Corridors of Power

by C. P. Snow

  I wondered whether Roger, too, had hated the morning. I wondered whether Caro had tried to give him comfort, as Margaret did to me. She knew, better than I did, that time and the hour ran through the roughest day.

  Nothing happened – that didn’t make the day smoother – until, once more at tea-time, I was within a few minutes of leaving for the House. Then a telephone call came through; this time, not from Mrs Henneker. Instead, a friend of Sammikins had a piece of news. He had just come away from the Lords. He wanted to tell me that old Gilbey had, ten minutes before, taken a hand.

  By this time, Lord Gilbey was very ill. He hadn’t been able to make a public appearance for twelve months, and his doctors were surprised that he had lived at all. Yet that afternoon, he had been impelled to make a public appearance, even if it were his last. He had arrived in the Lords. The subject for his intervention could not have seemed promising, for some peer, ennobled for scientific eminence, was moving for papers on the state of the country’s technological education. This hadn’t deterred Gilbey. Standing up, frail, white as bleached bread, he had supported the motion with passion. He didn’t understand technology, but he wanted it, if that was the price of keeping us strong. He was for anything, whether it was technology or black magic, if competent persons like the Noble Lord proved that it was necessary to keep us strong and make us stronger. He would assert this to his dying day, which wouldn’t be far off.

  He had spoken for five minutes, an old soldier’s attack on adventurers, men who were too clever for their good or ours. Adventurers in high places, careerists in high places. He begged the Noble Lords to beware of them. He wanted to make this plea, even if it were for the last time.

  It was pure revenge. He might die before the summer, but hatred for Roger would live as long as he did. It didn’t sound like a hero’s end: and then I thought that it might be just his willingness to end like this which had made him a hero.

  I was relieved to be back in the box, relieved to sit beside Hector Rose instead of Douglas. On this night it was better to have the company of an ally who wasn’t a friend than the other way round. Arms folded across his chest, Rose watched with trained, cold eyes. As, at intervals of half an hour, three members whom he had designated by name got up with hostile speeches, he permitted himself to say: ‘According to plan.’ Yet, even to him, fresh as he was, the debate was not giving any answer. The tone had become more bitter on both sides. The benches were full now, members were squatting in the aisles. There were echoes of Trafford; words like ‘gambler’, ‘adventurer’, ‘risk’, ‘surrender’, snapped into the Chamber, but all from men we had already written off. Several speakers sat down, leaving it vague how they intended to vote. When a Labour ex-Minister began a preamble on strategy, Rose said quietly: ‘I give him forty minutes. Time for us to eat.’

  I didn’t want to leave.

  ‘No, you must.’

  Douglas had made the same estimate about the speaker’s staying-power. As we reached the Hall together, Rose gave him lavish and courteous greetings, but pointedly did not invite him to come along with us.

  We hurried through the yard, across to a Whitehall pub. There Rose, who normally had delicate tastes in food, put down a large hunk of cheese and a scotch egg, and inspected me with satisfaction as I did the same. ‘That will keep us going,’ he said dutifully.

  We hadn’t spoken about the debate. I said the one word: ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know, my dear Lewis, I don’t know.’

  ‘Any chance?’

  ‘He’ll have to pull something out of the bag himself, shouldn’t you have thought?’

  He meant, in the final speech.

  I wanted to scratch over the evidence, to reckon the odds, but Rose wouldn’t have it.

  ‘It doesn’t seem profitable,’ he said. Instead, he had his own recourse. He drew out a stiff, plain pocket-book, such as I had often seen him use in meetings, and began to write down numbers. Maximum possible number of members on the Government side, 315. He jotted down the figure, without an inquiry or a doubt, like a computing machine. Unavoidable absences, illness, and so on – the Whips appeared to expect eight. Available votes, 307. Rose did not hesitate: Cabinet dubious, Minister not sticking to the rules, he couldn’t afford defections. 290 votes, and he might be safe: 17 abstentions. (From the debate, we now knew there would be at least nine, and one vote, Sammikins’, against.)

