08-05-2025
Jonathan Lynn: ‘People are running the country who have never had a proper job'
T here is nothing so ex as an ex prime minister. It has been a long time since Jim Hacker rose to the top of the greasy pole. Now in his eighties he is a sad and diminished figure, leaky in mind and bladder, increasingly forgotten by an ungrateful nation.
The fellows of the Oxford college that bears his name, thanks to an oligarch's endowment, want to remove him as their master, them having a different understanding to the Lords of what 'job for life' means, and in desperation he calls an old friend. Alas, Bernard Woolley can't come to the phone — Hacker forgot that he had attended his funeral — and so he turns to an old adversary. Can the man who became PM
