Corridors of Power (13 page)

It was a question to which I had not given thought. I assumed that Roger would choose one of a dozen young back-benchers, glad to get their first touch of recognition.

‘Or has he, and we haven’t heard?’ Sammikins insisted.

I said I had not heard the matter so much as mentioned.

‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins.

I found myself curiously embarrassed. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, as though I had done something shady. Didn’t he realize that he was a public figure? Didn’t he realize that he would be a political liability? A good many people admired his devil-may-care, but not the party bosses or other solid men. No politician in his senses would want him as an ally, much less as a colleague, least of all Roger, who had to avoid all rows except the big ones.

I thought that I had better try to speak openly myself.

‘He’s taken one big risk for you already,’ I said.

I was reminding him of the time Roger had defended him in Collingwood’s face.

Yes, he knew all about that. ‘He’s a good chap,’ said Sammikins. ‘He’s a damned clever chap, but I tell you, I wish he could make up his mind.’

‘Has Caro told you anything?’

‘What the hell can she tell me? I expect she’s doing her best.’ He took it for granted that she was persuading Roger on his behalf, working for him as she had done all their lives. I wondered whether she was. She must know that she would be doing her husband harm.

‘She knows what I want. Of course she’s doing her best,’ he said with trust, with dismissive trust. It was a younger brother’s feeling – with all the responsibility and most of the love on the sister’s side.

‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins, speaking like a man who is saying his last word.

It was not his last word, however. In his restless fashion, he arranged for us to go round to Lord North Street for a night-cap, shamelessly hoping that his presence would act like blackmail. As he drove me in his Jaguar – it was getting late, Piccadilly was dark and empty under the trees, even after a vinous night he was a beautiful driver – he repeated his last word. Yes, he wanted the job. Listening to him as he went on talking, I was puzzled that he wanted it so much. True, he might be tired of doing nothing. True, his entire family assumed that political jobs were theirs by right, without any nonsense about qualifications. They were not intellectuals, he had scarcely heard intellectual conversation in his life, but since he was a child he had breathed day by day politics in the air, he had heard the familiar, authoritative gossip about who’s in, who’s out, who’s going to get this or that. But it still seemed strange: here was the humblest of ambitions, and all his energies were fixed on it.

In Caro’s drawing-room, he did not get a yes or no, or even an acknowledgement of suspense. Caro knew why he was there; she was protective, but gave nothing away. Roger also knew why he was there. He was friendly and paternal, himself having a soft spot for Sammikins. Roger was skilled in keeping off the point, and even Sammikins was over-awed enough not to force it. Watching the three of them – Caro looked flushed and pretty, but subdued, and was drinking more than usual – I thought I could guess what had happened. I believed she had, in fact, mentioned Sammikins’ hopes to Roger, full of the sneaking shame with which one tries to pull off something for a child one loves, and knows to be unsuited. I did not think that she had pressed Roger: and I didn’t think that he had told her that the idea was mad.

All the time, Roger was certain of what he was going to do. He did it within a week of Sammikins’ – blackmail? appeal? It looked prosaic. Roger appointed Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, Tom Wyndham, who at the dinner-party, when Roger was interrogating David Rubin had protested about the American scientists ‘kicking us downstairs’. It was a commonplace choice: it was also a cool one.

Roger knew, as bleakly as anyone, that Tom Wyndham was a stupid man. That didn’t matter. Roger was securing his base. He had calculated the forces against him – the Air Staff, the aircraft industry, the extreme right of his own party, some of the forces which had helped him into power, as Douglas Osbaldiston, another cool analyst, had pointed out in his own ‘front room’.

Roger was making sure of his own forces, and one of them was the Admiralty. It was good tactics, he had decided, to get ‘channels’, private ‘channels’, to them from the start. That was where Wyndham came in. He had been a naval officer himself, his mother-in-law would have her uses. It was worth while making sure of your potential friends, said Roger. As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your friends.

The more I saw of him, the sharper-edged he seemed. Now that he was making his first decisions, in private he threw off some of the tricks and covers of his personality, as though they had been an overcoat. When I saw him so, I thought we had a chance.