  Anything under 280, and he was in great danger.

  Anything under 270, and it was all over.

  Rose went on with his own kind of nepenthe. He didn’t think the Opposition vote was relevant, but in his clear, beautiful script he continued to write figures. Maximum: 230. Absences: 12. Abstentions: perhaps 25.

  The majority would not be significant. Roger could survive provided he received the 290 votes from his own side, plus or minus 10. That would be the figure which all informed persons would regard as decisive that night.

  Rose looked up with the pleasure of one who has performed a neat operation. It struck me, even in the suspense, that the figures would be hard to explain to anyone not steeped in this kind of parliamentary process. The figures looked blank, the margins negligible. They would decide at least one career, maybe others, conceivably a good deal else.

  When we returned to our places, the ex-Minister had only just finished. More speeches, the House becoming packed. The shouts of laughter were louder, so were the protests, but most of the time there was a dense silence. It was a dense, impatient silence. Men looked at Roger, sitting heavily on the front bench, chin in hand. The last perfunctory ‘hear-hears’ after the last Opposition speech damped down. Again the silence. Voice from the Chair – ‘Mr Quaife.’

  At last. Roger stood up, heavy, moving untidily but without strain. He was much the biggest man on either front bench. Once again, as when I first met him in his clumsy, powerful, formidable presence, he gave me a reminder of Pierre Bezukhov. There was loyal applause behind him.

  He looked relaxed, abnormally so, troublingly so, for a man in his chief trial. He began with taunts. He had been accused of so many things, he said. Some of them were contradictory, they could not all be valid. Of course, wise persons remarked that, if you wanted to hear the truth about yourself, you listened to what your enemies said. Splendid. But that principle didn’t apply only to him. It applied to everyone. Even, believe it or not, to other Honourable Members, in some cases Honourable and Gallant Members, who had so reluctantly volunteered their character–sketches of himself. He listed four of the ultra-Conservatives. He did not refer, even by an intonation, to Trafford. It might be a good idea if each of us accepted just what his enemies said; it might make us better, and the world too. It would certainly rub into us that we were all miserable sinners.

  It was good-natured. The House was laughing. Once or twice a barb darted out. Suddenly one heard him, not so Pierre-like, but clear, hard, piercing. Though his friends cheered, I was not easy. It might be too light a beginning. In a sense, it seemed too much above the battle. I looked at Hector Rose. Almost imperceptibly, he gave a shake of the head. In the House, in the galleries, people were saying that this was the speech of the debate. As he got down to the arguments, he was using the idiom of a late-twentieth-century man. He had thrown away the old style of parliamentary rhetoric altogether. Compared with the other speeches from both the front benches, this might have come from a man a generation younger. It was the speech of one used to broadcasting studios, television cameras, the exposure of the machine. He didn’t declaim: he spoke about war, weapons, the meaning of a peaceful future, in his own voice. This was how, observers said later, parliamentarians would be speaking in ten years’ time.

  I scarcely noticed. I was thinking, was this the time that he might choose to break loose? Once or twice he had threatened to cut the tangle of these arguments, and to try to touch something deeper. Would it help him? We were all children of our time and class, conditioned to think of these decisions (Were they decisions? Were we just dri
ven?) in forms we couldn’t break. Could anyone break them? Were there forces which Roger or anyone in that house, or any of the rest of us, could release?

