Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
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record of the April 1947 negotiations indicates that the only security concern of the Air Council at the time concerned delivery dates. Although Wilson proposed that Cabinet should consider improving on them, ‘No promise of any such improvement’ (according to a Foreign Office minute) was made in Moscow. Concessions on delivery dates were later made, but only after Sir Stafford Cripps, as President of the Board of Trade, had personally considered the matter. It is clear that Wilson badly wanted to use the Soviet request as a bargaining chip, but equally clear that he did so only on the basis of close consultation with Cabinet colleagues, including Attlee as well as Cripps.33 Nevertheless, the ‘jet engines’ incident was not forgotten, as we shall see.
After preliminary skirmishes, Wilson flew back to London and returned again to Moscow in June to negotiate in earnest. The British wanted wheat and coarse grain, the Russians wanted engineering equipment, transport vehicles and additional concessions on the delivery of jets. Wilson found Mikoyan an even more intransigent negotiator than in April, and was amused by what he regarded as the Armenian’s oriental wiles. Later he would proudly recount how, faced with a diplomatic attack in the form of a sixteen-course banquet and a steady flow of vodka, he had retaliated by drinking the Soviet delegation under the table.34 In an attempt to obtain an agreement, Wilson cabled home for Cripps’s view in the hope of getting Cabinet approval for a further concession on the delivery date of jets ‘to throw into the pot’. But both the Air Ministry, and the Americans, objected.35
The talks came to nothing and Wilson left empty-handed. To add injury to insult, the plane carrying the British party over-ran the runway at London Airport and crashed into a hedge, cracking one of the Overseas Trade Secretary’s ribs. ‘Things some ministers will do to get publicity,’ said Cripps when he read about it in the newspaper.36 The press attention did Wilson no harm, however, and provided a peg for admiring profiles, linked to the human-interest story of a near disaster. Noting that the young minister was ‘swiftly recovering from the shake-up he received’, the Daily Telegraph described him as ‘an outstanding example of the Socialist intellectual … Able and ambitious, Mr Wilson has been consistently tipped for high office.’ But it also added a note of warning: ‘His frequent trips abroad have not given him time to gain a wide circle of friends in the House. This probably accounts for his reputation for being a trifle aloof.’37
‘It was not Britain’s fault we did not get an agreement in Moscow … ,’ Wilson told guests at a dinner in Liverpool. ‘We missed an agreement by the narrowest of margins, and it was not on trade but on finance that the negotiations broke down.’38 He gave details to Raymond Streat, a Lancashire industrialist who was Chairman of the Cotton Board, and with whom he had dealings in another sphere of his ministerial life. According to Streat, who kept a diary, ‘Wilson’s stories of the life of a Western negotiator dealing with the Russians in Moscow includ[ed] the usual ingredients – tortuous negotiations, false statements, translations to a Russian who inadvertently shows that he understands English, spies and spying.’ Agreement, Wilson told Streat, had been tantalizingly close.39 Cripps remained optimistic. He rang Dalton the day his junior minister returned and told the Chancellor he had not ‘yet given up hope of fixing something with the Russians in spite of Harold Wilson’s failure to get an agreement’.40 The Overseas Trade Secretary determined to do better next time.
It was Cripps who turned Wilson from a diligent, mainly backroom politician, unknown in the country and largely unknown in the Commons as well, into a national figure. He did so on the back of his own, still soaring, ambitions.
Although Sir Stafford Cripps had entered the Government in 1945 with a post not normally seen as one of the most important in the Cabinet, he was regarded from the outset as a member of Labour’s Big Five, together with Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and Dalton. He was also seen as the most left-wing because of his pre-war record of dissidence and his long association with Aneurin Bevan: though, in practice, this reputation was now sustained mainly by an uncompromising temperament. In policy terms, Cripps had set aside his earlier amalgam of Christian ethics and old-fashioned Marxism for the newfangled religion of macro planning. It was in Cripps’s proselytizing planning phase that Wilson first encountered him.
By mid-1947, much of what the Labour Government had set out to do had been achieved, or was in train. Such progress as had been possible in reconstruction and social policy, however, depended on a large US and Canadian loan, which was fast running out. Deepening economic problems made worse by the fuel shortage built up into a sterling crisis, culminating in the suspension of convertibility in August. With the Government’s policies in disarray, and warnings from bankers and industrialists of impending economic collapse, Cripps – as President of the Board of Trade, and minister responsible for the export drive – launched a crusade within the Government for a new strategy based on co-ordinated planning. He also began to think seriously about toppling the Prime Minister.
In the spring, Cripps began to campaign within the Government for a strong minister – either Ernest Bevin or himself – to take responsibility for economic planning. At the beginning of September, after the crisis over convertibility had raised the stakes, he decided to pursue an even more dramatic change: the replacement of Attlee by Bevin at No. 10, in the hope that Bevin would bring about necessary reforms. To this purpose, he proposed to Dalton a deputation by senior ministers to see Attlee, and force his hand: what today would be called a ‘men in grey suits’ meeting. The Chancellor offered his support, but expressed his doubts about Morrison’s likely attitude. The doubts were justified: Morrison had strong objections to a key part of the plan. He agreed that Attlee should be persuaded to stand down but did not agree with – indeed was seriously put out by – Cripps’s suggestion of the Foreign Secretary as successor. ‘Cripps had put the case to M’, Patrick Gordon Walker, Morrison’s PPS, noted, ‘& M had agreed that PM ought to go – but M thought he himself had better qualifications than Bevin.’41 Cripps, however, was not deflected from his purpose, and on 9 September he boldly confronted Attlee with his idea that Bevin should take over as Prime Minister, with the role of Minister of Production as well.
Attlee took no offence. He had long experience of Cripps. He also had better political judgement. First, he asked the Chief Whip, William Whiteley, to see the Foreign Secretary, who denied wanting to become premier and promised to support Attlee.42 Then he bought Cripps off. The President of the Board of Trade had demanded a strong planning machine. To Cripps’s surprise, though not to his consternation, Attlee offered to put him in charge of one. A few weeks later, Cripps became the first ever Minister of Economic Affairs, bringing Cabinet Committees responsible for home and economic affairs together under his own chairmanship, and taking over from Morrison the Economic Planning Staff, headed by Sir Edwin Plowden.43 The leadership crisis was over: Sir Stafford Cripps was now presented as the dynamic force on the domestic side of the Government, with Dalton reduced in standing and Morrison deprived of much of his empire.
The strengthening of Cripps had the immediate effect of advancing Wilson. Cripps remained as President of the Board of Trade until the end of September. In the meantime, Wilson was appointed head of the Export Targets Committee, responsible for the new export drive – part of a trinity of committees designed to deal with the balance of payments.44 This new job brought him to the attention of the sketch writers at a key moment. ‘Wilson was going grey when he was 28’, observed one, ‘and he grew a neat moustache to make him look older. He has a great reputation …’ It is an indication, however, of Wilson’s continuing anonymity that the reporter, who had presumably never met Wilson, had little idea of what he actually looked like. For the same story went on to describe the modestly proportioned politician as ‘big and burly’, and standing nearly six feet tall.45
After the decision to move Cripps had been taken, the question immediately arose of who should replace him as President of the Board of Trade. Wilson was not the inevitable, or even obvious, successor. Yet as the junior minister at the Board with the best knowledge of the export problem, and one who offered no political threat to senior ministers, he was a natural one. As an expert, he had few rivals – and, in Westminster terms, the other economists in the Government were even greener than he was. Douglas Jay had barely been in Parliament a year, and Evan Durbin (Wilson’s successor at Works) had only half