Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Inconsiderately, we had to bring him back to the point. This was my turn. I didn’t know whether any news had reached him, but there was a kite being flown for a new delivery system: from what we knew of Brodzinski, he wasn’t going to stop flying that kite just through lack of encouragement. Wouldn’t it be prudent — Rose and Osbaldiston both agreed with this — to deal with the problem before it got talked about, to bring in Getliffe, Luke and the Barford scientists straight away? It probably wasn’t pressing enough for the Minister himself, I said, but it might save trouble if Quaife, say, could start some informal talks.

‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ said Osbaldiston, who did not miss a cue.

‘Quaife? You mean my new Parliamentary Secretary?’ Lord Gilbey replied, with a bright, open look. ‘He’s going to be a great help to me. This job is altogether too much for one man, you’ve both seen enough of it to know that. Of course, my colleagues are politicians, so is Quaife, and I’m a simple soldier, and perhaps some of them would find the job easier than I do, don’t you know. Quaife is going to be a great help. There’s just one fly in the ointment about your suggestion, Lewis. Is it fair on the chap to ask him to take this on before he’s got his nose inside the office? I’m a great believer in working a man in gently—’

Amiably, Lord Gilbey went in for some passive resistance. He might find his job too much for one man, but nevertheless he liked it. He might be a simple soldier, but he had considerable talent for survival; quite as well as the next man, he could imagine the prospect of bright young men knocking at the door. On this point, however, we had a card to play. My department would be quite willing to take over these first discussions, I said. If Luke and the other scientists took the view we expected, then the business need never come into Gilbey’s office at all.

Gilbey didn’t like the idea of delegating a piece of work within his own department: but he liked the idea of the work totally escaping his department even less. Finally, in a sweet, good-natured fashion, he gave us a hedging consent. He said: ‘Yes, perhaps that’s what we should do.’ Without a blink, Osbaldiston took a note and said that he would minute it to the Parliamentary Secretary.

‘We mustn’t overburden the poor chap,’ said Gilbey, still hankering after a retreat. But he knew when he was beaten, and in a crisp tone, suggesting an efficiency expert addressing the woolly-minded, he said:

‘Well, that’s as far as we can go. I call it a good morning’s work.’

As we knew, he had a Cabinet at twelve. One might have thought that he would have shied from the approach of Cabinet meetings, feeling them above his weight. Not a bit of it. He loved them. As he was preparing himself for the occasion, he took on a special look, a special manner. As a rule, leaving Osbaldiston or me, or the secretaries in the room outside, he would say: ‘So long,’ sounding, as he often did, as though transported back before the first war when he was a smart young officer in the Household Cavalry. But, leaving to go to a Cabinet meeting, he would not have thought of saying, ‘So long.’ He inclined his head very gravely, without a word. He walked to the door, slow and erect, face solemn and pious, exactly as though he were going up the aisle in church.

After we had by-passed Lord Gilbey, I began to see Roger at work. He was ready to listen to any of us. He did not show much of his own mind. There were things about him, one above all, which I needed to know: not just for curiosity’s sake, though that was sharpening, but for the sake of my own actions.

In the middle of July, Roger was making his first ministerial speech. I did not need reminding, having drafted enough of them, how much speeches mattered — to parliamentary bosses, to any kind of tycoon. Draft after draft: the search for the supreme, the impossible, the more than Flaubertian perfection: the scrutiny for any phrase that said more than it ought to say, so that each speech at the end was bound, by the law of official inexplicitness, to be more porridge-like than when it started out in its first draft. I had always hated writing drafts for other people, and nowadays got out of it. To Hector Rose, to Douglas Osbaldiston, it was part of the job, which they took with their usual patience, their usual lack of egotism: when a minister crossed out their sharp, clear English and went in for literary composition of his own, they gave a wintry smile and let it stand.

Osbaldiston told me that, on the present occasion, Roger was doing most of his own writing. Further, it was Roger who was taking over the final draft of Gilbey’s speech. They were each to make statements for the department on the same day, Gilbey in the Lords, Roger in the Commons.

When the day came, I went to listen to Roger. I met Osbaldiston in Palace Yard: half-an-hour before he had gone through the experience, in the line of duty, of hearing Lord Gilbey. ‘If anyone can make head or tail of that,’ he reported, with professional irritation, ‘he damned well ought to be an authority on l’explication du texte .’

As we were on our way to our customary listening-point, his phlegm, usually impregnable as that of any of his colleagues, was wearing thin.

In the central lobby, I smelled scent near by me, and, glancing round, saw Caro Quaife. Her eyes were full and bright: she did not pretend to hide her nervousness. ‘I’d better sit somewhere out of the way,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’m going to fidget you.’

I said that he would be all right. Instead of going to the civil servants’ Box, we walked up with her to the Strangers’ Gallery. ‘This sort of speech is hell,’ said Caro. ‘I mean, when there’s nothing to say.’

I could not argue with that. She knew the position as well as I did, and the House of Commons much better.

We sat in the front row of the gallery, deserted except for a party of Indians. We looked down on the Chamber, half full of members, on the sea-green, comfortable benches, the green carpet hazy in the submarine light filtering through from the summer evening.

‘I’ve got the needle,’ said Caro. ‘This is a bit too raw.’

Within two or three minutes of his getting to his feet, she must have been reassured. Down there, speaking from the dispatch box, he looked a great hulk of a man. From a distance, his heavy shoulders seemed even more massive than they were. I had not heard him speak before, and I realized that he was effective quite out of the ordinary. Effective very much in a style of our time, I was thinking. He didn’t go in for anything that used to be called oratory. Nearly everyone in that chamber, and men like Osbaldiston and me, felt more comfortable with him because he didn’t. His manner was conversational; he had a typescript in front of him, but he did not glance at it. No metaphors, except in sarcasm. As Caro had realized, he had ‘nothing to say’ — but he didn’t make the mistake of pretending he had. There was no policy settled: the decisions were complex: there weren’t any easy solutions. He sounded competent, master of the details of the job. He also sounded quite uncomplacent, and listening to him, I believed it was that tone which went straight home.

So far as I could judge Commons receptions, his was a warm one, not only on his own side. Certainly Caro was in no doubt. Gazing down with an expression that was loving, gratified and knowledgeable, she said,

‘Now I call that a bit of all right.’

On my other side, Osbaldiston, still preoccupied with professional values, was reflecting: ‘I must say, it does make us look a bit more respectable, anyway.’