ARMANDO Iannucci’s The Thick Of It has dragged political satire into a ruder, angrier bear pit, but Jim Hacker can still hack it in the 21st century corridors of power too.

This tour of the West End anniversary production of Yes, Prime Minister is no mere revival of the Nigel Hawthorne-Paul Eddington television series of the Eighties. Instead, original screenwriters Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn have re-sharpened their quills for an entirely new, typically labyrinthine farce for Richard McCabe’s Hacker, the ever harassed Prime Minister, and Simon Williams’s urbane, superior Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Latin-quoting, hangdog Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley (Chris Larkin) is still there but the familiar triumvirate has been joined by a sharp, glamorous Special Policy Advisor, Claire Sutton (Charlotte Lucas), a savvy female addition.

Hacker is in crisis at Chequers, leading a financially crippled coalition government reduced to begging on bended knee to Kumranistan, whose promise of aid to Britain – facilitated by Sir Humphrey – hangs on the procurement of an under-age hooker for this dodgy new oil state’s Foreign Secretary.

Yes, Prime Minister transfers smoothly to the stage in Lynn’s directorial hands, just as Rik Mayall’s buccaneering return to The New Statesman in Episode 2006: The Blair B’stard Project did five years ago. Crucially, it oozes confidence and conviction in its new setting of round-the-clock news coverage, ubiquitous Blackberrys and post-Soviet-revolution splinter countries to sweet-talk.

McCabe’s lugubrious, puffy Hacker may be more Tony Hancock than a composite of modern PMs, but everything else chimes with the times, including a superb dissection of the current BBC. Jay and Lynn’s writing is always one step ahead, like Williams’s Sir Humphrey, whose slippery verbal dexterity and devious thinking peaks anew in a series of grandiloquent answers that leave Blairite spin looking so shallow by comparison. A delight from start to finish.

* Yes, Prime Minister, Leeds Grand Theatre, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 848 2701.