Hacker will lead Britain into a totalitarian dictatorship, perhaps by accident.
Severely doubtful considering that Jim is made PM during... well, the exact year is confusing but we'll just assume that it might be the end of the early eighties to the middle of the eighties. Despite Thatcher and Blair's lengths of serving, Jim might only be around to the late eighties, maybe early nineties before having to resign for health reasons, since the main trio all share birthdates with their actors. Jim might also have suffered from leukemia the same as Paul did. But being PM in 96? No way.
Administrative Affairs eventually gets folded into what becomes DoSAC. An aged Sir Humphrey and Malcolm Tucker teaming up on someone? Epic.
- An added possibility is that Malcolm Tucker was Sir Humphrey's protege, though I can't quite recall the latter's opinions on Scottish people.
- Sir Humphrey is not exactly clued up on Scotland; told he will be visiting there on government business, he describes it with horror as "remote!" to which Hacker points at the map of Britain, and directs him to look about two feet directly upwards from Potter's Bar (upmarket commuter town just outside London where Sir Humphrey lives and by implication about as far outside London as he normally cares to go).
- Unlikely. Malcolm Tucker wasn't a civil servant, he was Director of Communications for a political party. If anything, he and Sir Humphrey would have clashed, which certainly would have been worth seeing. But this troper would be surprised if The Thick of It isn't the future of Yes, Minister.
- To keep history on track.
- We know that the series take place in an Alternate Universe where, instead of Margaret Thatcher, the British PM during the 1980s was the unseen PM who put Jim Hacker in charge of Administrative Affairs, and later Hacker himself. We also know that while the Conservative and Labour Parties exist, Hacker's party is neither of these — his party's colours are shown as white. Finally, Hacker is clearly a complete Centrist. However, during the episode in which he becomes PM, Hacker is described as the leader of the "centrist" wing of his Party. If he were a Conservative, that would make him moderately right-leaning, while if he were Labour, that would make him slightly left-leaning. In this Alternate Universe, there existed in the 1980s a third major political party, the "British Centrist Party" — probably encompassing the real-world Liberal-SDP Alliance combined with moderate elements from Labour and the Tories. And that Centrist Party formed the government during the 1980s. Interestingly, since that "centrist, pro-EU, pro-free-market" stance is very similar to Tony Blair's New Labour and the moderate wing of the Conservatives as embodied by leaders like John Major and David Cameron, it's very likely that Hacker's Centrist Party remained in power since the 1980s, throughout the 1990s and 2000s until today (possibly with Centrist PMs Major, Blair and Cameron).
- This troper thinks this is 100% the case - in the same way that the Ministry of Administrative Affairs was invented to give scope to write episodes that touch all subjects rather than one real life area (similar to DoSAC in The Thick of It), the minister of Yes, Minister would have had to have been a centrist who could not be identified as either Labour or Tory in order for the show to effectively and credibly poke fun at both left and right.
As is revealed in the episode "One of Us", he once conducted an enquiry into the conduct of a fellow-civil servant called Sir John Halstead and found that he'd done nothing wrong ... only for Halstead to later be revealed (via a posthumous confession) to have spent much of his career passing secrets to Moscow. Stands to reason that Sir Humphrey was instructed by his real masters in the Kremlin to find nothing untoward about Halstead, thus allowing him to continue spying for Mother Russia.
- Sir Humphrey's 'master' was Sir Arnold. Who did, in fact, tell Sir Humphrey not to uncover anything. So who were Sir Arnold's true masters... ?
