by C. P. Snow
Copyright & Information
Corridors of Power
First published in 1964
© Philip Snow; House of Stratus 1964-2010
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This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755120086 EAN 9780755120086
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About the Author
Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.
Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature, and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.
Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘The Masters’, in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.
He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology. When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.
After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World’. He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.
In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.
‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’ - New Statesman
Dedication
To
Humphrey Hare
Author’s Note
By some fluke, the title of this novel seems to have passed into circulation during the time the book itself was being written. I have watched the phenomenon with mild consternation. The phrase was first used, so far as I know, in Homecomings (1956). Mr Rayner Heppenstall noticed it, and adopted it as a title of an article about my work. If he had not done this, I doubt if I should have remembered the phrase myself; but when I saw it in Mr Heppenstall’s hands, so to speak, it seemed the appropriate name for this present novel, which was already in my mind. So I announced the title, and since have been stuck with it, while the phrase has kept swimming in print before my eyes about twice a week and four times on Sundays, and has, in fact, turned into a cliché. But I cannot help using it myself, without too much inconvenience. I console myself with the reflection that, if a man hasn’t the right to his own cliché, who has?
I would like to make one other point. This novel is about ‘high’ politics and like all novels on the subject, carries an unresolvable complication. This one is set in the period 1955–8, and in the year 1957 the Prime Minister has to be introduced. Now there was a real Prime Minister at the time. His name was Harold Macmillan. The Prime Minister in this novel is quite unlike Mr Harold Macmillan, as unlike as he could reasonably be. Short of introducing real personages as characters, there is no other way. None of my imaginary Ministers is connected with anyone in office during the Eden or Macmillan administrations, and I have deliberately used, as the major public issue in the novel, one which didn’t come openly into politics at that time.
Since I have had to mention Mr Harold Macmillan, I should like, out of gratitude, to mention something else. If it had not been for his intervention, in one of his less public phases, my books would not now be published under this present imprint.
During the writing of this book, I collected other debts of gratitude. Politicians on both sides of the House of Commons have given me their time and trouble: it would look too much like a roll-call to write down all the names. But I should not feel comfortable if I did not make two specific acknowledgements. One to Mr Maurice Macmillan, with whom I discussed aspects of the book long before a word was written: and the other to Mr Maurice Edelman, who – being both a novelist and a Member of Parliamen
t – welcomed me on to his own proper territory and has been more generous and helpful than I can describe.
CPS
1964
Part One
The First Thing
1: A London Dinner Party
I stopped the taxi at the corner of Lord North Street. My wife and I had the habit of being obsessively punctual, and that night we had, as usual, overdone it. There was a quarter of an hour to kill, so we dawdled down to the river. It was a pleasant evening, I said, conciliating the moment. The air was warm against the cheek, the trees in the Embankment garden stood bulky, leaves filling out although it was only March, against the incandescent skyline. The light above Big Ben shone beneath the cloud-cap: the House was sitting. We walked a few yards further, in the direction of Whitehall. Across Parliament Square, in the Treasury building, another light was shining. A room lit up on the third storey, someone working late.
There was nothing special about the evening, either for my wife or me. We had dined with the Quaifes several times before. Roger Quaife was a youngish Conservative member who was beginning to be talked about. I had met him through one of my official jobs, and thought him an interesting man.
It was the kind of friendly acquaintanceship, no more than that, which we all picked up, officials, politicians of both parties: not meeting often, but enough to make us feel at home in what they sometimes called ‘this part of London’.
Prompt to the last stroke of eight, we were back in Lord North Street. A maid took us upstairs to the drawing-room, bright with chandeliers, drink-trays, the dinner-shirts of the two men already standing there, the necklace of Caro Quaife glittering as she took our hands.
‘I expect you know everyone, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Of course you do!’
She was tall and pretty, in her middle thirties, just beginning, though she was still elegant, to thicken a little through the waist. Her voice was warm, full, and often disconcertingly loud. She gave out a sense of natural and exuberant happiness – as though it were within the power of everyone around her to be as happy as she was.
Other people had followed us up. They all knew one another, establishing Caro’s principle of mutual intimacy: Christian names flew about, so that, when the principle broke down, I didn’t know whom I was being introduced to. There was, in fact, only one man whom Margaret and I had met as often as the Quaifes. That was Monty Cave, who, according to the political talent spotters, was another coming star. He had a plump face, lemur-like eyes, a quiet, subtle, modulated voice.
As for the others, there appeared to be three couples, all the men Tory back-benchers, none of them older than forty, with wives to match, young, strapping matrons such as one saw in the Kensington streets at four in the afternoon, collecting their children from fashionable pre-preparatory schools. There was also an elderly woman called Mrs Henneker.
As we sat down and drank, Roger Quaife not yet present, they were all talking politics, but politics which any outsider – even one as near to it as I was – needed a glossary to follow. This was House of Commons gossip, as esoteric as theatre-gossip, as continuously enthralling to them as theatre-gossip was to actors. Who was in favour, who wasn’t. Who was going to finish up the debate next week. How Archie pulled a fast one with that question.
There was going to be an election soon, we all knew: this was the spring of 1955. They were swapping promises to speak for one another: one was bragging how two senior Ministers were ‘in the bag’ to speak for him. Roger was safe, someone said, he’d give a hand. What had the PM got in mind for Roger ‘when we come back?’ Monty Cave asked Caro. She shook her head, but she was pleased, and I thought she was touching wood.
