Corridors of Power Read online

  Roger gave a boisterous laugh, a laugh so unrestrained that I saw other people glancing towards our table.

  It was a point to me. Without any introduction, preparation or lead in, Roger leaned across the table and suddenly said: ‘Lewis, I want your help.’

  I was taken by surprise, and went back to stonewalling again. I looked, not at him, but at the people round about us, at an old man with a crimson face who was chewing with exaggerated slowness, at a serious youth impressed by his first glimpse of a London club.

  I said:‘What for?’

  ‘I thought you had just been blaming me for being neutral.’

  ‘What am I being neutral about?’ I asked.

  ‘I can play that game as long as you can. Is it going to get us anywhere?’

  Roger had seized the initiative and held it. He was speaking easily, with inexplicable intimacy, with something like anger.

  A few drops of wine had spilled upon the table. He flicked them together with his forefinger, then made a cross with them, as if to emphasize an end to something.

  ‘You’ve got some insight, haven’t you? You’re supposed to be a man of good will, aren’t you? I believe you want some of the things I do. The trouble with you, you like to sit above the battle. I don’t know that I’ve got much use for that. You’re prepared to get your hands a bit dirty, but not very dirty. I’m not sure that that’s as creditable as you would like to think. I must say, I sometimes lose my respect for people who know as much as you do, and still don’t come and fight it out.’

  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.

  5: The Scientists

  Within two days of that dinner at the Carlton, Roger asked me to make some arrangements. He wanted us to have lunch with Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke – ‘in a private room’, he specified. After lunch, we would all pay a visit to Brodzinski. As I stood with Getliffe and Luke in the room at the Hyde Park Hotel, looking down at the Row and the bronzing trees, I was puzzled and the others more so. There was nothing specially mysterious about the private room, if we were to discuss secret projects: but Roger met them both regularly on one of the defence committees. Why should he make an occasion of it now? Neither of them had any inclination to spend time with Brodzinski, nor saw any value in it.

  As we waited for Roger, Francis was vexed. He was getting more irritable, more occupied with punctilio, as he grew older. He and I had been friends since our early twenties. At this time he was fifty-two, and already an elder statesman of science. He had thought more effectively about military-scientific strategy than anyone had, and it was his views which had influenced us most. But now he had to force himself to produce them. He had found a new field of research, and was working as obsessively as when he was a young man. It was a physical strain to be torn away from it, to be dragged up from Cambridge for that lunch. He stood by the window, his face sculptured, hidalgo-like, his fingers nervous, as he spun the stem of a glass.

  By his side, Walter Luke looked seamed, confident, grizzled, low-slung, more prosaic. Yet the scientists said that he had been unlucky: he had a scientific imagination as powerful as Francis’, or more so: in a peaceful world, he might have done work of genius. As it was, he had been busy on what he called ‘hardware’ since 1939: he was still not forty-four, but he had been head of the Atomic Energy establishment for years. He was not as vexed as Francis, but was swearing like the dockyard hand his father used to be. When Roger arrived, he was friendly, business-like, but did not exert his personal arts on either of them. As we ate, he was asking them questions about Brodzinski’s project – as though refreshing his memory, or making certain they had not changed their minds, for in fact he had heard their opinions times before and knew them off by heart.

  ‘I go on saying,’ said Walter Luke, ‘I believe technically it might be on. At least, there’s a fifty-fifty chance it might be on. Brod’s no fool, he’s got a touch of the real stuff. And if we had these bloody things, we could call ourselves independent in nuclear weapons, which we’re not now except for guff, and which we’re probably never going to be. The whole point is, we kept coming back to it – what price are you willing to pay for that?’

  ‘What price are you?’

  ‘Not this.’

  Luke bristled with energy. From his manner, no one would have guessed that he hadn’t enjoyed coming down on this side. He had a simple, integral patriotism. He had shared the scientists’ moral concern, but if his country could have kept the highest military power, he would have made any sacrifice. His tough mind, though, told him it was impossible, and he put the regret behind him. ‘We just can’t play in this league. If we spent everything we’ve got, that is, everything we now spend on defence, and I mean everything, we might bring this off – and what the bloody hell have we bought at the end of it? The priceless thought that we could take out Moscow and New York simultaneously. The only thing that scares me is that too many people never grow up.’

