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

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.

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

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.

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