One morning, though, he did not seem sharp-edged at all. He was wearing a morning-coat, grey waistcoat, striped trousers. He was absent-mindedly nervous. I had watched him when he was anxious, but in nothing like this state. I asked him what was the matter. When I heard the answer, I thought he was joking. He was going to the Palace that morning – to have an audience with the Queen, and to be sworn into the Privy Council.

I had seen dignitaries, industrialists, academics, waiting in the queue at a Palace investiture, with their hands shaking, as though, when they entered into the Presence, they expected some sinister courtier to put out a foot and trip them up. It seemed absurd that Roger should feel as frightened in the shadow of
mana
. It was easy to feel with him as a detached modern soul – while in fact he concealed a romantic, or better, a superstitious, yearning for an older world. It was not for show, nor for propriety’s sake, that he was a church-goer. When I asked him why he was Conservative, he had given me a rationalization, and a good one; but he had left an obstinate part of his nature out of it. It was not an accident, perhaps, that he married into a family with an historic name: or at least, when he first met Caro, that her name had its own magic for him.

He was fond of laughing off those who were in politics simply for the sake of the
charm of government
, of the charm of being in the inner circle. Sammikins’ ‘charade’, the charmed circle – people who were lured by it, said Roger, were useless, and he was right. But, for him, there may have been another charm, deeper, subtler, less rational than that.

I felt relieved when he came back from the Palace, looking jaunty again, and produced brisk plans about how we might seduce Lord Lufkin away from the rest of the aircraft industry.

That summer, Roger judged that we were doing a little better than we had calculated. As carefully as a competent Intelligence officer, he was keeping track of his enemies. Not that they were enemies yet, in any personal sense: so far he had fewer of them than most politicians. The ‘enemies’ he watched were those who just because of what they wanted, or because of the forces behind them, could not help trying to stop him.

About those, he was as realistic as a man could be. Yet, like most realistic men, he detested having the hard truth brought to him by another. I had to tell him, early in the scientists’ series of meetings, that Brodzinski was not budging by an inch. It was news we had both feared, but for an afternoon Roger regarded me as though I were an enemy myself.

Soon he was in action again. Before the House rose in July, he had talked to the Party’s defence committee, which meant fifty back-bench Members, some of whom he knew were already disquieted. Right from the beginning, he had made his calculation. He could live with disquiet on the extreme right, in the long run it would boil over: but if he lost the solid centre of his own party, then he was finished. So he talked – in what language I didn’t know, though I could guess – to the respectable county members, the ‘Knights of the Shire’. According to Wyndham, who was moved to unusual lyricism, the meeting went ‘like a dream’.

During August, Roger asked Osbaldiston to convene a group of top civil servants, to get some administrative machinery ready in time for the scientists’ report. Since this was an inter-departmental group, and Rose was the senior member, it met in his room. A vase of chrysanthemums on the desk, as usual, the window open on to the Park, as usual, and as usual Rose welcoming us with a courtesy so exaggerated that it sounded faintly jeering.

‘My dear Douglas, how extremely good of you to spare the time! My dear Lewis, how very good of you to come!’ Since my office was ten yards away, and since the summons was official, it was not in fact a benevolent exertion on my part.

As we sat round the table, Rose’s opposite numbers in the Service departments, Douglas, a Second Secretary from the Treasury, and me, Rose was just perceptibly tart. He didn’t mean this to be a long meeting. He was irritated at having to hold it at all. He did not indulge his mood. He merely said: ‘I take it that we’ve all seen Lewis Eliot’s memorandum on the scientists’ first few meetings, haven’t we? I believe they’ve been instructed to report to your Minister by October, Douglas, or have I got that wrong?’

‘Quite right,’ said Douglas.

‘In that case, I’m obliged to confess that in the meantime, even this distinguished gathering can only hope to produce a marginal result,’ said Rose. ‘We don’t know what they’re going to say. Nor, unless I seriously misjudge our scientific colleagues, do they. All that we can be reasonably certain about, is that they can be relied upon to say several different and probably contradictory, things.’

There were grins. Rose was not alone in that room in having a generalized dislike of scientists.

