Brilliantly funny and observant - just as good as the TV series, and has dated less. ( )

As a TV show (and I feel me a bit stupid, not only that I didn't read this WHILE working at the Ministry, but that I haven't sought out and sat down with the DVDs of the show, ever) this is pure 5, but as all TV or film adaptions (you see the same thing in JK Rowling, for some reason) do when they try to stick to line-by-line adaption of the dialogue, it suffers a bit, because you can see the strings. They make a valiant effort to take us into Hacker's brain, and it no doubt is super-interesting for longtime fans of the show who are used to seeing it as a little sketch, but the fact remains that it IS a little sketch and when you try to have him explain to the reader why he said this or what he thought when Bernard said that, it doesn't ring true because in fact there was no reason - it was because it was funny, and they were scripted to say absurd stuff because the funny is absurd.

That said. If the psychological realism is lacking, the grip on institutional practice is almost frighteningly sound. It ACTUALLY IS like that, with the ministers totally in thrall, except when they make a leviathan roll to achieve or abort something to poltical reasons, to their civil service, and all the way down the line everyone is trying to achieve whatever will cement their position, accrue more power to ministry and office, and provide a plausibe means to feather in cap, whether what they say they did has any relation to what they did or not. Statistics really are ALL MEANINGLESS, and they REALLY DO want it that way, because it you change the metrics year by year you can get them to support anything you might want. They REALLY DO measure success by size and responsibilities, number of "hats" - wastage. It's changed a lot for better and worse, no doubt - the stuff about women is pure unreconstructed the '70s, and there have been twenty years of New Labour/Third Way-typre reforms bringing in people from private sector and making everyone a lot more concerned with self-promotion and less secure. Dear lord, am I saying the modern public service combines the worst of "old government" with the worst of modern politics? Nah. Just that the human capacity for obfuscation in defense of one's own power is infinite, and this is a primer.

And it's FUNNY, of course. ( )

Although it is a bit dated now, this must still be the best politcal satire ever. We need something like this about the Blair years. ( )

This and its companion book Yes Prime Minister are some of the best political books of all time. I'm amazed that more people haven't read them. They came out after the television series of the same name, and are amazingly just as good, if not better than the series, in some places.

Jim Hacker is the hapless, newly-anointed Minister for Administrative Affairs. There to "assist" him in running the ministry are his permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and his private secretary Bernard Woolley. Humphrey is a brilliant tactician who can make white seem black and black seem white. Most of the episodes are devoted to the battle between Hacker and Appleby. Hacker wants to push his policies and changes through, and Humphrey wants the existing status quo to continue. Bernard is a high-flying young civil servant whose quibbling makes for very funny side jokes.

With plenty of witty dialogue and verbal sparring, the linguistically-inclined reader learns a lot about pragmatics, the politically-minded reader learns a lot about British political life in the 1980s, and everyone learns a tip or two about avoiding questions, lying without actually lying, and how to get your own way without letting anyone see. ( )