The ability of the show to turn old facts into new fictions had been evident right from the start, but, increasingly, the sitcom also demonstrated an equally remarkable gift for anticipating future incidents, issues and trends. In ‘The Smoke Screen’, for example, we can now see a fiction that later became a fact.
The episode focused on a radical plan, proposed by Dr Thorne, the Minister of State for the Department of Health and Social Security, to eliminate smoking. The phased plan to achieve this involved, first, a complete ban on all forms of tobacco sponsorship and advertising, even at the point of sale; second, Government investment in anti-smoking publicity; third, a ban on smoking in all public spaces; and, fourth, a series of progressive, deterrent tax rises over the course of the next five years until a packet of cigarettes cost about as much as a bottle of whisky.
Hacker is stunned by this proposal. Although he assures his Minister that he is sympathetic to the intention, he urges him to be realistic. The Treasury would only say that smoking brings in about £4 billion in revenue every year – roughly a third of the NHS’ funds – and so the Government cannot manage without it. ‘You can’t beat the Treasury,’ says Hacker solemnly.
Then he has an idea. It is a devious idea, rather than a noble one, but it excites him. He will let his idealistic Health Minister press on with his campaign, because, he reasons, it will make the Treasury come to see his own unpopular plan – to use some of the savings from his ‘Grand Design’ for a £1.5 billion tax cut (which will win Hacker ‘masses of votes’) – as far less unpalatable than the prospect of throwing away £4 billion a year by abandoning the tobacco industry.
Sir Humphrey, when he hears of Hacker’s supposed willingness to back the Health Minister’s demands, is greatly distressed. ‘No man in his right mind could possibly contemplate such a proposal,’ he exclaims. The Prime Minister, however, cites the estimated one hundred thousand deaths each year that stem from smoking, and insists that he is right behind the plan:
Having endured Sir Humphrey’s predictable protestations, Hacker then has to put up with an unsolicited intervention from his Minister for Sport, a chronically coughing member of the tobacco lobby, who warns the Prime Minister that this plan will not only damage sporting events but will also affect voting at many marginal seats that are stuffed full of workers in the tobacco industry. Hacker, however, who is impatient to pursue his own deviously dirty-handed scheme, brushes all such complaints aside and presses on with the pose.
Sir Humphrey, meanwhile, is frustrated to find that nothing looks likely to stop what he believes is a moral campaign. He could try the old ‘we don’t want a Nanny State’ conceit, he notes, but then rejects that on the grounds that it could just as easily be used for legalising the sale of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, arsenic and gelignite. He does try to embarrass Hacker by reminding him that, in the past, he has been the willing recipient of a great amount of VIP hospitality at tobacco company-sponsored sporting and cultural events, but even this fails to deflect the PM from his apparent course of action. ‘I’ve had drinks at the Soviet embassy,’ he observes calmly, ‘that doesn’t make me a Russian spy!’
It is at this point that Hacker, sensing that Sir Humphrey has, for once, run out of ways to frustrate him, seizes his moment and cuts to the chase. Reminding Sir Humphrey that the Treasury is not only blocking the Health Minister’s calamitously expensive plan but also his own far more modest one-off tax cut, the Cabinet Secretary takes the hint and departs to make some calls and pull some strings.
It does not take long for Sir Humphrey to return from the Treasury with the good news that, with the proviso that the anti-smoking policy is shelved, the tax cut can go through. The ruse has worked.
The only problem now is to find a way to stop the Health Minister from resigning in protest at this cynical betrayal, but Hacker solves that by promising him that his plans have only been temporarily postponed, and then promotes him away from trouble to a vacancy in the Treasury. He then selects the one person who can be trusted to take over as Minister for Health and drop the plans for good: the tobacco-addicted Sports Minister.
