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calculated decision and one which his political eminence had seemed to warrant. Whatever the Fellows might say about him, his reputation for moderate and essentially conservative reform would absolve him of the accusation that he was the advocate of change for change’s sake. As the Minister who had made the slogan ‘Alteration without Change’ so much a part of the recent tax reforms, Sir Godber prided himself on his conservative liberalism or, as he had put it in a moment of self-revelation, authoritarian permissiveness. The challenge he had thrown down to Porterhouse had been deliberate and justified. The College was absurdly old-fashioned. Out of touch with the times, and to a man whose very life had been spent keeping in touch with the times there could be no greater dereliction. An advocate of comprehensive education at no matter whatcost, chairman of the Evans Committee on Higher Education which had introduced Sixth Form Polytechnics for the Mentally Retarded, Sir Godber prided himself on the certain knowledge that he knew what was best for the country, and he was supported in this by Lady Mary, his wife, whose family, now staunchly Liberal, still retained the Whig traditions enshrined in the family motto
Laisser Mieux
. Sir Godber had taken the motto for his own, and associating it with Voltaire’s famous dictum had made himself the enemy of the good wherever he found it. ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ had no appeal for Sir Godber’s crusading imagination. What sweet maids required was a first-rate education and what sleeping dogs needed was a kick up the backside. This was precisely what he intended to administer to Porterhouse.
    Lying awake through the still hours of the night listening to the bells of the College clocks and the churches toll the hours, a sound he found medieval and unnecessarily premonitory, Sir Godber planned his campaign. In the first instance he would order a thorough inventory of the College’s resources and make the economies needed to finance the alterations he had in mind. In themselves such economies would effect some changes in Porterhouse. The kitchen staff could well do with some thinning out and since so much of the ethos of Porterhouse emanated from the kitchen and the men, a careful campaign of retrenchment there would do much to alter the character of the College. And suchsavings would be justified by the building programme and the expansion of numbers. With the experience of hundreds of hours in committees behind him, the Master anticipated the arguments that would be raised against him by the Fellows. Some would object to any change in the kitchen. Others would deny the need for expansion in numbers. In the darkness Sir Godber smiled happily. It was precisely on such divisions of opinion that he thrived. The original issue would get lost in argument and he would emerge as the arbiter between divided factions, his role as the initiator of dissension quite forgotten. But first he would need an ally. He ran through the Fellows in search of a weak link.
    The Dean would oppose any increase in the numbers of undergraduates on the specious grounds that it would destroy the Christian community which he supposed Porterhouse to be and, more accurately, would make discipline difficult to impose. Sir Godber put the Dean to one side. There was no help to be found there except indirectly from the very obduracy of his conservatism, which irritated some of the other Fellows. The Senior Tutor? A more difficult case to assess. A rowing man in his day, he might be inclined to favour a large intake on the grounds that it would add weight to the College boat and improve Porterhouse’s chances in the Bumps. On the other hand he would oppose any changes in the kitchen for fear that the diet of the Boat Club might be diminished. The Master decided a compromise was inorder. He would give an absolute assurance that the Boat Club would continue to get its quota of beefsteak no