Sir Matthew Wetherall

Minister of Works and Communications, responsible for the Crown side of roads, bridges, guarded masts and strategic construction. Londoners know him less from speeches than from surveys, delays, compulsory access and the clerks who arrive before a great project.

Sir Matthew Wetherall governs the Crown side of works and communications: major roads, bridges, public works, guarded masts and strategic construction, together with the awkward meeting point between metropolitan ambition and local jurisdiction. It is a ministry that is felt before it is seen. A survey party appears, then a notice of compulsory access, then a trail of clerks, and only afterwards anything a Londoner would recognise as a project. Beneath him sit officers such as George Marchmont, Under-Secretary of Civic Works, whose names ordinary Londoners encounter more often than the minister’s own, which is how most of the present state is met: one rung below the great office.

He is counted among the active figures of the Crown City’s household life and, more unusually for a minister, among the recurring names of mast culture and the secret sky, where aerial gossip and technical confidence travel together. He is comparatively young for his office and has the reputation of a working minister rather than a courtly one. He is remembered chiefly for the observation that a petitioner sent from one side door to another learns a chamberlain’s temper long before he learns the limits of his reach, which is a courteous way of saying that the man who decides is rarely the man who signs. His own habits are those of a surveyor: he is said to read the field sheets himself rather than the summaries prepared from them, and to prefer walking a disputed site to hearing it argued.

Companies meet his ministry wherever the Crown is building on ground that someone else considers theirs: guarding a survey party, securing a works site or a mast against interference, carrying drawings and instruments, or standing beside a clerk with a compulsory-access warrant while the owners decide how much to object. The pay is regular; the delays are regular too.

In person

Matthew Wetherall is compact and sturdy, a physically capable man with dark brown hair touched by early grey, a broad, practical face and thick brows. He is clean-shaven and wears a dark, practical ministerial coat, waistcoat and tie. He looks more like an engineer who has been obliged to become a minister than the reverse, and tends to be found among plans, surveys and instruments rather than at the centre of a reception.