  If he had thought of trying, he put the idea behind him. He was talking only to the House. And yet, within ten minutes, I knew that he wasn’t withdrawing, that he had forgotten temptations, ambiguities and tricks. He was saying what he had often concealed, but all along believed. Now that he had to speak, he gave an account, lucid and sharp, of the kind of thinking Getliffe and his colleagues had made their own. He gave it with more force than they could have done. He gave it with the authority of one who would grip the power. But it was only right at the end that he said something which dropped, quietly, unofficially, into the late night air. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The problems we’re trying to handle are very difficult. So difficult that most people in this country – people who are by and large at least as intelligent as we are – can’t begin to understand them. Simply because they haven’t had the information, and hadn’t been taught to come to terms with them. I’m not sure how many of us can comprehend what our world is like, now that we’re living with the bomb. Perhaps very few, or none. But I’m certain that the overwhelming majority of people who are, I repeat, at least as intelligent as we are, don’t have any idea. We are trying to speak for them. We have taken a great deal upon ourselves. We never ought to forget it.’

  I was feeling admiration, anxiety, the exhilaration of anxiety. Now it had come to it, did I wish that he had compromised? His colleagues could get rid of him now: the bargains and balances of the White Paper didn’t allow for this. The chance, the only chance, was that he might take the House with him.

  ‘It has been said in this house, these last two nights, that I want to take risks. Let me tell you this. All choices involve risks. In our world, all the serious choices involve grave ones. But there are two kinds of risk. One is to go on mindlessly, as though our world were the old world. I believe, as completely as I believe anything, that if this country and all countries go on making these bombs, testing these bombs – just as though they were so many battleships – then before too long a time, the worst will happen. Perhaps through no one’s fault – just because we’re all men, liable to make mistakes, go mad, or have bad luck. If that happens, our descendants, if we have any, will curse us. And every curse will be justified.

  ‘This country can’t be a super-power any longer. I should be happier if it could. Though it is possible that being a super-power is in itself an illusion, now that science has caught up with us. Anyway, we can’t be one. But I am certain that we can help – by example, by good judgement, by talking sense, and acting sense – we can help swing the balance between a good future and a bad future, or between a good future and none at all. We can’t contract out. The future is firmly poised. Our influence upon it is finite, but it exists.

  ‘That is why I want to take one kind of risk. It is, in fact, a small risk, which may do good, as opposed to a great risk which would certainly do harm. That is still the choice. That is all.’

  Roger sat down, heavy-faced, hands in his pockets. For an instant, a long instant, there was silence. Then applause behind him. How solid was it? Was it uncomfortable? There were one or two cheers from the back benches on the other side. Ritual took over. The lobby bells rang. I noticed Sammikins stand up, head high and wild, in the middle of his friends, going out defiantly to vote against them. Half a dozen members sat obstinately on the Government benches, most of them with arms crossed, parading their determination to abstain. That told us nothing. There might be others, not so forthright, who would go out and not pass through the lobby.

  The members returned. Some were talking, but the noise level was low. There was a crowd, excited, tense, at the sides of the Speaker’s Chair. Before the tellers had passed the dispatch box, a hush had fallen. It was a hush but not a high-spirited one. The voice came: ‘Ayes on the right, 186.’ (There had been more Labour abstentions than Rose had allowed for.)

  The voice came again.

  ‘Noes on the left, 271.’

  Rose looked at me with cold sympathy. He said, precisely: ‘I consider this unfortunate.’

  In the chamber, it took longer for the result to sink in. The Chairman repeated the numbers in a sonorous bass, and announced that the Noes had it.

  Seconds later, half a minute later, a chant opened up from the Opposition. ‘Resign! Resign!’

  Without fuss, the Government front bench began to empty. The Prime Minister, Collingwood, Monty Cave, went out of the House together, passing close by us in the box. Cries followed them, but the shouts were focused on Roger. He was sitting back, one arm stretched out behind him, talking, with apparent casualness, to the First Lord and Leverett-Smith.

  ‘Resign! Resign!’

  The yells broke on him. Once, he gave a wave across the gangway, like a Wimbledon player acknowledging the existence of the crowd.

  Taking his time, he got up. He didn’t look either at his own back-benchers or at the others. ‘Resign! Resign!’ The shouts grew louder. His great back moved slowly down the aisle, away from us. At the Bar he turned and made his bow to the Chair. Then he walked on. When he was out of sight, the shouts still crashed behind him.

