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now. Fison smiled inwardly. He was sure that his services would not go unrewarded. At the very least he was expecting a peerage to provide the final seal of respectability he craved.
    The pipe was now clamped between Sir Peregrine’s teeth, causing him to speak through the side of his mouth. As he did so the end of the pipe wobbled. “I want you to get together a few proprietors, editors and senior journalists whom we can absolutely count on. You should meet regularly to coordinate coverage. As things get hotter, and believe me they will, we’re going to need people we can rely on. Can you manage?”
    â€œNo problem,” said Fison, “no problem at all.”
    â€œWhat about the journalists? Bound to have some trouble with them if we lay it on too thick.”
    Fison wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I promise you,” he said slowly, “there won’t be a peep out of anyone.”
    â€œVery embarrassing to have journalists whining on about ethics and press freedom just as we get a decent campaign going.”
    â€œMy dear boy,” Fison leaned towards Sir Peregrine, “take it from me, most Fleet Street journalists wouldn’t recognise a real live ethic at five paces. Why do you think we pay them so well?”
    â€œGood, that’s settled, then,” said Sir Peregrine, rising. He placed the pipe, by now extinct, in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. “One other thing. Very important you don’t breathe a word of this conversation to anybody. Nothing we send you must be traceable to us. If Perkins gets a whiff of what’s going on, we’ll all be in the excreta up to our necks.”
    Gripping both arms of the chair, Fison heaved himself to his feet, panting slightly with the exertion. He drew himself rigidly to attention, a fitting posture for a man about to serve his King and country, “Don’t worry, Peregrine, you can count on me.”
    Perkins crossed the threshold of Number Ten Downing Street to find the entire staff, private secretaries, clerks, telephonists, footmen and garden girls from the downstairs typing pool lining the corridor that leads to the Cabinet Room. As he entered they applauded. Not entirely spontaneously since many of them confidently expected to be sacked. Only an hour had elapsed since they had gathered on the same spot to applaud the outgoing Prime Minister who had departed by a back entrance.
    Guided by the omnipresent Tweed, Perkins crossed the black and white marble tiled floor of the entrance lobby and passed down the corridor to the Cabinet Room, nodding to the right and left in acknowledgment of the applause. He paused respectfully at the entrance to the Cabinet Room as a Catholic might pause in the entrance of a church to cross himself with holy water. Even for a Sheffield steel worker, born and bred with a healthy disrespect for tradition and thetrappings of power, the Cabinet Room had something of a presence. Within these walls the British government had first heard of the loss of the American colonies, plotted the downfall of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler and granted independence to India. Now these same walls were to bear witness to the rise, and perhaps the fall, of Harry Perkins.
    He entered diffidently and stood at the top of the long table, down either side of which were arranged chairs covered in red leather. Each place at the table was marked with a leather-bound blotter and crystal decanters of water. Perkins made one slow circuit of the table, peering cautiously out of each window overlooking the garden. When he had completed his lap of the room Tweed gestured that he should sit. Perkins sat.
    â€œOne or two things we must attend to immediately, Prime Minister.”
    â€œDon’t I even get to wash my hands?”
    â€œThis won’t take a moment,” said Tweed.
    Three private secretaries had now filed into the room and they stood in a crocodile behind Tweed, waiting to be