Donald Pickering credited as playing...
Sir Richard Wharton
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: East Yemen, isn't that a democracy?
- Sir Richard Wharton: Its full name is the Peoples' Democratic Republic of East Yemen.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Ah I see, so it's a communist dictatorship.
- Bernard Woolley: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
- Bernard Woolley: What's that?
- Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
- Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
- Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
- Bernard Woolley: The PM seems to be completely in the dark.
- Sir Richard Wharton: Good.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Excellent. Anything else?
- Bernard Woolley: What if he demands options?
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well, it's obvious, Bernard. The Foreign Office will happily present him with three options, two of which are, on close inspection, exactly the same.
- Sir Richard Wharton: Plus a third which is totally unacceptable.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Like bombing Warsaw or invading France.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: You know what happens when politicians get into Number 10; they want to take their place on the world stage.
- Sir Richard Wharton: People on stages are called actors. All they are required to do is look plausible, stay sober, and say the lines they're given in the right order.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Some of them try to make up their own lines.
- Sir Richard Wharton: They don't last long.
- Sir Richard Wharton: But there's a group of Marxist guerrillas in the mountains somewhere. And we're getting reports that they're planning a coup.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Oh well, these things will happen.
- Sir Richard Wharton: If the PM gets into one of his ghastly patriotic Churchillian moods, he may intervene. All that pro-British, defending democracy nonsense.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Oh, I know, I know.
- Sir Richard Wharton: He must understand that once you start interfering in the internal squabbles of other countries, you're on a very slippery slope. Even the Foreign Secretary's grasped that.