Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

There was an hallucination about high places which acted like alcohol, not only on Roger under threat, but on whole circles. They couldn’t believe they had lost the power till it had gone. Even when it had gone, they didn’t always believe it.

That week and the next, mornings in the office were like war time. Roger was sitting in his room, never looking bored, sending out for papers, asking for memoranda, intimate with no one, so far as I knew, certainly not with me. Ripples of admiration and faith were flowing down the corridors. They reached middle-grade civil servants who, as a rule, wanted only to get home and listen to long-playing records. As for the scientists, they were triumphing already. Walter Luke, who had believed in Roger from the beginning, stopped me in a gloomy, lavatory-like passage in the Treasury where his uninhibited voice reverberated round: ‘By God, the old bleeder’s going to get away with it! It just shows, if you go on talking sense for long enough, you wear ’em down in time.’

When I mentioned Walter’s opinion to Hector Rose, he said, with a frigid but not unfriendly smile: ‘Sancta simplicitas.’

Even Rose was not immune from the excitement. Yet he found it necessary to tell me that he had been in touch with Monteith. The piece of false information, which I had protested about, had been checked. Rose had satisfied himself that it was an honest mistake. He told me this, as though the first imperative for both of us was that the official procedures should be proved correct. Then he felt free to pass on to Roger’s chances.

During those days I talked once or twice to Douglas, but only to try to comfort him about his wife. The prognosis had been confirmed: she would become paralysed, she would die within five years. At his desk he sat stoically writing upon official paper. When I went in, he talked of nothing but her.

February had come, it was warm for the time of year, Whitehall was basking in the smoky sunlight.

By the end of the month, Roger was due to make his speech on the White Paper. We were all lulling ourselves with work. All of a sudden the lull broke. It broke in a fashion that no one had expected. It was a surprise to the optimistic: but it was even more of a surprise to the experienced, it didn’t look much, in the office. Just a note on a piece of paper. Harmless looking, the words.

The Opposition had put down a motion to reduce the Navy vote by ten pounds.

It would have sounded archaic, or plain silly, to those who didn’t know Parliament. Even to some who did, it sounded merely technical. It was technical, but most of us knew it meant much more. Who was behind it? Was it a piece of political chess? We did not believe it. Roger did not pretend to believe it.

Our maximum hope had been that, when the House ‘took notice’ of the White Paper, the Opposition would not make much of the debate, or force a division. This hadn’t seemed unrealistic. Some of them believed that Roger was as good — as near their line — as anyone they could expect. If he lost, they would get something worse. They had tried to damp down their own ‘wild men’. But now the switch was sudden and absolute. They were going for him, attacking him before his White Paper speech. They were ready to give up two of their supply days for the job. They must have known something about Roger’s side. They must have known more than that.

Roger had scarcely seen me, since the night at his house with Rubin. Now he sent for me.

He gave a smile as I entered his room, but it wasn’t a comradely one. He had kept his command intact, and his self-control: but, so it seemed, at the price of denying that we knew each other well. We were talking like business partners, with years of risk behind us, with a special risk present now: no closer than that: his face was hard, impatient, over-clear.

What did I know about it? No more than he did, probably less, I said.

‘I doubt if you can know less,’ he said. He broke out: ‘What does it mean?’

‘How in God’s name should I know?’

‘You must have an idea.’

I stared at him without speaking. Yes, I had an idea. I suspected we were fearing the same thing.

‘We’re grown men,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

I did so. I said it looked to me like a classical case of fraternization behind the lines. That is, some of his enemies, on his own back benches, had been making a bargain with their Opposition counterparts. The Opposition backbenchers had pressed their leaders to bring the vote. They would get support — how much support? — from the Government side. It was more decent that way. If Roger made a compromising speech, his colleagues and party would stay with him. But if he were too unorthodox — well if a Minister were too unorthodox to be convenient, there were other methods of dislodging him: this was one which gave least pain to his own party.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re quite likely right. That may be it.’

He had spoken neutrally. He went on, in an impatient, active tone: ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. We’ve got to know.’

He meant, we had to know, not only whether we were right, but if so, who the enemy were. One or two dissidents in his own party he could write off: but thirty or forty — and the more so if they were respected members — would mean the end.

Unless he behaved as Collingwood and his colleagues would have done, and denied that he meant to do anything at all. For an instant the temptation flickered again. Then he shut it away. He was set.

He was estimating the odds, and also our sources of information. He would be talking to the Whips himself that day and to friends in the party. The trouble was, he said, still talking cold sense, this didn’t sound like a respectable revolt. He hadn’t received a letter of regret, and no one had spoken to him face to face. We should have to go in for subterranean talking ourselves. Some of my Opposition friends might know something. So might the Press.

‘You’d better find out,’ said Roger, as briskly as though he were himself only remotely concerned, but was advising me for my own good.

From two sources I learned much the same story. An Opposition front-bencher whom I had known at Cambridge told it to me: a journalist took me along to El Vino’s to meet a couple of lobby correspondents. Next day, I had some news — not hard news, but more solid than a rumour — for Roger.

Yes, the correspondents had confirmed, our guess had something in it. There had been chaffering (one journalist claimed to know the place of the meeting) between a group of Opposition members and a few conservatives. The Opposition members were mostly on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party, though there were one or two pacifists and disarmers. I kept asking who the conservatives were, and how many. There, just at the point of fact — the rumour got wrapped in wool. Very few, one of my informants thought — maybe only two or three. No one who counted. One was, they were sure, the young man who had asked the Parliamentary Question about Brodzinski’s speech. ‘Oddballs’, my acquaintance kept repeating in the noisy pub, as the drinks went round, as though he found the phrase satisfactory.

It wasn’t bad news, so far as it existed. Considering our expectations, we might have been consoled. But Roger did not take it so. We were grown men, he had said. But it was one thing to face the thought of a betrayal, even a little one: another to hear that the thoughts were true. He was angry with me for bringing the news. He was bitter with himself. ‘I’ve never spent enough time drinking with fools,’ he cried. ‘I’ve never made them feel they’re important. It’s the one thing they can’t forgive.’

That evening, he did something out of character. Accompanied by Tom Wyndham, he spent hours in the smoking room at the House, trying to be matey. I heard the story from Wyndham next day, who said in a puzzled fashion: ‘It’s the first time I’ve known the old boy lose his grip.’ The great figure, clumsy as a bear, standing in the middle of the room, catching acquaintances’ eyes, downing tankards of beer, performing the only one of the personal arts at which he was downright bad. In a male crowd, he was at a loss. There he stood inept, grateful for the company of a colleague who was no use to him, until Tom Wyndham led him away.