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. 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. 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, 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)." 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''. 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 ==