I think that Humphrey's hobbies were reading (mainly biographies), listening to classical music, and occasionally visiting the RSC, the National Theatre or the Royal Opera House, where he was on the Board.
[4] The third volume (published 1983, but dated September 2019) notes that the editors learned from "the few lucid moments of Sir Humphrey Appleby's last ravings" at St Dymphna's Hospital for the Elderly Deranged.
He will both feign sympathy and strike alliances even with the far left in order to maintain the existing status quo in his own career and for the Civil Service bureaucracy in particular.
He is even once heard singing, "We shall not be moved", to himself when unleashing a rabid left-wing labour union leader against his Minister's plans for replacing the civil servants filling out red tape all day in a London hospital with no actual doctors, nurses, and patients.
After decades of working in a bureaucracy, Sir Humphrey knows how to baffle his opponents with legalese and routinely employs what his previous Minister calls "creative inertia" (meaning a dizzying array of sociopathic blocking and delaying tactics).
He often conceals vital documents underneath mammoth piles of papers and reports, strategically appoints allies to supposedly impartial boards, or offers to set up an interdepartmental committee to indefinitely block his Minister's proposals, and occasionally outright lying.
Sir Humphrey frequently uses both his mastery of the English language and even his superb grasp of Latin and Classical Greek grammar to perplex his political masters and to obscure relevant issues under discussion.
However, his habit of using language as a tool of confusion and obstruction is so deeply ingrained that he is sometimes unable to speak clearly and directly even when he honestly wishes to be clearly understood.
The joke being, however, that Sir Humphrey, as an elite, University of Oxford-educated career civil servant, is actually quite out of touch from the average Briton.
Sir Humphrey still holds women to be the fairer sex and is thus overly courteous, frequently addressing them as "dear lady", while expressing contempt for female civil servants behind their backs and blocking their chances of promotion at every turn.
Humphrey is usually smooth, calm and collected within his element of manipulating both bureaucracy and procedure, but has become so adept at working within and maintaining the system of government that, whenever anything unexpected is sprung on him, whether it be Hacker ordering him to negotiate with a councillor who wishes to overthrow the monarchy, or honours in his department being made dependent on meritocracy, Humphrey immediately crumbles, on a few occasions being reduced to stuttering out garbled platitudes such as "the thin end of the wedge", "the beginning of the end", or "it cuts at the very roots", although he usually regains his composure pretty quickly to try and push his own opposition to the plans back on track.
While it would be premature to commit ourselves to a definitive position on his merits or even his existence, a committee is being struck to consider the possibility of a decision, in the fullness of time, to regret his passing, if any.
"[12]The character was resurrected for the 2010 general election campaign in a series of short sketches on BBC Two's late evening current affairs programme Newsnight.
[14] In January 2025, the British government announced that a new collection of artificial intelligence tools aimed at helping civil servants with their work would be called Humphrey.