Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Thus I was frequently in and out of their offices, which were only a few hundred yards away from ours, at the corner of the Park. Like everyone else, I had become attached to Lord Gilbey. I was no better than anyone else, and in some ways worse, at getting him to make up his mind. A few days after that talk with Rose, I was making another attempt, in conjunction with Gilbey’s own Permanent Secretary, to do just that.

The Permanent Secretary was an old colleague of mine, Douglas Osbaldiston, who was being talked of now just as Rose had been, nearly twenty years before. He was the newest bright star, the man who, as they used to say about Rose, would be Head of the Civil Service before he finished.

On the surface, he was very different from Rose, simple, unpretentious, straightforward where Rose was oblique, humbly born while Rose was the son of an Archdeacon, and yet as cultivated as an old-fashioned civil servant, and exuding the old-fashioned amateur air. He was no more an amateur than Rose, and at least as clever. Once, when he had been working under Rose, I had thought he would not be tough enough for the top jobs. I could not have been more wrong.

He had studied Rose’s career with forethought, and was determined not to duplicate it. He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little — ‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply — and back to the Treasury.

He was long, thin, fresh-faced, still with the relics of an undergraduate air. He was quick-witted, unpompous, the easiest man to do business with. He was also affectionate, and he and I became friends as I could never have been with Hector Rose.

That morning, as we waited to go in to Gilbey, it did not take us five minutes to settle our tactics. First — we were both over-simplifying — there was a putative missile on which millions had been spent, and which had to be stopped: we had to persuade ‘the Old Hero’, as the civil servants called Lord Gilbey, to sign a Cabinet paper. Second, a new kind of delivery system for warheads was just being talked about. Osbaldiston, who trusted my nose for danger, agreed that, if we didn’t ‘look at it’ now, we should be under pressure. ‘If we can get the OH,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘to let the new boy take it over—’ By the new boy he meant Roger Quaife.

I asked Osbaldiston what he thought of him. Osbaldiston said that he was shaping better than anyone they had had there; which, because with Gilbey in the Lords Quaife would have to handle the department’s business in the Commons, was a consolation.

We set off down the corridor, empty except for a messenger, high and dark with the waste of space, the lavish clamminess, of nineteenth-century Whitehall. Two doors along, a rubric stood out from the tenebrous gloom: Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Roger Quaife. Osbaldiston jabbed his finger at it, harking back to our conversation about Roger, and remarked: ‘One piece of luck, he doesn’t get here too early in the morning.’

At the end of the corridor, the windows of Lord Gilbey’s room, like those of Hector Rose’s at the other corner of the building, gave on to the Park. In the murky light, the white-panelled walls gleamed spectrally, and Lord Gilbey stood between his desk and the window, surveying with equable disapproval the slashing rain, the lowering clouds, the seething summer trees.

‘It’s a brute,’ he said, as though at last reaching a considered judgement on the weather. ‘It’s a brute.’

His face was pleasant, small-featured, open with that particular openness which doesn’t tell one much. His figure was beautifully trim for a man in his sixties. He was affable and had no side. And yet our proposal, which had seemed modest enough in Osbaldiston’s room, began to take on an aura of mysterious difficulty.

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘I really think it’s time we got a Cabinet decision on the A—.’ He gave the codename of the missile.

‘On the A—?’ Gilbey repeated thoughtfully, in the manner of one hearing a new, original and probably unsound idea.

‘We’ve got as much agreement as we shall ever get.’

‘We oughtn’t to rush things, you know,’ Gilbey said reprovingly. ‘Do you think we ought to rush things?’

‘We got to a conclusion on paper eighteen months ago.’

‘Paper, my dear chap? I’m a great believer in taking people with you, on this kind of thing.’

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that is precisely what we’ve been trying to do.’

‘Do you think we ought to weary in well-doing? Do you really, Sir Douglas?’

The ‘Sir Douglas’ was a sign of gentle reproof. Normally Gilbey would have called Osbaldiston by his Christian name alone. I caught a side-glance from my colleague, as from one who was being beaten over the head with very soft pillows. Once more he was discovering that the Old Hero was not only affable, but obstinate and vain. Osbaldiston knew only too well that immediately he was away from the office, Gilbey was likely to be ‘got at’ by business tycoons like Lord Lufkin, to whom the stopping of this project meant the loss of millions, or old service friends, who believed that any weapon was better than none.

That was true; the latter being an argument to Osbaldiston for not having a soldier in this job at all. It was not even that Gilbey had been a soldier so eminent that his juniors could not nobble him now. When they called him the Old Hero, it was not a jibe; he had been an abnormally brave fighting officer in both wars, and had commanded a division in the second. That had been his ceiling. If he had been even reasonably capable, the military in the clubs used to say, he couldn’t have helped but go right to the top, since it was hard for a man to be better connected. His peerage had come by birth, not as a military reward. So far as there were aristocrats in England, he was one.

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘if you think it’s wise to prove just how much agreement there is, we could easily run together an inter-departmental meeting, at your level. Or at mine. Or Ministers and officials together.’

‘Do you know,’ Gilbey said, ‘I’m not a great believer in meetings or committees. They don’t seem to result in action, don’t you know.’

For once, Douglas Osbaldiston was at a loss. Then he said, ‘There’s another method. You and the three service ministers could go and talk it over with the Prime Minister. We could brief you very quickly.’

(And I had no doubt Osbaldiston was thinking, we could also see to it that the Prime Minister was briefed.)

‘No, I think that would be worrying him too much. These people have a lot on their plate, you know. No, I don’t think I should like to do that.’

Gilbey gave a sweet, kind, obscurely triumphant smile and said: ‘I tell you what I will do.’

‘Minister?’

‘I’ll have another good look at the papers! You let me have them over the week-end, there’s a good chap. And you might let me have a précis on one sheet of paper.’

Then he broke off, with an air of innocent satisfaction.

‘What do you think of this suit I’m wearing?’

It was an extraordinary question. No one, whatever accusation he was bringing against me or Douglas Osbaldiston, could possibly think of us as dressy men: which, in a gentlemanly way, Lord Gilbey was. He sounded innocent, but though he might not be capable of making decisions, he was entirely capable of pushing them out of sight.

It looked very nice, I said, with a total lack of interest.

‘You’ll never guess where I had it made.’

No, we found that beyond us.

‘As a matter of fact, I had it made at—.’ Gilbey gave the name, not of a fashionable tailor, but of a large London departmental store. ‘It doesn’t sound very smart, but it’s all right .’