Corridors of Power by C.P. Snow

During the winter, the gossip began to swirl out from the clubs and the Whitehall corridors that Lord Gilbey was ‘getting past it'. At the same time, Roger's name crept into the political columns in the Sunday papers, as the first junior Minister in the new government to be talked about for promotion. It looked as though he were handling the press, or rather, the political link-men who added to their incomes through leaking secret information to the press, with skill and nerve. About whether these link-men really existed, administrators like Hector Rose went on speculating, as though they were some species still in doubt, like the yeti, or the plesiosaur in Loch Ness. Rose, with his rigid propriety, could not easily believe in them. My guess was that Roger not only believed in them, but knew them. If so, he got himself liked, but never let out that he had a policy already formed, much less what it was. In fact, the political commentators, while agreeing that he was coming to the front, gave diametrically different reasons why he should do so.

Early in February, Roger told me that he was spending the weekend at Basset, Diana Skidmore's house in Hampshire. It was not a coincidence that Margaret and I had just received the same invitation. Diana had an intelligence network of her own, and this meant that the connection between Roger and me was already spotted. So far as Roger went, it meant more. Diana was a good judge of how people's stock was standing, whatever their profession was: upon stock prices within the government, her judgement was something like infallible. Since Diana had a marked preference for those on the rise, the frequency of a man's invitation to Basset bore a high correlation to his political progress.