‘Steam power is the key. Nothing has changed since James Watt invented the steam engine – it is exactly the same principle of operation. The only technological advance in a nuclear power station is the way we heat the water to get the steam – that’s what we’re all about. Ninety per cent of what you’re going to find if you walk around this plant is the same as what you will find if you walk around any coal-fired or oil-fired or gas-fired power station anywhere in the world. The ten per cent that’s different is the way we make the steam – that’s what’s important, that’s what nuclear power is all about.’

The man paused for a moment, looking nervously through his spectacles, which were fast sliding down his nose. He wrung his hands together, sweat glistened on his brow, and his brown hair cut like a pudding basin clung greasily to his head as the sweat poured into it. He swayed on his feet, occasionally elevating himself onto tiptoe as he spoke, occasionally shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed jacket, so deep at times I thought the jacket was going to come apart at the shoulders. He was used to parties of school children and university students. He wasn’t used to a crowd like this lot; they could eat him for breakfast, and he knew it.

In an effort to swing ever-increasing public hostility to nuclear power stations into some measure of support for their construction programme, and to try and gain export orders, the British government had thrown open to the international press their latest star-studded masterpiece, Huntspill Head on the shore of North Somerset. It was the first pressurized-water reactor to be built in Britain and its one major drawback, as far as public relations went, was that it was based on the same system as the infamous Three Mile Island reactor which, in 1979, had come perilously close to wiping out a large chunk of Pennsylvania.

The future of the government’s energy policy was in jeopardy, and a favourable outcome today would be a big boost for it. It was essential they got the right message across, and to get the right message across, it was essential they used the right man. Douglas Yeodall had been chosen for his school-teacher-from-next-door appearance and manner, his extensive knowledge on the subject of nuclear power, his honest face and, as much as anything else, for his thick Somerset accent. It had been decided that his accent, with its strongly rural flavour – an accent that reminded one of crude jokes about lecherous farmers – would put people at ease. The journalists present were of a different opinion. Half of them couldn’t understand a single word; the other half, which could, with some difficulty, make out the general gist of what he was saying, had decided that the British government had deliberately laid on the village idiot.