Corridors of Power Page 19

  It sounded official, cautious, reasonable. But everyone in the room knew that it meant more. It was a sighting-shot: and it was a sighting-shot, as it were, by proxy. It was not really this Minister who was testing Roger’s intentions. It was a set of other interests, who were still keeping quiet. Service groups? Big firms? None of us knew, but all of us were guessing.

  ‘They’ve been getting at him,’ said Collingwood.

  ‘It’s very easy, as I said before,’ Roger leaned back, ‘for them to overplay their hands.’

  He looked confident, full of weight, springy with resource. Collingwood turned his handsome head and watched him in silence. So far as I could feel it in the air, there had been no argument.

  ‘Well, then, Quaife, I’m with you. I agree, the Committee’ (he meant the Cabinet committee on defence policy, about which Rose had given me the first news) ‘ought to meet tomorrow or Tuesday. That’s where we want you to help us–’ He spoke to me. He gave, as usual, the impression that he was ill at ease and that he didn’t care whether he was at ease or not. Everyone at Basset called him Reggie, but he still found it an effort not to speak to those two Cabinet colleagues of his as Mr Quaife and Mr Cave. He just managed to use their surnames. As for me, though I had met him a dozen times in the house, he could not become as familiar as that.

  He assumed that I was at his disposal for a modest task.

  They wanted the Committee convened over the weekend. As Douglas Osbaldiston was the Secretary, that was his job. Would I telephone him and get that in motion before dinner?

  It was barely polite. It was certainly not adroit. Yet, within the next ten minutes, I saw, or thought I saw, how he kept his power. Before I arrived, they had been talking about three big firms: how much influence could they pull out? By this time, Roger and Cave spoke of ‘pressure groups’, or ‘lobbies’, as though they were Americans.

  ‘If they were solid together, they might be more of a menace,’ said Roger. ‘But they’re not, we haven’t given them a chance to be. There are always going to be some Government contracts. For some of our friends, that prospect carries its own simple logic.’

  By the side of Roger, braced for the struggle, his voice taking on its taunting edge, Cave looked slack and gone to seed. But he was more at home than he had been all the weekend. He didn’t see, he said, any lobby being effective by itself. ‘But I should make two qualifications. First, Government must know its own mind. Second, and this isn’t quite a platitude, lobbies may be important if they happen to touch opinion deeper than their own. That is, if they touch opinion which hasn’t their own axe to grind.’

  ‘Fair comment,’ said Roger.

  Collingwood stirred, and put one arm round the bedpost. ‘I see.’ He was speaking to neither of them in particular, making pauses like one reading from a script: but the authority was there. ‘If I understand you both right, there isn’t much between us. I take it Cave means that we’ve got to feel our way. I agree to that. We’ve got to watch whether any of these forces are having any effect on the Party. We can’t push the Party further than it’s prepared to go. I’m not presuming to give Quaife any advice. I never give anyone any advice.’ He said this as though it were the most exalted claim a man could make. ‘But, if I were Quaife, I should wrap up some of his intentions. I shouldn’t let them get down to particular consequences until we’ve carried most of them with us. Carried them further than they thought. But not further than some of us are ready to go. I shouldn’t let the White Paper give them much idea which weapons were being struck off straight away. I should wrap it up.’ He was still addressing the wall. ‘If I were Quaife, I should remember one other thing. I’ve got a feeling that the Party needs a lead. And by the Party, I mean the country as well. They need to feel that they’re doing something new. I’ve got a feeling that, if anyone gives them a lead, they’ll forgive him a lot. They may not like everything he’s doing, but they’ll be ready to forgive him.’

  It was a curious speech, I thought, as I listened, and even more so later. A good deal of it was common form, not specially ominous, but carefully uncommitted. The last part was not such common form. He seemed to be inviting Roger to take a risk. As he did so, I had felt for the first time that he was, in his own right, a formidable man. Was he inducing Roger to take one risk too many? He had sounded, in a stony way, sincere. What did he wish for Roger? He had done him good turns. Did he like him? Men like Collingwood did not like or dislike freely. I was still uncertain about his feelings for Roger, or whether he had any feelings for him at all.