  44: ‘You Have Nothing to Do with It’

  Next morning, headlines, questions in the papers: rumours in Whitehall. Beyond the windows, the February sky was clear and crystalline. In my office, the scrambled, yellow corded telephone kept ringing. No message from Roger had reached the Prime Minister’s secretary.

  Collingwood was reported to have said: ‘This dance will no further go.’ (The only historical reference the old man knew, said a cultivated voice at the other end of the wire.) He was said to be bearing Roger no malice, to be speaking of him with dispassion. He had heard – this I did not know for certain until later – about Roger and his nephew’s wife. He took the news with stony lack of concern. ‘I regard that as irrelevant,’ he said. He turned out to have no feeling whatsoever for his nephew. That had been one of the unrealistic fears.

  That morning, there was a strong rumour, which came from several sources, that some of Roger’s supporters were calling on the Prime Minister. They were trying to arrange for the Prime Minister to interview him. He hadn’t resigned yet. Another rumour: he was backing down. He wouldn’t resign. He would announce that he had stressed one part of the White Paper at the expense of the whole. He had been wrong, but now faithfully accepted the compromise. He would go on implementing the compromise policies: or alternatively, he would take a dimmer job.

  I heard nothing from him. I imagined that he was like the rest of us when the worst has happened, in moments still tantalized by hopes, almost by fulfilment, as though it had gone the other way: just as, when Sheila had betrayed me when I was a young man, I walked across the park deceived by gleams of happiness, as though I were going to her bed: just as, when an operation has failed, one lies in hospital and, now and then, has reveries of content, as though one were whole again.

  He would be living with temptations. He wasn’t different from most of those who have obtained any kind of power, petty or grand. He wanted to cling to it up to the end, beyond the end. If he went out now, untouched, unbudging, that was fine, that was in the style he would like for himself. And yet, he knew politics too well not to know that he might never come back. It would be bitter to behave as if he had been wrong, to be juggled with, put in an inconspicuous Ministry for years: but perhaps that was the way to win. Would they let him? He must be thinking of the talks that day. Others would be counting the odds, with more degrees of freedom than he had. It might be good management to make sure that he was disposed of. Some might be sorry, but that didn’t count. If they gave him a second chance, it wouldn’t be because of sympathy or even admiration. They owed him no support. It would be because he still had some power. They must be weighing up just how much influence he still possessed. Would he be more dangerous eliminated, or allowed to stay?

  In the aftern
oon I attended a departmental meeting, Rose in the chair. He hadn’t spoken to me that morning; he greeted me with overflowing politeness, as though I were a valuable acquaintance whom he had not seen for months. No one round the table could have guessed that we had been sitting side by side, in anxiety, the night before. He got through the business as accurately, as smoothly, as he would have done when I first sat under him, nearly twenty years before. Next year, he would be sixty, taking his last meeting in this room. He would go on like this till the last day. This particular afternoon, it wasn’t even interesting business: it had to be done.

  As soon as I returned to my room, my PA came in.

  ‘There’s a lady waiting for you,’ she said. She looked inquisitive and apologetic. ‘I’m afraid she seems rather upset.’

  I asked who it was.

  ‘She says her name is Mrs Smith.’

  When I had told Ellen the result over the telephone, late the previous night, she had gasped. I had heard a gulp of tears before the receiver crashed down.

  That afternoon, as she sat down in the chair beside my desk, her eyes were open, bloodshot, piteous and haughty. They reminded me of someone else’s so hauntingly that I couldn’t at first listen to what she was saying. Then, down the years, I had it. They were like my mother’s, after an intolerable wound to her pride, as on the day my father went bankrupt.

  She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s told me nothing.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to see him.’

  She was crying out for sympathy, and yet she would reject it.

  I said, as astringently as I could make myself: ‘Yes, it’s bad. It’s part of the situation.’

  ‘I mustn’t see him till he’s decided, one way or the other. You understand, don’t you?’