‘No, Hector, we can go a bit further than that,’ said Douglas, neither piqued nor over-borne. ‘My master isn’t asking you to do anything quite useless.’

‘My dear Douglas, I should be the last person to suggest that your admirable department, or your admirable Minister, could ever ask anyone such a thing.’

Rose found it hard to forget that Douglas had once been a junior civil servant, working under him.

Right,’ said Douglas. I agree we shan’t actually receive the report until October, but–’

‘By the way,’ Rose broke in, getting down to business. ‘I take it there are remote chances we shall get the report by then?’

‘We ought to,’ I said.

‘But before that comes along, we’ve got a pretty shrewd idea what it’s going to say, in general terms? This paper–’ Douglas tapped it – ‘gives us enough. Some of the scientists are producing arguments at one extreme, and some at the other. There’s this chap Brodzinski, and you ought to know that he’s got some backers, who’s trying to push us into investing a very sizeable fraction of our defence budget, and an even higher fraction of our total scientific manpower, on this pet scheme of his. I ought to say, and Lewis will correct me if I’m wrong, that none of the scientists, even those who think he’s a national danger, have ever suggested this scheme is airy-fairy.’

They had studied the first estimates of the cost. Several would have liked to believe in the scheme. They had, though, to shake their heads. The Air Ministry man said his department wished for an opportunity of ‘another look at it’, and Rose said: ‘Of course, my dear Edgar, of course. But I’m afraid we should all be mildly surprised if your ingenious friend can really persuade us that we can afford the unaffordable.’

‘That’s our view,’ said Douglas. ‘It’s just not on.’

Someone, who was taking note of the meeting, wrote a few words. Nothing more formal was said, and there was no formal decision. From that moment, however, it would have been innocent to think that Brodzinski’s scheme stood a good chance.

Douglas said, ‘The other extreme view – and this isn’t such an easy one – is that the country hasn’t got the resources, and won’t have within foreseeable time, to have any genuine kind of independent weapon at all. That is we shan’t be able to make do without borrowing from the Americans: and the scientists think the balance of advantage is for us to be honest and say so, and slide out of the nuclear weapons business as soon as we conveniently can. As I said, this is the other extreme. But I ought to say that it seems to be held by chaps who are usually level-headed, like Francis Getliffe and our scientific adviser, Walter Luke.’

‘No,’ said Rose, ‘this isn’t such an easy one. They know as well as we do that this isn’t just a scientific decision. It’s an economic decision, and, I should have thought, even more a political one.’

Rose was speaking carefully. He knew precisely what Douglas was aiming at. Rose had not yet declared himself, but he was inclined to think that Douglas was right. Not that he liked him. Douglas was tipped to have the final professional success denied to himself, and he was envious. But liking mattered less than one might have thought, in these alliances.

Douglas, tilting back his chair like an undergraduate, speaking with his casual, lethal relevance, was arguing that the Luke–Getliffe view also, wasn’t really ‘on’. Furthermore, it might be attractive to the public, and we ought to be prepared to ‘damp it down’. It might be a practicable policy ten or fifteen years ahead, but it wasn’t a practicable policy now. The scientists thought it was easy to find absolute solutions; there weren’t any. None of the great world pundits, no one in the world – for once Douglas showed a trace of irritation – knew the right way, or whether there was a way at all.

Rose began to speak, massive, precise, qualified. I was thinking that until Brodzinski had been disposed of, Douglas had spoken like a correct departmental chief, representing his Minister’s view. But what he had just said was nowhere near his Minister’s view, and Douglas must have known it. I was sure that he did not feel either irregular or conspiratorial. This wasn’t intrigue, it was almost the reverse. It was part of a process, not entirely conscious, often mysterious to those taking part in it and sometimes to them above all, which had no name, but which might be labelled the formation, or crystallization, of ‘official’ opinion. This official opinion was expected to filter back to the politicians, so that out of the to-ing and fro-ing a decision would emerge. Who had the power? It was the question that had struck me, moving between Basset and Clapham Common. Perhaps it was a question without meaning – either way, the slick answers were all wrong.