The other men spoke of Roger as though he were the only one of them whose success was coming soon, or as though he were different from themselves. The gossip went on. The euphoria grew. Then the maid came in and announced, ‘Lady Caroline, Dr Rubin is here.’
It was not that Roger Quaife had a title – but his wife was the daughter of an earl, one of a rich aristocratic family who in the nineteenth century had been Whig grandees.
I looked round, as Caro stood up with cries of welcome. I was taken aback. Yes, it was the David Rubin I knew very well, the American physicist. He came in, very quiet and guarded, pearl cuff-links in his sleeves, his dinner jacket newer and more exquisite than any man’s there. He was, so my scientific friends said, one of the most distinguished of scientists: but unlike the rest of them, he was also something of a dandy.
Caro Quaife took him to my wife’s side. By this time the drawing-room was filling up, and Caro threw a cushion on the floor and sat by me. ‘You must be used to women sitting at your feet, mustn’t you?’ she said. She couldn’t understand, she went on, why Roger, the old devil, was so late. She spoke of him with the cheerfulness, the lack of anxiety, of a happy marriage. When she spoke to me directly, it was in a manner at once high-spirited, deferential and aggressive, eager to be impressed, used to speaking out and not thinking twice.
‘Hungry,’ said Mrs Henneker, in a trumpeting tone.
She had a fleshy, bulbous nose and eyes which stared out, a fine bright blue, with a disconcerting fixity.
‘Sorry. Have another drink,’ said Caro, without any sign of caring. In fact, it was not yet half-past eight, but it seemed late for a dinner-party in the ’fifties.
The conversation had switched. One of the members’ wives had started talking about a friend of theirs who was having ‘woman trouble’. Just for once, they had got away from the House of Commons. This friend was a banker: he had ‘got it badly’: his wife was worried.
‘What’s the woman like?’ Caro gave a loud, crowing chuckle.
I observed David Rubin’s sad face show signs of animation. He preferred this topic to the previous one.
‘Oh, madly glamorous.’
‘In that case,’ cried Caro, ‘I don’t believe Elsa’ (the wife) ‘has much to worry about. It isn’t the glamorous ones you ought to watch out for when the old man’s showing signs of absent-mindedness. It’s that little quiet grey mouse in the corner, who nobody’s ever noticed. If she’s got her claws into him, then the best thing is to call it a day and wonder how you’re going to explain it to the children.’
The other wives were laughing with her. She was not a beauty, I thought, she was too hearty for that. Just then her eyes lit up, and she scrambled off her cushion.
‘Here he is!’ she said. ‘And about time too!’
As Roger walked through the room from an inner door, he looked clumsy, a little comic, quite unselfconscious. He was a big man, heavy and strong; but neither his face nor his body seemed all of a piece. His head was smallish, for a man of his bulk, and well-shaped, his eyes grey and bright, pulled down a little at the outer corners. His nose was flattened at the bridge, his lower lip receded. It was not a handsome face, but it was pleasant. His colleagues in the room, except for Cave, were neat, organized, officer-like; by their side he was shambling and uncoordinated. When I first met him, he had brought back my impression of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. Yet his manner, quite unlike Pierre’s, was briskly competent.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to his wife, ‘someone caught me on the phone–’
It was, it appeared, one of his constituents. He said it simply, as if it were a matter of tactics that she would understand.
He had considerable physical presence, though it was the opposite of an actor’s presence. He shook hands with Rubin and me. All he did and said was easy and direct.
For a moment he and his fellow members had edged away, and on the periphery of the group Mrs Henneker laid a substantial, ringed hand on my arm.
‘Office,’ she said.
I found her conversation hard to cope with.
‘What?’ I replied.
‘That young man is going to get office.’ By which she meant that he would be made a Minister if his party were returned again.
‘Will he?’ I said.
She asked, ‘Are you an i
diot?’
She asked it with a dense, confident twinkle, as though I should love her for being rude.
‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ I said.
‘I meant it in the Greek sense, Sir Leonard,’ she said, and then from a heavy aside, discovered from Caro that my name was Lewis Eliot. ‘Yes, I meant it in the Greek sense,’ she said, quite unabashed. ‘Not interested in politics, y’know.’
She was so proud of her scrap of learning. I wondered how often she had trotted it out, knowing as much Greek as she did Eskimo. There was something childlike about her self-satisfaction. She was sure that she was a privileged soul. She was sure that no one could think otherwise.
‘I am rather interested in politics,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Henneker triumphantly.
I tried to hush her, for I wanted to listen to Roger. His tone was different from that of his friends. I could not place his accent. But it was nothing like that of Eton and the Brigade; any of the others would have known, and Mrs Henneker might have said, that he did not come ‘out of the top drawer’. In fact, his father had been a design engineer, solid provincial middle-class. He wasn’t young, despite Mrs Henneker’s adjective. He was only five years younger than I was, which made him forty-five.
He had interested me from the beginning, though I couldn’t have said why. Listening to him that evening, as we sat round the dinner-table downstairs, I was disappointed. Yes, his mind was crisper than the others’, he was a good deal heavier-weight. But he too, just like the others, was talking about the chessboard of Parliament, the moves of their private game, as though nothing else existed under Heaven. I thought that, with David Rubin present, they were all being impolite. I became impatient. These people’s politics were not my politics. They didn’t know the world they were living in, much less the world that was going to come. I looked at Margaret, who had the eager, specially attentive look she always wore when she was bored, and wished that the evening were over.