The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is a 1970 British satirical film directed by Kevin Billington, and starring Peter Cook, Vanessa Howard and John Cleese. It was co-written by Cook, Cleese, Graham Chapman and Billington. The film was devised and produced by David Frost under the pseudonym "David Paradine".

Plot

The mysterious Michael Rimmer appears at a small and ailing British advertising agency, where the employees assume he is working on a time and motion study. However, he quickly begins to assert a de facto authority over the firm's mostly ineffectual staff and soon acquires control of the business from the incompetent boss Ferret. Rimmer then succeeds in establishing the newly invigorated firm as the country's leading polling agency, and begins to make regular TV appearances as a polling expert. He subsequently moves into politics, acting as an adviser to the leader of the Tory opposition, Tom Hutchinson. After arranging for the Shadow Home Secretary Sir Eric Bentley to give an inflammatory anti-immigration speech to give Hutchinson a pretext for firing him and to demonstrate the Conservatives' opposition to immigration without any policies, Rimmer becomes the MP for Bentley's vacant seat of Budleigh Moor (a reference to Cook's frequent collaborator, Dudley Moore). Along the way, he acquires a trophy wife.