Corridors of Power by C.P. Snow

It needed no one to instruct Roger about gossip. He picked it up in the air: or more exactly, for there was nothing supernatural about it, he read it in the expressions of acquaintances, without a word spoken, as he walked about the House, his clubs, the offices, Downing Street. We all knew, in those November days, that it was boiling up: some of it sheer random gossip – malicious, mischievous, warm with human relish – some politically pointed.

I had not yet heard a whisper about Ellen, or any other woman. The PQ seemed to have fallen dead. One reason why he was being talked about was that he was getting precisely the support he could least afford. The Fishmongers' Hall speech, or bits of it, or glosses upon it, was passing round. It had made news. It was drawing the kind of publicity which, because no one understood it, the theatre people called ‘word of mouth'. Roger had, within two or three weeks, become a favourite, or at any rate a hope, of liberal opinion. Liberal opinion? To some on the outside, certainly to the Marxists, it didn't mean much. It might use different language from the Telegraph, Lord Lufkin's colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers, but if ever there was a fighting-point, it would come down on the same side. Maybe. But this, inconveniently for Roger, was not how it appeared to the Telegraph, Lord Lufkin's colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers. To them, the New Statesman and the Observer looked like Lenin's paper, Iskra, in one of its more revolutionary phases. If Roger got praise in such quarters, he was a man to be watched.