Annie Hacker

Annie Hacker is Jim's wife, the steady presence at home while he navigates the corridors of Whitehall. She's shrewd about politics without being consumed by it, often puncturing her husband's grand pronouncements with dry common sense. She listens, she teases, and she seems to understand the game better than the men playing it.

Diana Hoddinott gives Annie an unshowy intelligence that cuts through the show's verbal fencing between Hacker and Sir Humphrey. She's the domestic chorus who says the obvious thing everyone else is too invested in status to say, and her marriage to Jim feels lived-in rather than decorative, a rare note of genuine warmth amid the satire.