In their Wisdom by C.P. Snow

It was now early October, and Reginald Swaffield was giving one of his dinner parties. He was in his most expansive – his enemies would have said inflated – form. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, he stood in his morning room, which opened off the hall in Hill Street, and gave his own kind of welcome to his guests, barking at them with a mixture of interferingness and blarney, the proportion blended according to his intentions on the guest.

Since Parliament wasn't yet sitting, a Cabinet Minister called Haydon-Smith was able to attend: nothing surprising in that, Cabinet Ministers were used to accepting invitations from tycoons. He and his wife were received with a fairly high proportion of blarney, though Swaffield had been known to express judgements on politicians in general which were robust but not over-enthusiastic. One of the top Treasury civil servants, Sir Ernest Packe, got perceptibly more blarney, young and unobtrusive as he was. The Symingtons, being old acquaintances and protégés, got almost none, but Swaffield was immediately giving advice and instructions about Alison's pregnancy. That debate had at last been settled, and, both of them looking more sumptuous than anyone else in the room, she was three months gone. Jenny, bringing Lord Lorimer with her according to orders, got nothing but a pat and a conspiratorial leer in the direction of her partner. Jenny hadn't been astonished that Swaffield's intelligence service had come up with the name of Lorimer. It was like being on the edge of an enormous spider's web, she grumbled to herself, but the grumble was nominal by now. Sooner than one realised, one ceased to resist.