What would Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby have made of cancel culture? This question seems to be the impetus for dragging the beloved political satire Yes, Minister back to the West End, with a stellar cast but a script that, alas, does not survive the transition from screen to stage, nor from the 1980s to 2026.
The plot, such as it is, goes like this. Hacker (the masterful Griff Rhys Jones) was prime minister once – a fact he repeatedly reminds us of. Now he is doddery octogenarian master of an Oxford college, about to lose his job and cushy lodge thanks to a number of off-colour comments on women, safe spaces and the Empire. Desperate, he enlists the help of his Machiavellian ex mandarin (the equally compelling Clive Francis), while his care worker Sophie (a black lesbian former student, played by Stephanie Levi-John) bustles around making coffee and observations.
The three of them have great chemistry. There are occasional glimpses of genius from writer and director Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of the original TV series, especially in Humphrey’s delightfully sesquipedalian monologues (we are treated to several), and a couple of zingers that had the audience (which seemed to include half of Westminster – I was sitting next to Michael Gove) guffawing into their programmes. (“If there is a God, why does He run the world like the Home Office?”)
But overall, I’m Sorry, Prime Minister is a dreadful disappointment. The charm of Lynn’s original relied on political machinations, schemes and scandals tightly plotted to resolve in 28 minutes. This play is four times as long with none of the drama. Stripped of that scaffolding, the dialogue unspools into endless trading of retorts and ripostes, going nowhere. The forays into free speech and Brexit are tired and predictable; the explorations of ageing and looming irrelevance surface-level and played for laughs rather than emotional intensity.
Yes, Minister works as a three-hander, the charged dynamic between ambitious politician and top Whitehall manipulator balanced by the brilliant junior civil servant who always saves the day. Levi-John makes a valiant effort with the material on offer to her cypher of a character – a lazy representation of the woke youth of today, championing trigger warnings and decrying austerity – but she cannot fill the Bernard-shaped hole in this reinterpretation.
And even if she could, what would be the point? Good acting and a gorgeous set (think faded donnish splendour bedecked with political paperbacks – Peter Mandelson’s memoir could be spotted) do not make up for the fact that this play does not know what it is trying to be or who it is for. Its subtitle is “The Final Chapter of Yes, Minister”, but for a concept all about Westminster, politics itself is an afterthought. Those who love the original may experience some joy meeting two of the characters one final time. But really it would have been better to let them rest.
Further reading: Arcadia is Tom Stoppard at his finest
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This article appears in the 18 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Class warrior
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