In the final episode of Yes Minister – before the show graduated to Yes, Prime Minister with Jim Hacker’s elevation as the premier of Great Britain as a ‘compromise candidate’ – the minister has a fantastic idea where he decides that he is going to take money from selling a popular art gallery and pour it into his local football club, which would make him very popular with his constituency. Obviously, this leaves Sir Humphrey Appleby aghast, because the idea of taking money from the arts and giving it to football is his idea of a civilisation being destroyed by barbarians.
So, he comes up with an ingenious plan to stop Hacker from doing that by making him the minister responsible for art. When a colleague wonders if that’s a good idea, given that Hacker is a ‘philistine’, Sir Humphrey points out: “The industry minister is the idlest man in town, the education minister is illiterate, and the employment minister is unemployable.”