  Next day, Margaret and I had to leave the house after tea. The weather had not changed. Just as when we arrived, it was an evening so tranquil that the chimney smoke seemed painted on the sky, and in the air there was a smell of burning leaves. Diana stood by herself in the courtyard, waving us off.

  It had been a weekend in the country, with unhappiness in the house, and foreboding. As we settled down in the car, though, I felt, not relief to get away, but disquiet. For some of the disquiet I could find reason; but it was still there, swelling, nagging, changing, as though I were back in my childhood after a holiday, returning home, not knowing what I should find nor what I feared.

  25: A Speech to the Fishmongers

  The committee room looked inwards to the Treasury yard: the rain sloshed down. Past Collingwood’s head, on the two sides of the window, quivered the turning plane-leaves. In the chair, Collingwood behaved as he had done before, sitting on the bed at Basset. He was formal with the Ministers: Douglas Osbaldiston he treated like a servant, which Douglas showed no sign of noticing, much less of minding. But Collingwood got what he wanted. Arguments did not continue, except on lines which he approved, and there were not many. He had come to inspect the skeleton of the White Paper. In his view, it ought to be what he called ‘a set of balances’.

  This suited Roger. It was not the way in which, that summer, before the opposition began to crystallize, we had been making drafts. This way left him some tactical freedom. It sounded as though he and Collingwood, after the bedroom conference, had made a deal. Yet I knew for certain that, since half-past eight on the Saturday night, two and a half days before, they had not exchanged a word in private. Enough had been said. They each understood what would follow, and so did Monty Cave and I. This was the way business got done, very rarely with intrigue, not as a rule with cut and dried agreements; quite different from the imaginative picture of the cynical and unworldly.

  Osbaldiston, who was neither cynical nor unworldly, would have understood it without even a comment, if he had been present on Saturday night. As it was, he was momentarily surprised. He had expected something more dramatic from his Minister, and had been uneasy. Douglas did not approve of anything dramatic, on paper. Now he realized that the White Paper was going to be filled with detail. He was more comfortable with it so.

  While Hector Rose, sick with migraine when I reported to him that afternoon, smelled compromise in the air.

  ‘I think I remember, my dear Lewis, mentioning to you that the knives were sharpening. Has it ever crossed your mind that our masters are somewhat easily frightened off?’ He looked at me with sarcastic satisfaction in his own judgement. I told him more about the meeting, which he would have attended himself if he had been well. I said that the Air Minister had reserved his position at much too great length. Rose nodded. It would be a month or two before the White Paper could be finished, they had agreed. By that time, Roger had told them casually, just before the end of the meeting, he would have his ‘winding-up’ ready for them to see. ‘That went down?’ Rose raised his eyebrows. ‘It sounds like a very neat job of papering-over-the-cracks, shouldn’t you say?’

  But Rose and a good many others were puzzled when, within a fortnight, Roger next spoke in public. Long before the Basset weekend, Lufkin had made him commit himself to the actual engagement. Whether he had changed his mind about what to say, after Collingwood’s allocution, I did not know. Whether he had decided to use this occas
ion, instead of going on to the television screen, I did not know also. It may have been the chance conjunction of Collingwood and Lufkin that led him to give what became known, a little bizarrely, as the Fishmongers’ Hall Speech.

  Lord Lufkin was a Fishmonger. Not that he had ever sold a fish: not even in the Hamletian sense. Lufkin had a singular gift for getting it both ways. He disapproved of the hereditary peerage, and had become a hereditary peer. In just the same way, he had nothing but scorn for the old livery companies. It was grotesque, said Lufkin, with acid scorn, for businessmen to take on the names of honest trades they had not a vestige of connection with: and to stand themselves good dinners out of money earned by better men. It was medieval juju, said Lufkin. It was ‘atavistic’, he said mysteriously, with the spirit that John Knox might have shown when he was less well disposed than usual to Mary Queen of Scots. None of that prevented him taking all the honours in his own livery, which, by some fluke, was the Fishmongers. That year, he had risen to be the Prime Warden of the Fishmongers. Most of his colleagues enjoyed each honorific job as it came, and would have enjoyed this. Lufkin showed no sign of pleasure: except, I sometimes fancied, at the thought of doing someone else out of it.

