No, Minister: the week Keir Starmer had his own Sir Humphrey moment

Olly Robbins gave MPs a classic civil servant’s performance – and there are lessons from history about how ministers should respond

The Whitehall satire Yes Minister was said to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite TV show due to its proximity to reality, as the programme’s loquacious top civil servant, Sir Humphrey, might have put it.

Yes Minister had a familiar groove: there would be a problem in response to which the mandarin would artfully deploy the most astonishing sophistry to avoid blame or get his own way. Jim Hacker, the largely clueless yet ambitious politician played by the late Paul Eddington, rarely won the day.