  Roger turned to Francis Getliffe.

  ‘You know what I think, Parliamentary Secretary,’ said Francis with stiff courtesy. ‘This business of Brodzinski’s is a nonsense. And so are the views of more important people.’

  Francis, who did not often go in for public controversy, had not long before screwed himself up to write a pamphlet. In it he had said that there was no military rationale behind the nuclear policy. This analysis had got him into trouble, mostly in America, but also in England. In some Right-thinking circles, it had seemed not only preposterous, but also heretical, and something like wicked.

  As we drove through the autumnal streets to the Imperial College, I was still not sure why Roger was playing it this way. What was he aiming at? Was he reckoning that Brodzinski, that lover of English flummery, would be softened by the attentions, the paraphernalia?

  If so, sitting in Brodzinski’s room, gazing out at the lonely-looking Colcutt tower, the pale green dome making the aesthetic protest in the solitude of sky, I thought that Roger had reckoned wrong. It was true that Brodzinski loved English flummery, with a passion that made Roger’s more conservative friends look like austere revolutionaries. He had been a refugee from Poland in the late ’thirties. During the war he had made a name, working in one of the Admiralty scientific departments. Afterwards he had spent some years at Barford, had quarrelled with Luke and others, and recently taken a professorship. It was true that he had immersed himself, with fanatical devotion, in what he thought of as English life. He knew all the English snobberies, and loved them so much that they seemed to him morally right. He had dedicated himself to the politics of the English ultra-right. He addressed Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke, with extreme relish, as Sir Francis, and Sir Walter. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he was unyielding about his idea, and, instead of listening to Quaife’s persuasions, he was determined to make Quaife listen to him.

  He was a tallish man, very thick in the chest and thighs, and his muscles filled his clothes. His voice boomed against the walls of his office. He had beautiful pure transparent eyes, in a flat Slavic face; his fair hair, now mingled with grey, was the colour of dust. He was always on the lookout for enemies, and yet he was vulnerable to help, appealing for it, certain that anyone, not already an enemy, given intelligence and willingness, would be convinced that he was right.

  He explained the project over again. ‘I must inform you, Parliamentary Secretary,’ (he was as familiar with English official etiquette as any of us) ‘that there is nothing technically novel here! There is nothing that we do not know. Sir Walter will tell you that I am not over-stating my case.’

  ‘With reservations,’ said Luke.

  ‘With what reservations?’ Brodzinski burst out, brilliant with suspicion. ‘What reservations, Sir Walter? Tell me that, now?’

  ‘Come off it, Brod,’ Luke was beginning, ready to settle down to a good harsh scientific argument. But Roger would not let it start. He was treating Brodzinski with a mixture of deference and flattery – or perhaps not pure flattery, but an extreme empathy. Just as Brodzinski felt a brilliance of suspicion when Walter Luke spoke, so with Roge
r he felt a brilliance of reassurance. Here was someone who knew what he had to fight against, who knew his urgencies.

  ‘But, Parliamentary Secretary, when do we get something done?’ he cried. ‘Even if we start now, tonight, it will take us to 1962 or ’63 before we have the weapons–’

  ‘And they won’t have any strategic meaning,’ said Francis Getliffe, irritated at the way the conversation was going.

  ‘Sir Francis, Sir Francis, I believe there is meaning in having weapons in your hands, if the country is going to survive. I suppose you mean, I hope you mean, that America will have their own armaments, much greater than ours, and I hope they will. The more the better, and good luck to them. But I shall not sleep happy until we can stand beside them–’

  ‘I mean something more serious–’ Francis interrupted. But once more Roger stopped the argument.

  Brodzinski burst out: ‘Parliamentary Secretary, when can we get some action?’

  After a pause, Roger replied, carefully, considerately: ‘You know, I mustn’t raise false hopes–’

  Brodzinski raised his head. ‘I know what you’re going to say. And I agree with it. You are going to say that this will cost a thousand million pounds. Some say we cannot afford to do it. I say, we cannot afford not to do it.’

  Roger smiled at him. ‘Yes, I was going to raise that point. But also I was going to say that there are many people to convince. I am only a junior Minister, Professor. Let me say something to you in confidence that I really oughtn’t to. Within these four walls, I think it will be necessary to convince my own Minister. Without him behind it, no government could even begin to listen–’