James George Hacker, Baron Hacker of Islington, , BSc (LSE), Hon. D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a fictional character in the 1980s British sitcom Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. He is the minister of the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs, and later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was portrayed originally by Paul Eddington, with David Haig taking on the part for the 2013 revival.
Fictional biography Before Yes Minister Hacker attended the London School of Economics (around 25 years before his appointment to the cabinet) and graduated with a third class honours degree. He had a career in political research, university lecturing and journalism – including editorship of a publication named Reform – and was elected as a Member of Parliament, initially serving as a backbencher.
While his party was in opposition, Hacker served for seven years as Shadow Minister of Agriculture. During an internal contest for leadership of his party, Hacker ran the campaign of his colleague Martin Walker, but this was unsuccessful, leaving Hacker with a strained relationship with the party leader.
Yes Minister When Hacker was in his late 40s, his party won a general election victory, with Hacker himself being re-elected in the Birmingham East constituency with an increased majority. Hacker expected to be appointed Minister of Agriculture, due to his extensive knowledge of the subject, but the Civil Service, for the same reason, encouraged the new prime minister to appoint him elsewhere. Hacker was appointed Minister of Administrative Affairs. The Department of Administrative Affairs (DAA) was described by a commentator as a "political graveyard", implying the prime minister may have chosen it as an act of revenge, likely due to Hacker's management of the prime minister's rival's campaign during their party's last leadership election.
Hacker worked with the ministry's permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, who as a senior civil servant tries to control the ministry and the minister himself, and his own principal private secretary, Bernard Woolley.
Hacker had been helped in his re-election by political adviser Frank Weisel, saying of him, "I depend on him more than anyone." Initially, Hacker brought Weisel with him to the DAA, but his presence was resented by the civil servants, who referred to him as "the weasel" (derived from an obstinate mispronunciation of the name Weisel, which Frank often corrects on screen). Eventually, Hacker and Weisel came to conflict when Weisel proposed reforming the quango system, as he put it, "ending the scandal of ministerial patronage". Sir Humphrey arranged a situation where Hacker could avoid a scandal only by appointing an unqualified candidate to chair such a quango. When Hacker agreed, Weisel was disgusted and threatened to go to the press, but instead accepted Hacker's offer of heading a well compensated "super-quango" on the abolition of quangos. This left Hacker to be advised entirely by civil servants for the remainder of his time at the DAA.
Hacker hoped for promotion to a more prestigious Cabinet post, such as Foreign Secretary. He considered the "top jobs" to be Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, and dreaded the prospect of being made Secretary of State for Northern Ireland or Minister with General Responsibility for Industrial Harmony. The prime minister still saw Hacker as a supporter of his rival, Martin Walker, and at one point almost abolished the Department of Administrative Affairs, in which case Hacker may have been "kicked upstairs" to the House of Lords. Hacker was able to blackmail the prime minister into abandoning the idea. However, fearing demotion in an upcoming Cabinet reshuffle, he seriously considered accepting an offer to become an EEC Commissioner, a move he considered to be "curtains as far as British politics is concerned. It's worse than a peerage... You're reduced to forming a new party if ever you want to get back," in reference to Roy Jenkins. Sir Humphrey persuaded Hacker to refuse the offer, and Hacker remained Minister of Administrative Affairs. Following the prime minister's resignation, Hacker was offered the roles of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary by the respective incumbents in bids to secure his support in a leadership contest; however, Bernard dissuaded Hacker from excepting either offer, arguing that neither would make him popular with the British public, with Hacker balking at the idea of becoming Home Secretary for similar reasons.
Hacker was pleased to take on additional responsibilities while remaining at the same department, including the role of "Transport Supremo", responsible for an integrated transport policy (although this was a highly contentious issue that not even the Department of Transport wanted to deal with owing to the risk of alienating sectors of the industry through preferential treatment), and responsibility for the arts (although this was a ploy to prevent Hacker from organising the sale of an unpopular art gallery in his constituency to save its local football team from bankruptcy). Following a cabinet reshuffle, his department absorbed the Local Authority Directorate.
Hacker was awarded an honorary doctorate of Law from Baillie College, Oxford (a possible reference to Balliol College), in return for allowing them to continue taking overseas students and abandoning his policy of making the rewarding of honours to civil servants at the DAA dependent on cuts of five per cent to the administration budget.