  He went through his duties. That was why he had invited Roger to the Michaelmas dinner and had arranged for him to speak. That was why Lufkin stood in a great drawing-room at the hall, that November night, dressed in a russet Tudor gown tipped with fur, surrounded by other officials of the livery, dressed in less grand gowns tipped with less grand fur. Above the fancy dress protruded Lufkin’s small, neat, handsome twentieth-century head, as he shook hand after hand with an impersonation of cordiality.

  With maces carried before him, he led the procession into the hall for dinner. It was a hall not unlike, though larger than, a college hall: and the dinner was not unlike, though larger than, a college feast. Roger sat at the high table, on Lufkin’s right hand. I was somewhere down the hall, placed between a banker, cultivated and reactionary, and a Labour MP, less cultivated, but not much less reactionary. I did not know many men there, though across the room I caught sight of Sammikins, leaning back with a glass in his hand. The food and drink were good, but not good enough to go out for. I knew that Roger was going to use the occasion to ‘fly a kite’. I had not seen the script, and did not expect much. I was not at all keyed-up. I got the banker off the subject of South Africa, on which he sounded like an unusually illiberal Afrikaaner, on to German translations of Dostoievsky, where I knew nothing, and he a great deal.

  Speeches. A long, and very bad one, by the chairman of an insurance company. I drank another glass of port. A short and very bad one by Lufkin, who sat down among dutiful plaudits as though he both expected them and was impervious.

  Then the toastmaster cried: ‘Pray silence for your guest, the Right Honourable Roger Quaife, one of her Majesty’s Privy Councillors, holder of the Distinguished Service Order, Member of Parliament for—’

  In the candlelight, looking at the table before me, I saw the sheen of glass, of gold and silver plate. I turned as Roger rose. He looked enormous, after the image left by Lufkin. He began the incantation: ‘My Lord and Prime Warden, your Grace, my Lords, Members of the Honourable Livery Company of the Fishmongers, gentlemen–’

  He stopped short, and stood there in silence. He went on in a quiet tone: ‘We have, all of us here, a good deal to be thankful for. This is an autumn night, and there is no war. An autumn night, and no war. For ten years out of the lives of almost every man here, we could not have said as much. We are lucky now, tonight. We have to make sure that that luck lasts. Some of us have fought in two wars. Most of us have fought in one. I don’t need to tell anyone who has fought, that war is hell. We have seen better men than ourselves killed beside us. We have seen the way they died. We have seen our dead. But that is not the worst of it. In the wars we fought, there were times when we could still admire our friends: one was terrified oneself, but others were brave. War was stink, and rot, and burning, but human beings were often fine. Individual men still counted. It is hard to imagine how, in any major war which we can now foresee, they can count much again.’

