundreds.”
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Thousands”
On corruption:
Jim Hacker; “Are you saying that winking at corruption is Government policy?”
Sir Humphrey: “No, no, Minister. It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable. Only
government practice”
Explaining Foreign Policy:
“Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to
create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with
the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, with the French
against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it’s
worked so well?”
The Minister wrestles with a plan to reduce the size of the Civil Service:
Jim Hacker: “So when this next comes up at Question Time, you want me to tell the Parliament that
it’s their fault the Civil Service is too big?”
Sir Humphrey: "But it is the truth, Minister”
Jim Hacker; “But I don’t want the truth. I want something I can tell Parliament!”
On the civil servant’s role:
Sir Humphrey: “My job is to carry out government policy”
Jim Hacker: “Even if you think it is wrong?”
Sir Humphrey: “Well, almost all government policy is wrong, but…….frightfully well carried out”
Taking a dim view of politics:
Animal Rights Activist: “Animals have rights too, you know. A battery chicken’s life isn’t worth
living. Would you like to spend your life packed in with six hundred other desperate, squawking,
smelly creatures, unable to breathe fresh air, unable to move, unable to stretch, unable to think?”
Sir Humphrey: “Certainly not! That is why I never stood for Parliament”
Accepting responsibility in a face-saving sort of way:
Sir Humphrey: “Minister, I think there is something you perhaps ought to know. The identity of the
official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of
recent discussion, is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous
disclosures might have led you to assume, but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual is,
it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of identifying by
means of the perpendicular pronoun.”
Jim Hacker: “I beg your pardon???”
Sir Humphrey: “It was……..I.”
And an all-time classic –
Explaining to the Minister why he might not be able to gain access to work done by a previous
government on a national citizens’ database, which civil libertarians have been attacking:
“If there had been investigations, which there haven’t, or not necessarily, or I’m not at liberty to
say whether there have, there would have been a project team which, had it existed, on which I
cannot comment, which would now have been disbanded, if it had existed, and the members returned to
their original departments, if indeed there had been any such members.”
R.I.P. Sir Nigel.
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