Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

He gave a comradely, savage grin, then broke out: ‘Anyway, just to begin with, don’t you think you might treat me as a moral equal?’

This was my second surprise — so sharp, it seemed I hadn’t heard right and simultaneously knew that I had. We looked at each other, and then away, as one does when words have burrowed to a new level, when they have started to mean something. There was a pause, but I was not premeditating. I said: ‘What do you want? What do you really want?’

Roger laughed, not loudly this time. ‘You must have learned a little from your observations, mustn’t you?’

His body was heaved back in his chair, relaxed, but his eyes were bright, half with malice, half with empathy, making me take part.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I want everything that politics can give me. Somehow you never seem to have wanted that. If you’d been slightly different, I’ve sometimes thought you could have done. But I don’t think you were humble enough.’

He went on: ‘Look, a politician lives in the present, you know. If he’s got any sense, he can’t think of leaving any memorial behind him. So you oughtn’t to begrudge him the rewards he wants. One of them is — just possessing the power, that’s the first thing. Being able to say yes or no. The power usually isn’t very much, as power goes, but of course one wants it. And one waits a long time before one gets a smell of it. I was thinking about politics, I was working at politics, I was dreaming of a career nowhere else, from the time I was twenty. I was forty before I even got into the House. Do you wonder that some politicians are content when they manage to get a bit of power?’

He said: ‘I’m not, you know.’

Once more angry, intimate and simple, he said he thought he could have done other things. He believed he could have had a success at the Bar, or made money in business. He said in passing that money didn’t matter much, since Caro was so rich. He went on: ‘If I were content, it would all be nice and easy. I happen to be pretty comfortably placed. It isn’t a matter of being liked. I doubt if they like me all that much. Being liked doesn’t count so much in politics as outsiders think. Being taken for granted, becoming part of the furniture, counts for a great deal more. I’ve only got to sit on my backside, and I should become part of the furniture. If I played the game according to the rules, nothing could stop me getting a decent, safe Ministry in five years or so.’ He gave a smile at once sarcastic, matey, calm. ‘The trouble is, that isn’t good enough.’

He said, as though it were straightforward: ‘The first thing is to get the power. The next — is to do something with it.’

There was a silence. Then, heaving himself up, he suggested that we might have a change of scene. We went into the drawing room, where he ordered brandy. For a moment or so he sat in silence, as though uncertain. Then he snapped his fingers and looked at me, with a glimmer of amusement. ‘Why do you imagine I’m in this present job at all? I suppose you thought I wasn’t given any choice?’

I said that I had heard speculations.

‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘I asked for it.’

He had been warned against it, he said, by all who believed in him: encouraged into it by some who didn’t. It was of course a risk, he added, that a politician at his stage ought not to take. He looked at me, and said, without emphasis: ‘I believe I can do something. I don’t guarantee it, but there is a chance. For a few years the situation is comparatively fluid. After that, I confess I don’t see much hope.’

It was quiet in the drawing room, only four other people there beside ourselves, and they were far away across the room. It was, as usual, rather dark or gave the impression of darkness. There was no sense of time there, of the hurrying clock, or the inevitability of morning.

For some time we went over arguments which we both knew well. They were the arguments over which for months we had been fencing, not declaring ourselves. Yet, as he had known and I had suspected, we disagreed little. They were the arguments which had been implicit in his interrogation of David Rubin, that evening in the spring: when, so it seemed now, Roger was already preparing himself.

Neither of us needed to make a coherent case. Knowing the details of the debate so intimately, we used a kind of shorthand, which at that time would have been understood by a good many of our acquaintances, in particular by Getliffe and most of the scientists. To put it at its simplest, we believed that most people in power, certainly in our own country, certainly in the West, had misjudged the meaning of nuclear arms. Yet we had got on to an escalator, and it would take abnormal daring to get off. There were two points of action, Roger and I both knew. One was in our own, English, hands. It was not realistic for us to try indefinitely to possess our own weapons. Could we slide out and manage to prevent the spread? The second point, about which I myself felt much more strongly, was not in our control. We might have an influence. If the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union went on too long — how long was too long? none of us could guess — then I could see only one end.

‘It mustn’t happen,’ said Roger. Neither of us smiled. It was an occasion when only a platitude gave one support. Roger went on speaking with energy, calculation and warmth. It had to be solved. There were enough forces to be used, by determined and skilful men. He sounded impersonal, immersed. He wasn’t thinking about me; both his psychological attention and his vanity had dropped away. He was utterly sure that he could be of some use.

After a time, when the concentration had slackened, I said: ‘All this is fine, but isn’t it curious, coming from your side?’

He knew as well as I did that I was no conservative.

‘It’s got to come from my side. It’s the only chance. Look, we both agree that we haven’t much time. In our kind of society — and I mean America too — the only things that can possibly get done are going to be done by people like me. I don’t care what you call me. Liberal conservative. Bourgeois capitalist. We’re the only people who can get a political decision through. And the only decisions we can get through will come from people like me.

‘Remember,’ said Roger, ‘these are going to be real decisions. There won’t be many of them, they’re only too real. People like you, sitting outside, can influence them a bit, but you can’t make them. Your scientists can’t make them. Civil servants can’t make them. So far as that goes, as a Junior Minister, I can’t make them. To make the real decisions, one’s got to have the real power.’

‘Are you going to get it?’ I asked.

‘If I don’t,’ said Roger, ‘this discussion has been remarkably academic.’

In the last moment before we got ready to go, he was preoccupied, but not with decisions to come. He was thinking how soon he could manage to sit in Gilbey’s chair. He mentioned the name, but he was being careful not to involve me. He was sensitive, perhaps in this case over-sensitive, to what he could ask his supporters. It sometimes made him seem, as now, more cagey, evasive, tricky than he was at heart.

He was, however, happy with the evening’s talk. He foresaw that, when he had the power, he would be plunged in a network of what he called ‘closed’ politics, the politics of the civil servants, the scientists, the industrialists, before he got any scrap of his policy through. He thought I could be useful to him there. After this evening, he believed that he could rely on me.

When we had said good night in St James’s Street, and I made my way up that moderate incline (with a vestigial memory of how, when I was younger and had spent nights at Pratt’s, it had sometimes seemed uncomfortably steep) I was thinking that he did not find his own personality easy to handle. It was not neat or sharp, any more than his face was. Like a lot of subtle men, he must often have been too clever by half, and taken in no one but himself. Nevertheless, when he spoke about what he wanted to do, he had not been clever at all. He knew, and took it for granted that I knew, that in their deep concerns men aren’t clever enough to dissimulate. Neither of us had been dissimulating that night.