Hacker was appointed Chair of his party. When he had held this position for less than a year, and been a minister for two, the prime minister unexpectedly retired following the resignation of the Home Secretary due to a drink-driving scandal (but which Hacker himself surmised was the result of the prime minister merely wishing to deny the premiership to his then deputy). With the two likely successors to the party leadership, the chancellor and the Foreign Secretary, being significant security risks, Sir Humphrey, who was now Cabinet Secretary, encouraged and assisted Hacker in using the position of Chair to his advantage, resulting in Hacker becoming party leader unchallenged and thus prime minister.
Yes, Prime Minister Although Hacker had believed the prime minister had more freedom to act than Cabinet ministers, he found that in his new role Sir Humphrey was still able to prevent him implementing many of his ideas. Early in his premiership, Hacker intended to implement what he called his "Grand Design" – actually the idea of the Chief Scientific Adviser – which involved cancelling the Trident missile programme, enlarging the armed forces and reintroducing conscription. Sir Humphrey, through the Permanent Secretaries of the various departments, was able to persuade the Cabinet to oppose the scheme.
The former prime minister posed a problem for Hacker by describing him unflatteringly in his memoirs. Hacker was delighted by his sudden death, not only because the memoirs would not be finished, but because the funeral offered the opportunity for him to host an unofficial summit of world leaders, during which he discussed with the French president the terms of joint British-French management of the Channel Tunnel.
Notable policies that Hacker supported throughout the series have included:
The sale of the National Theatre building so that the institution could spend more of its budget on productions rather than building maintenance and become truly national by operating out of provincial theatres and low-cost rented offices (albeit as a bargaining chip intended to deter its director from criticising the government in a public speech). His Health Secretary's aggressive ameliorative anti-smoking plan involving the banning of tobacco advertising and increasing taxes on tobacco to sumptuary levels (albeit as a bargaining chip to persuade the Civil Service to agree to one-and-a-half billion pounds' worth of budget cuts so as to avoid the loss of four billion pounds in revenue). The establishment of a National Education Service and the abolition of the Department of Education (but backed down after learning from Humphrey that the school which he intended to model his education reforms on had stolen materials for its woodworking classes). Reforming local government so that local boroughs were elected by districts of two-hundred households each, effectively being granted their own parliaments and cabinets (but backed down after learning from the plan's proponent, Professor Marriott, that it would, if applied to Westminster, result in the collapse of party discipline and prevent the passage of unpopular but necessary legislation). The relocation of military bases from the South of England to the North to create jobs (which was unsuccessfully challenged by the Civil Service and the General Staff through the fabrication of a leadership challenge by the Employment Secretary).
After Yes, Prime Minister The original television series ended in 1988 with Hacker still in office as prime minister; however, both before and after this, writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn made references to Hacker's career in print which reveal his life after the series ended.
In 1981, Jay and Lynn adapted the first series of Yes Minister into book form, presenting it in the form of Hacker's diaries, ostensibly edited by Jay and Lynn more than thirty years later in 2017. In summarizing his career, they say that he "failed upwards from one senior cabinet post to the next, culminating with his ultimate failure at Number Ten and his final demise on his elevation to the House of Lords (as it then was)." This would be partly contradicted by the 1984 episode "Party Games", as Hacker does not hold any other cabinet post between being Minister for Administrative Affairs and becoming prime minister.
The foreword to the third volume of the book series (published 1983, but dated September 2019) makes clear that Hacker has died, not merely suffered a political demise. All five volumes of the book series are supposedly written at "Hacker College, Oxford", an institution apparently named after him.
In 2003, Jay and Lynn wrote an obituary for Hacker for The Politico's Book of the Dead. It gives his dates of birth and death as 18 June 1927 and 4 November 1995, the same as Paul Eddington, the actor who portrayed him. The obituary states that Hacker was Minister of Administrative Affairs (the events of the three series of Yes Minister) for a period of two years. His time as prime minister is also described as brief, finishing in a general election defeat for his party. Despite re-election being Hacker's main motivation throughout the series, it appears that he was in government for only a single term, a maximum of five years.
The obituary confirms that Hacker was elevated to the House of Lords, taking the title Lord Hacker of Islington, and also reveals that he was made a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter. Both are customary retirement honours for former prime ministers. Hacker is described as an "Hon. D. Phil", indicating that his honorary law degree from Baillie college was as a Doctor of Philosophy rather than Doctor of Civil Law.
Personal life Hacker and his wife, Annie, are seen to have one daughter, Lucy, a left-wing activist and sociology student at the University of Sussex. Hacker mentions having more than one child, saying, "Our children are reaching the age where Annie and I are hoping to spend much more time with each other."
Character