Corridors of Power Read online

  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.’

  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.

  3: A Speech in the Commons

  After we had by-p
assed 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.’

  In the lobby, where we went to meet him, he was being congratulated. Members whom he scarcely knew, hounds of success, were trying to catch his eye. Shining with sweat and well-being, he nevertheless wanted our opinion too. ‘Satisfactory?’ he asked Osbaldiston and me, with a vigilant look. It was not until he had had enough praise that he switched to another topic. Now he was ready to think about some of the scientists’ troubles, he said. He and Caro were going out to dinner. Could we come round to Lord North Street after eleven, and start straight away?

  Later that night, I sat in the Quaifes’ drawing-room, waiting for them. I was sitting there alone, since Osbaldiston, who lived out in the suburbs, had left me to it. They were not late home: they ran up the stairs brimming with excitement: but it was a long time before Roger and I got down to business.

  They were excited because they had been dining with the editor of The Times, and had been given a glimpse of next day’s (Friday morning’s) paper.

  I was amused. This was real privilege, I said. In London at that time, one could not buy the earliest editions until the small hours. The other notices they would not see before the morning. Still, Roger was prepared to concede, The Times was the most important. They couldn’t have done him better. His had been the statement they examined, while Lord Gilbey, his boss, received a few indifferent lines.

  He saw me watching him. I asked, what did Gilbey’s speech look like on paper? Roger shrugged his shoulders, said he had been too close to it. He didn’t know how it would read in the House of Lords Hansard.

  Caro, radiant, gave us more drink, and took a stiff one herself. She was as excited as he was, but much more confident. She could trust her judgement about success much more easily than he could. He was still thinking of next morning’s papers. That evening in the House, he had sounded grown-up, unusually speculative, responsible. It was arguable, unless one believed that we were wholly at the mercy of blind and faceless fortune, that his decisions might turn out to be important. More than most men, that was the feeling he gave one. Yet, in the bright drawing room in Lord North Street, all he was thinking of, without any deviation or let-up, was what the Telegraph, the Guardian, the popular press, would say next day. Caro sat stroking the side of her glass, proud, loving, full of certainties. She could have written the headlines herself.

  Of the people I knew, I often thought, it was only the politicians and the artists who lived nakedly in public. The great administrative bosses, the Roses and Osbaldistons, scarcely ever heard a public word about themselves, certainly not a hostile one. As for the industrial tycoons like Paul Lufkin, as soon as they got near the top, they would have felt the virtues outraged if they had heard so much as a whisper of personal criticism. Those lives were out of comparison more shielded. It was the politicians and artists who had to get used to being talked about in public, rather as though they were patients in a hospital visited daily by troops of medical students, who didn’t hate them, but who saw no reason to lower their voices. Of course, the politicians and artists had asked for it, or rather, some part of their temperament had. Yet, though they might have asked for it, they didn’t like it. Their skins did not thicken, even if they became world figures. I was sure that Roger’s never would.

  I wished that I were as sure of what, in his job, he intended to do. That night, at last, we were talking business. He was as familiar with ‘the papers’, (which meant a drawer-full of files, memoranda marked ‘Top Secret’, and even one or two books) as I was. He had mastered both the proposals of the Brodzinski group, and what Getliffe and the others argued in reply. All Roger said was intelligent and precise – but he would not give me an opinion of his own.

  I did not get any further that night. We went on in the same fashion, sniffing at each other like dogs, in the weeks before the summer recess. He must have guessed where I stood, I thought – even though guardedness was catching, and soon
one didn’t put out one’s feelers as far.

  Intermittently, during the summer, on holiday with the family, I wondered about him. It was possible that he was testing me. It was possible that he had not yet made up his mind.

  As a rule I would have waited. This time I had to know. It was often naïf to be too suspicious, much more naïf than to believe too easily. It often led to crasser action. But there were occasions – and this was one – where you needed to trust.

  In September, arriving back in London, I thought it would do no harm if I tried to spend an evening with him alone. Then, my first morning in Whitehall, I felt the sensation of having put one’s shoulder hard against a door already on the latch. A telephone call came through before I had glanced at my in-tray. I heard a familiar, rich, off-beat voice. Roger was asking me whether I had any time free in the next few days, and whether we might spend a bachelor evening at his club.

  4: Something in the Open

  At the Carlton, Roger and I had our dinner at a corner table. Although he waved now and then to passers-by, he was concentrating on his meal. He was enjoying himself, we were sharing a bottle of wine and he ordered another. When I had been with him before, he had not cared what he ate or drank, or whether he did so at all. Now he was behaving like a gold-miner coming into town. It struck me that he had the irregular habits, the mixture of rapacity and self-denial, which I had seen before in people who set themselves big tasks.

  Through the dinner, I was stonewalling. He wanted something out of me: I wanted to find out something about him. But I could afford to let it ride. So we talked about books, where he uttered strong opinions, and about common acquaintances, where he was more interested and would not utter any opinion whatever. Rose, Osbaldiston, Luke, Getliffe, a couple of top Ministers: we discussed them all. He produced detail after detail, but would not admit that he liked one more than another. I taunted him by saying that this neutrality didn’t suit his style. He was putting on the neutrality of men of action who, except under extreme provocation, never admitted that one man was preferable to another.