The Best Episodes Written By Jonathan Lynn

A rumour starts that Jim’s department is about to be axed. So with help from Sir Humphrey, they try and defeat the Prime Minister’s plans.

Office politics take precedence over national issues when Sir Humphrey and Bernard fall out with each other after Jim tries to restrict Sir Humphrey’s access to №10.

Jim favors abolishing smoking through heavy taxation but runs into strong opposition from the tobacco lobby and the Treasury department.

Jim faces rebellion at home and in the office over the removal of protected status from a badger habitat, while he tries to circumvent Sir Humphrey’s efforts to keep him ignorant of things.

Jim goes on radio to support the Solihull project a Government, union and private enterprise building scheme, that he has inherited from the last administration, but unknown to him the project is close to bankruptcy, Sir Humphrey hopes to save the deal by offering a quango to the director of the bank involved

With his finger now on the nuclear button, Hacker plans his first act as Prime Minister to be a radical new defence policy.

Sir Humphrey tries to get his scheduled pay raise even though increases for M.P.s have been put on hold for budgetary reasons.

Jim considers approving the publication of his predecessor’s memoirs, but it becomes a plumber’s nightmare as a series of leaks spring up.

Jim uses the occasion of his predecessor’s state funeral to negotiate with the French over the conditions of the Channel Tunnel.

Sir Humphrey has to decide if he will support the P.M. or inform Parliament when Hacker denies knowledge of a wiretap authorized by his office without his knowledge.

Jim is coached in the world of show business as he prepares to address the nation on his defence policy.

Jim must take action to avert a Marxist takeover of a Commonwealth island nation despite the efforts of the Foreign Office to keep him ignorant.

Hacker threatens to place Sir Humphrey on leave while a security inquiry looks into why he cleared a confessed Soviet spy many years earlier, so Sir Humphrey retaliates with a dog in distress on Salisbury plain.

Hacker and Sir Humphrey clash over the appointment of the governor of the Bank of England and the cover up of a banking scandal in the City.

Sir Humphrey makes a very strange ally out of the formidable Agnes Moorhouse, a radical political reformer from a London council, in his efforts to stop Hacker’s plans to make local government more democratic.

Jim Hacker faces embarrassment when Sir Humphrey tells a friend in the arts that the PM's government is planning to cut grants.

Sir Humphrey faces a conflict of interest when Hacker devises a plan to improve educational standards by abolishing the Department of Education and Science.

Jim has to choose a new bishop but doesn’t like either the Church or Sir Humphrey’s choices.

Sir Humphrey makes Jim suspicious of the Minister of Employment when he needs the P.M.’s support in opposing a plan to shift military personnel from the south to the north of England.

Jim accepts an unpopular position pushing a transportation bill desired by Number 10, but opposed by everyone else.