A Very British Coup Read Online Free PDF

turned down. The more meetings he addressed, the more the invitations multiplied. Gradually, the rise of Harry Perkins had begun.
    When Labour was returned to government Perkins was asked to be Secretary of State for the Public Sector, a new post designed to make the nationalised industries accountable to Parliament. It was a meteoric rise for someone who hadnever been so much as a junior minister. With no love lost between Perkins and the Labour leadership, he was under no illusions as to why he had been offered the job. “They’re just trawling for a left-winger to make the régime look respectable,” he told his friends. All the same, he accepted.
    Perkins’ spell in government was dominated by what was in later years to become known as the Windermere reactor affair. As Secretary of State for the Public Sector he was responsible for the Central Electricity Generating Board. The Board was in the process of choosing the type of nuclear reactor for a series of new power stations which would generate enough electricity to meet demand until well into the next century. By the time Perkins took office the decision involved a straight choice between a water-cooled reactor made by the Durand Corporation, an American multinational with a reputation for hard sell, and a gas-cooled reactor to be made by British Insulated Industries, a corporation with its head office in Manchester. To the winner the contract was worth a billion pounds.
    Every day delegations of hard-nosed businessmen and learned scientists filed through the Secretary of State’s second floor office at Millbank. Behind them they left abstruse memoranda setting out their case. The Americans said their version was cheaper. The men from British Insulated claimed they could get back their costs by selling reactors to the Shah of Iran (whose demise at that time was but a twinkle in the eye of the Ayatollah). The Americans said their version was already in use and had proved as safe as houses. British Insulated brought in experts who alleged that it was not.
    And so it went on day after day, week after week. Each night when Perkins boarded a number 3 bus he took back to his flat in Kennington red despatch boxes brimming with memoranda arguing the comparative merits of water-cooled and gas-cooled reactors. There were times, as he sat up late into the night poring over papers he could scarcely comprehend, when he wished he was back at Firth Brown’s. Alone in the living room of his three-room flat in the small hours of themorning, the absolute self-confidence he carried through life deserted him. This was no job for a Sheffield steel worker. More than once he reflected on the irony that he, a product of Parkside Secondary School who had barely scraped an ‘O’ level in Physics, was in a position to over-rule the finest minds in the scientific establishment.
    In the end that is exactly what he did. Against the advice of his own civil servants, the Atomic Energy Authority and the CEGB itself, Perkins ruled in favour of British Insulated. The first reactor would be built on the shore of Lake Windermere. The recommendation went to the Cabinet and he talked it through in the face of bitter hostility from his own civil servants. So committed had they been to the American reactor that they refused point blank to provide him with the necessary briefing papers for the Cabinet. Instead he had to commission a report setting out the case for the British reactor from outside academics.
    For Perkins the deciding factor was jobs. It was no secret that British Insulated was on the edge of ruin. If they lost the contract a string of factories from Portsmouth to Port Greenock would close. The union men had been to see him. Delegations of shop stewards from every British Insulated factory in the country. In Greenock alone thirty per cent of the town’s labour force were employed at British Insulated. Perkins had no desire to be remembered as the man who