Text IV
In the middle of July, Roger was making his first
ministerial speech. I did not need reminding, having drafted
enough of them, how much speeches mattered — to
parliamentary bosses, to any kind of tycoon. Draft after draft: the
search for the supreme, the impossible, the more than Flaubertian
perfection; the scrutiny for any phrase that said more than it
ought to say, so that each speech at the end was bound, by the
law of official inexplicitness, to be more porridge-like than when
it started out in its first draft. I had always hated writing drafts for
other people, and nowadays got out of it. To Hector, to Douglas,
it was part of the job, which they took with their usual patience,
their usual lack of egotism: when a minister crossed out their
sharp, clear English and went in for a literary composition of his
own, they gave a wintry smile and let it stand.
C. P. Snow. Corridors of Power. London: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 31.