  At that point, Roger had to break off into official language and point out how the armed services were still all-important. But soon he was talking in his own voice again. That was the knack – it was more than a knack, it was a quality which had drawn some of us to him – which held his audience. The hall was quiet. He went on: ‘We all think, from time to time, of thermo-nuclear war. Of course we do. We should be foolish, as well as wicked, if we didn’t. We can dimly imagine what such a war would be like. By its side, any horrors that men have so far contrived to inflict upon other men, would look like a tea-party. So we know that this must never happen. Yet, though we know that, we do not know the way to stop it. I have met men of good will, who don’t easily give up hope, thinking to themselves that we are all – all mankind – caught in a hideous trap. I don’t believe that, I believe that with courage and intelligence and a little luck, we shall find a way out. I don’t pretend it will be easy. I doubt whether there is any total solution. Perhaps we’ve got to hack away here and there, trying to do comparatively small things, which may make war that much less likely. That is why I am taking the opportunity tonight to ask a few questions. No one in the world, I think, knows the answers to all of them, perhaps not to many. That is a reason why we should at least ask them. Most of all, in this country. Ours is a country which has been as stable as any in the world for the longest time. We are an experienced people. We have been through many dangers. It happens, through no fault of our own, that this new danger, this change in the nature of war, this thermo-nuclear breakthrough, threatens us more vitally and completely than any major power. Simply because, by world standards, we are no bigger than a pocket-handkerchief, and live so close together. This degree of danger, of course, ought not to affect our judgement. I know there are some – most of all, old people living alone, and some of the young, who feel this predicament as unfair – who quite naturally, in their own hearts, occasionally feel frightened.’

  There had been no noise, almost no coughing, in the hall. I had been aware of the faces round me, some naked with interest, the banker’s reflective and morose. Just then, a voice down the end of the opposite table shouted, thick with drink: ‘Speak for yourself!’

  Sammikins was on his feet, berserk, calling to the interrupter.

  ‘Shut up, you blasted swine!’

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ came a drunken voice.

  Sammikin’s neighbours were pulling him down, as he cried, ‘Where have you fought? This man has, you pig!’

  Roger held up his hand. He stood, impassive, immobile, without a flicker. He said: ‘I’m prepared for anyone to accuse me of being cowardly. That doesn’t matter. It’s hard, I sometimes think, for a man with young children not to be. But I’m not prepared for anyone to accuse the people of this country of being cowardly. They’ve proved the opposite quite enough for any reasonable man. Anything we decide, now or in the future, about our military position, will be done because it seems to us moral and sensible, not because we’re frightened, or because, on the other hand, we have to prove that we’re not.’ He drew the first rumble of ‘hear, hears’. He let them run, then held up his hand again.

  ‘Now, after this bit of pleasantry, I’m going to ask the questions. As I say, no one knows the answers. But if all of us think about them, we may some day be able to say something that decent people, people of good will all over the world, are waiting to hear. First, if there is no agreement or control, how many countries are going to possess thermo-nuclear weapons by, say, 1967? My guess, and this is a political guess, and yours is as good as mine, is that four or five will actually have them. Unless it is not beyond the wit of man to stop them. Second, does this spread of weapons make thermo-nuclear war more or less likely? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But mine is sombre. Third, why are countries going to possess themselves of these weapons? Is it
for national security, or for less rational reasons? Fourth, can this catastrophe – no, that is going further than I feel inclined, I ought to say, this extreme increase of danger – can it be stopped? Is it possible that any of us, any country or group of countries, can give a message or indication that will, in fact make military and human sense?’

  Roger had been speaking for ten minutes, and he continued for as long again. In the whole of the second half of his speech, he went off again into official language, the cryptic, encyclical language of a Minister of the Crown. The effect was odd, but I was sure that it was calculated. He had tried them deep enough: now was the time to reassure them. They would be glad of platitudes, and he was ready to oblige them.

  He did not make much of a peroration, and sat down to steady, though not excessive, applause. There was an amiable and inept vote of thanks, and the Prime Warden’s procession, maces in front, Roger alongside Lufkin, left the hall.

  When I recalled the evening, I thought that few of the people round me realized that they had been listening to what would become a well-known speech. I was not certain that I realized it myself. There was a sense of curiosity, in some sense of malaise, in some of let-down. I heard various speculations on my way out. Most of them were respectful but puzzled.

  In the press of men jostling towards the cloakroom, I saw Sammikins, his eyes flaring, his face wild as a hawk’s. He was not far from me, but he shouted: ‘I’m sick of this mob! Come for a walk.’

  I had a feeling that the invitation was not specially calculated to please his neighbours, who stood stolid and heavy while he pushed through them, lean, elegant, decorations on his lapel.