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for the next few years it was all he had to go on.
    Gradually he saw less and less of his schoolfriends. After classes they would go their own ways. Perkins to the library, the others to Brady’s. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, they would meet up at a football match, but that was all they had in common.
    Four weeks after Perkins’ fifteenth birthday his father was killed in an accident at work. Two steel ingots being loaded by crane on to a lorry fell on him when a cable snapped. But for the accident he would have stayed on at school. His teachers tipped him as Parkside’s first candidate for university. Instead he left to take his father’s place at Firth Brown.
    Perkins’ first real girl-friend was Anne Scully. A small, neat girl who was receptionist at the district office of the engineering union. He had been four years at Firth’s and met her when he went to pay in the subscriptions from his branch. Anne was quite unlike Perkins. She liked dancing and Buddy Holly and had never read a book – at least not through to the end. That summer they went for long walks in the Pennines and Perkinstried explaining about imperialism (it was the year of Suez) and the goings-on in his union branch. Anne tried hard to understand, but was happier gossiping about who was marrying whom and who was having babies. “You’re so bloody serious, Harry Perkins,” she scolded him, “always got your head stuck in a newspaper. Why can’t you just relax and enjoy life for a change?”
    Those days with Anne were the nearest he ever came to relaxing. The high spot of their relationship was a camping holiday in the Lake District. That was in the summer of 1956. For ten days the sun shone brightly. The days they would spend ambling hand in hand along the shore of Lake Windermere, the evenings singing songs with the locals in a pub called The Water’s Edge, and the nights snuggled up in the warmth of a single sleeping bag, borrowed from Anne’s brother-in-law who ran a camping shop.
    They went steady for the best part of three years, until Perkins went to Ruskin. “That’ll be the end of us,” said Anne sadly. “You’ll meet all kinds of fancy people in Oxford and forget about me.”
    â€œDon’t be daft,” he tried to reassure her, but he knew she was right. It was not so much the fancy people, as the distance. At first he hitch-hiked home nearly every weekend. Once Anne came to stay in his digs at Oxford, but the landlady soon put a stop to that. After a while the visits got fewer. The gaps between letters grew longer. In the end they just drifted apart.
    By the time he left Ruskin, Anne was married. Perkins got no sympathy from his mother. “That girl was the best thing that ever happened to you,” she told him. “If you had any sense, you would have married her while you had the chance.” As he passed the years alone he began to think that his mother had been right. Until he met Molly Spence.
    â€œMy Dad used to think you were a bit of a bastard,” said Molly as she helped herself to salad dressing.
    â€œBetween you and I,” said Perkins, winking at her, “I was a bit of a bastard.”
    Molly had never been to lunch with a Cabinet minister before. For the occasion she wore a cotton skirt patterned with red tulips which descended to mid-calf and swirled when she turned suddenly, and a white blouse which did justice to her breasts. Perkins had opened the door to her in his shirt sleeves and a pair of worn brown corduroys.
    She was surprised at where he lived. It was a street of late Victorian houses five minutes from the Oval tube station. Perkins’ flat was on the third floor. The living room was tastefully, but not extravagantly furnished. Shelves lined with books of Labour Party history and political memoirs. The fireplace had been bricked off, but the mantelpiece remained. Upon it stood a framed photograph of Perkins