Rt Hon James Hacker

James Hacker arrives at the Department of Administrative Affairs as its newly appointed Minister, full of manifesto promises and reforming zeal. He wants to cut waste, be seen to govern, and leave a mark. What he mostly meets is his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, whose gentle, endless obstruction he is not yet equipped to recognise.

Paul Eddington plays vanity and decency as the same fragile substance, so Hacker's blustering self-regard never curdles into contempt. The scripts let him win just often enough to keep trying, and his exasperated cries of 'Yes, but—' become a whole comic philosophy about how power actually moves through a government.