4 ideas
Roderick Spode leads the Saviours of Britain, a uniformed movement known as the Black Shorts, and bullies everyone at Totleigh Towers with threats of violence. Jeeves learns that Spode secretly runs a ladies' underwear business called Eulalie Soeurs, and Bertie finds that merely saying 'Eulalie' makes Spode back down at once. The aspiring strongman is disarmed not by force but by a private embarrassment that would make his followers laugh at him.
Bertie obeys 'the Code of the Woosters' and never lets down a pal or refuses a woman's request. Stiffy Byng, Gussie and Aunt Dahlia know this, so they can steer him into thefts, false engagements and danger. Because the rule is absolute and public, others can predict and exploit it, and it works against its holder.
Every character's power rests on a compromising object or secret: Gussie's notebook of insults about Sir Watkyn and Spode, the policeman's helmet, the silver cow-creamer, the Eulalie secret. Control shifts to whoever holds the item at that moment, so conflicts are settled by trading and passing on leverage, not by argument or force. Read this way, a social tangle becomes a question of who holds what over whom, and at what point the holder will trade it.
Jeeves engineers every rescue, but he does it from a position where Bertie cannot manage without him. The nominal subordinate holds the real power because only he can solve the problems, and he collects his payment when the need is greatest.