Antony Jay had drawn some inspiration for the theme by talking informally to Kenneth Clarke, who at the time was nearing the end of his very eventful spell as Minister of State for Health (he would soon be made both Paymaster General and Employment Minister).17 Clarke, notoriously, was an improbable-looking champion of issues relating to health, not only because of his tabloid image as a doughty trencherman with a fondness for cigars, beer and spirits, but also because of his increasingly close ties with the tobacco industry (he would become Deputy Chairman of British American Tobacco in 1997). ‘I can’t remember whether I gave him any brilliant ideas,’ he would say of his meeting with Jay, but he did admit that, after this episode had been broadcast, many people asked him if he was the model for the wheezing, chain-smoking Sports Minister, and he acknowledged that some of the on-screen conversations ‘were remarkably similar to the exchanges I was having with my own officials’.18
It was this mischievous association that aroused most interest at the time, causing plenty of amusement within Westminster, but it would be the broader theme itself that, with the benefit of hindsight, would seem more intriguing to those who watched the episode again in later years. Back in 1986, the sense that the idealistic Health Minister’s plan was doomed to failure was hard to resist, because, as the story suggested, the tobacco lobby was very strong and the revenue the industry generated continued to dazzle the Treasury (indeed, just one day after the episode was broadcast, an MP commented in the Commons: ‘Anyone who watched Yes, Prime Minister last night will have seen a programme which, in jest but also in all seriousness, showed the difficulty of introducing anti-smoking legislation, bearing in mind vested interests, electoral consequences, loss of taxation revenue and other issues’19). Eventually, however, the mood began to change, and, slowly but surely, the fictional plan started to be imitated by the facts.
The Health Minister in the sitcom had demanded a complete ban on all forms of tobacco sponsorship and advertising, even at the point of sale. In reality, following the passing of the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act (2002), advertising in the press and on billboards was outlawed from February 2003, followed later the same year by a ban on sponsorship of UK sporting events. Further bans, on certain adverts in tobacconists and large adverts in pubs, clubs and shops, followed in 2004. The Health Act of 2009, together with regulations made under the Act, enabled further restrictions on tobacco sales and advertising. The Department of Health then announced that cigarettes and other products would have to be kept under the counter from 2012 for large stores and 2015 for small shops.
The second demand in the sitcom was for Government investment in anti-smoking publicity. In 2003, the British Government committed itself to investing £31 million in a succession of national anti-smoking campaigns. The European Commission followed this in 2005 with the launch of its Help campaign, targeting all Europeans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four through national media, television and web-based campaigns.
The third demand was for a ban on smoking in all public spaces. Just nine months after the episode was first broadcast, a Private Member’s Bill, sponsored by Joe Ashton MP, aimed at creating no-smoking areas in pubs, received its first reading in Parliament.20 Several more Private Members’ Bills on more or less the same subject were launched and debated over the course of the next few years. ‘Choosing Health’, a Government White Paper proposing a smoking ban in almost all public places in England and Wales, was published in 2004, and, in July 2007, a formal ban finally came into force.21
The fourth demand was for a series of progressive, deterrent tax rises. Between 1991 and 2001, the proportion of tax in the retail price of cigarettes rose from 73 per cent to 80 per cent, thanks in part to the introduction of a tobacco duty ‘escalator’ in the autumn 1993 Budget, whereby the Government committed itself to raising tobacco duties by at least 3 per cent per year in real terms.22
There was one sign of stubborn resistance: the price of a packet of cigarettes would continue to be considerably cheaper than that of a bottle of whisky. In every other way, however, the proposals made in a British sitcom had been turned into a reality, during the course of a couple of decades or so, by the British Government.
It is a strangely ironic experience, therefore, to witness, with the benefit of hindsight, the moment when Sir Humphrey first hears of these plans in the episode back in January 1986:
SIR HUMPHREY: |
I was just wondering if you had an interesting chat with Dr Thorne? |
HACKER: |
Yes. He proposed the elimination of smoking. |
SIR HUMPHREY: |
[Erupts with laughter] By a campaign of mass hypnosis perhaps? |
The studio audience joined Sir Humphrey in his loudly incredulous laughter. The whole proposal seemed absurd. Things, however, have changed, and that response, from this distance, now sounds quite hollow.