Read "Corridors of Power" by C.P. Snow online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The election went according to plan, or rather, according to the plan of Roger's friends. Their party came back with a majority of sixty; as prophesied by Mrs Henneker at that dinner-party in Lord North Street, Roger duly got office.
As soon as the appointment was announced, my civil service acquaintances started speculating. The rumour went around Whitehall that he was an ambitious man. It was not a malicious rumour; it was curiously impersonal, curiously certain, carried by people who had never met him, building up his official personality for good and all.