He may have been overweight, but he stayed light on his feet, both physically and politically. The hours he spent over dinner weren’t wasted, because he chose his dinner-partners carefully, and by the time Kennedy was elected he was known as one of the toughest and most knowledgeable negotiators in Congress. His main power base was the Department of Agriculture, where he formed intricate and lasting alliances with the most influential members of the bureaucracy, the faceless officials who really decided what went on. He ran for senator in 1964, and during the Johnson years he built up several enduring friendships with the heavyweight Southern Democrats who controlled the Agriculture Committee. In 1971, he was the prime mover behind a small but forceful group of senators who blocked attempts to abolish or adjust the parity ratio – the ratio between income and expenditure which was supposed to show how well America’s farmers were faring. The parity ratio usually showed the farmers were doing badly, and that they urgently needed federal support, so that by 1973 the government was handing them more than 2.5 billion dollars a year.

What the parity ratio didn’t show was that most larger farmers were actually doing very well, and that many of those larger farmers were paying Shearson Jones hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain their subsidies. By 1973 – when the federal farm programme was eventually changed under the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act – the senator from Kansas was worth well over seven million dollars.

He was said to have made another million out of illegal sales of rice to the North Vietnamese, but an exhaustive investigation in the Washington Post failed to come up with any concrete evidence. Shearson Jones had raised his fist in the Senate and asked God to strike him dead instantly if he had ever been guilty of illegal trafficking in grain or rice.

Today, Shearson Jones was big, balding and buoyant – a huge and ebullient man at the peak of his career. He had occasionally been mentioned as vice-presidential material, although The New York Times had ruled out the possibility of his ever making the White House. ‘Too fat in an age of austerity,’ they had remarked, dismissively.

The red-haired girl said, ‘What are you going to do now? Kiss me? Kick me out? Or are you going to sit there and seek oral gratification from that cigar for the rest of the night?’

‘I’m thinking,’ said Shearson.

‘Oh, you’re thinking. In the middle of our romantic courtship, you have to think?’

He ignored her. ‘Make me another drink,’ he said. ‘I want to make one more phone call.’