Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
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anywhere else. The seat was not a promising one for Labour, and Wilson accepted the contest as a trial run. There was some chance of winning. But it was, at best, a gamble – of an unusually complicated nature.
Ormskirk had a peculiar electoral history. S. T. Rosbotham, a local farmer, had taken the seat for Labour by a narrow majority over the Conservatives in 1929, only to desert Labour and follow Ramsay MacDonald two years later. In the ensuing election, and again in 1935, ‘National Labour’ held the seat by large majorities against orthodox Labour challengers. When the seat became vacant in 1939, Commander Stephen King-Hall, a publicist of distinctly independent views, secured the National Labour colours and was returned unopposed. By this time, adherence to National Labour meant simply that he took the Government whip, while remaining open-minded about Government policy.
From the beginning of his parliamentary career, the Commander – who was well known to the London intelligentsia for his I. F. Stone-like National News-Letter – had been extremely open-minded. In May 1940, he was one of the forty-four normal Government supporters in the Commons who voted against Chamberlain after the Norway debate. He had since become one of the Churchill administration’s least tractable critics, the more irritating to the Government because he had a regular outlet for his opinions. Indeed, his News-Letter often read like a socialist polemic. In February 1944 he castigated the Government on the need for planning to meet Britain’s post-war needs, and in April he congratulated the Government’s enemies on defeating it in Committee on the issue of equal pay for equal work in the Education Bill, urging ministers ‘to be more active and progressive on the domestic front’.29 Such boat-rocking did not, of course, endear him to Conservative Central Office. Wilson knew that when the Coalition broke up, there would be a question mark over his future.
The critical issue, still undecided at the time of Wilson’s selection, was whether the Conservatives would run a candidate against King-Hall. If they did not, then Wilson’s own hope of victory was small. If they did, and the anti-Labour vote was split, his chances improved. Wilson knew King-Hall in Whitehall, where the Minister of Fuel and Power had employed him to run a propaganda drive to raise coal production. This acquaintanceship may have given Wilson some inkling of what might happen at Ormskirk before he put in for the Labour candidacy. But he could not be sure. He turned out to be lucky. Soon after his own selection, a Tory candidate was put up against King-Hall. Even so, it was impossible in 1944 to know how the votes would fall, or which of the three candidates was best placed.
Despite the uncertainty, Wilson acted decisively. The best temporaries were asked to stay in Whitehall after the war. Wilson, who had risen fast to a high post at a young age, could hope for such an opportunity, with the prospect of rising much higher. He enjoyed the civil service, but did not hesitate in his choice. Since he could not both remain an official and stand for Parliament, he left Whitehall as quickly as he could. There was some feeling (unjustified, in view of other indicators) that his real reason for standing was to secure his early release.30 Eyebrows were raised at the precipitate retirement of an able-bodied young official, before Germany, let alone Japan, had been conquered. Nevertheless, his departure was crowned, in the 1945 New Year’s Honours, with the standard Whitehall reward for a temporary civil servant of his rank, an OBE. Before getting his candidacy at Ormskirk, he had been elected a Tutorial Fellow in Economics at University College, and it was to Oxford that he returned.31
It was a period of waiting: the outcome of the war seemed certain, but its duration – and the timing of the election – were not. While the war continued, Wilson began to be noticed as a politician, and possibly one with a bright future. Shortly after his selection, the Daily Telegraph ran a significant little story, which must have caused irritation on both sides of the civil servant–politician divide. It described Wilson as ‘one of the most prominent wartime civil servants with parliamentary ambitions’, and declared that at twenty-eight ‘Mr Wilson is looked on by Socialists as a coming President of the Board of Trade or Chancellor of the Exchequer.’32 Beveridge’s stepson Philip Mair, a fellow temporary, bumped into him in Whitehall before he resigned and asked about his future. Wilson replied that he was going into politics. ‘Isn’t that a rum sort of thing for you to do?’ said Mair, in surprise. ‘It depends what you think you can make of it,’ said Wilson. Mair took this to mean that he already had ministerial ambitions.33
Back in Oxford, there were few undergraduates to teach, but Wilson was given the jobs of Junior Dean and Home Bursar, which placed him in charge of the college’s catering budget. At first, Gladys and Robin stayed in the Richmond flat, while Harold continued to work in London, lecturing to naval officers on current affairs. Then at Easter 1945 the whole family returned to Oxford, moving into rooms on Staircase Eleven, in University College’s Back Quad. The idyll was briefly revived. Only a handful of women lived in college, where normal rules and practices were suspended: Gladys and Robin had the run of the Fellows’ Garden. Harold’s attention, however, was elsewhere. Having taken the first important step towards politics, he directed as much of his concentrated energy to it as he had previously focused on trade cycle research and coal statistics. Before the election, he prepared a report on railway nationalization for the Railway Clerks’ Association. He also spent five weeks writing a quasi-political, quasi-academic tract, New Deal for Coal, which drew on his experience at the Mines Department and was published by an enterprising young Austrian immigrant, called George Weidenfeld, on polling day.
The book had the character of a Fabian blueprint and consisted of a sober plan for nationalizing the coal industry. Most of it was devoted to a detailed and technical account of how a National Coal Board might be set up on public corporation lines. It opposed the ‘workers’ control’ approach to the staffing of the boards of nationalized industries which had been favoured by some trade unions in the 1930s, and opted for what came to be known as the ‘Morrisonian’ method, advocating control by ‘men chosen for their ability and technical competence … the replacement, in short, of amateurs by professionals’. If it was necessary to pay £15,000 per annum for the right chairman, Wilson was in favour of doing so. His argument for nationalization was on efficiency, not ethical or doctrinal, grounds. The book concluded by (in effect) equating socialism and modernization. The aim, said the author, was to show
not only that socialism and efficiency are compatible, but also that socialism, properly applied, is the only means to full efficiency; and, finally, that, through that efficiency, the interest of the consumer, in a plentiful supply of coal at a reasonable price, can be reconciled with the right of the miner to a high standard of living, good working conditions, and an effective share in controlling the destination of the industry in which he works.34
Though administrative in tone and specialist, it was polemical in intent, showing how, in practical terms, the progress towards state control which had been made during the war could be driven home. It followed a theme in Wilson’s political interests which had begun before the war. Wilson had taken a close look at the detailed mechanics of possible nationalization in a number of key industries: electricity, railways and steel – finally coal. For a nationalizing administration, such knowledge would clearly be an asset. New Deal for Coal was Wilson’s first major credential as a Labour technical expert, perfectly timed – as it turned out – to draw its author to the attention of the Party hierarchy, at the precise moment when places in a new Government had to be filled. When the book appeared, Will Lawther, the miners’ leader, helpfully described it as ‘one of the most important statements issued on this despised and rejected industry’.35
At Whitsun 1945, Wilson attended Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, using the opportunity to cultivate his former ministerial chief, Hugh Dalton, who noted afterwards that ‘Harold Wilson, our candidate for Ormskirk’, accompanied him on the journey back to London.36 Meanwhile, in Ormskirk, Harold was cutting his teeth as a platform speaker. He had little experience of public meetings. Now he took to the sport with enthusiasm. Gladys was less keen. ‘In 1945, when I went to my very first meeting, it was quiet and orderly and I said to Harold, wasn’t it nice and quiet,’ she recalled in the 1960s. ‘He didn’t think it was nice. It was too quiet and dull. The next meeting was terrible, I thought. A lot of shouting and anger and at the end of it I found I was actually trembling. But he was delighted.’37 Such disturbances,