Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
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he considers. ‘It was an area he understood.’ Yet the issue was as much the personality of the Chancellor, as his proposals. ‘One of the bonds between Nye and Wilson’, Freeman now thinks, ‘was that they both saw Gaitskell as the real enemy to their intentions.’51
Bevan was the massive, dominating presence at these meetings:52 but there remains the interesting question of who was leading whom, when it came to the crunch. Wilson claims, and we have no reason to doubt him, that he was desperately uncertain up to the last moment about whether to leave the Government, ‘walking up and down the bedroom floor all night trying to make up my mind’.53 Mary recalls that he said to her: ‘I think I’m going to have to resign.’ She told him that if that was something he felt he ought to do, then he should do so. But she was well aware of his reservations.54 Private uncertainty is one thing, however: in his meetings with Bevan and other allies, he presented a different face.
One newspaper reported on 11 April that Wilson was pressing Bevan to resign;55 and Dalton seems to have formed the same impression. John Freeman, the best available witness, confirms that, by the end, Wilson had become an uncompromising hawk. He remembers a meeting of the three dissident ministers at Bevan’s house in Cliveden Place on the eve of the resignations at which Wilson brushed aside hesitations, saying that things had gone too far to turn back, I think his attitude could be correctly described as “it’s too late for any more shilly-shallying: I’m quite clear we should now resign”,’ recalls Freeman. The issue had become Bevan’s credibility, and whether it could survive the alternative of a public surrender. ‘We all believed in Bevan at the time, and Wilson’s firm judgement of the realities may have been tactically sound and very shrewd.’56 Freeman thinks that Wilson’s influence was decisive in preventing Bevan from pulling back. ‘Probably Jennie’s influence would have been decisive in any case. But Nye had no chance of changing his mind once Harold had weighed in.’57
Publicly, however, Bevan was the leader, and Wilson the barely visible follower. ‘Nye’s little dog’ was Dalton’s contemptuous tag, and it seemed to fit. The general view immediately after the resignations was that Wilson had unwisely taken his cue from a much more powerful personality; that he had wrecked his own career; and that he was, in any case, no great loss to the Government. ‘Mr Wilson’s action had the appearance of making the rift in the Cabinet more serious,’ The Times observed loftily, ‘but this second resignation appears to be treated by the Government and the Labour Party as a matter of no great consequence.’ According to the Manchester Guardian, Wilson had never been more than an adequate debater, and did not have the knack of arousing his own side. Moreover, ‘a certain superiority of manner in debate has not helped his popularity.’ Consequently, he was likely to find himself in the wilderness for some time.58
If, however, the fact of Wilson’s departure led the press to be disdainful, the manner of it was considered impressive. By common consent, Bevan’s resignation speech on 23 April was blustering and self-centred, harming his own cause. Wilson determined to do better. Freeman helped prepare the speech. Mary remembers 24 April as a hectic day: Ernest Bevin’s memorial service in the Abbey in the morning, Harold’s resignation speech in the afternoon. Though she did not know it, the two events marked the symbolic end of the old era, and the beginning of the new.
At a PLP meeting in Westminster Hall before the service, Wilson, Freeman, Bevan and Gaitskell all spoke. Bevan was emotional, Wilson calm.59 The contrast was repeated when Wilson rose in the House just before 4 p.m. Where Bevan had hectored, Wilson ‘quietly and sombrely – almost sadly’ read from notes. ‘I will be brief’, he began, ‘and as far as is compatible with the position in which I find myself, noncontroversial.’ His argument closely followed Bevan’s on arms expenditure and the American accumulation of raw materials. He was, he said, ‘strongly in support of an effective defence programme forced on us by the state of the world’, yet adamantly opposed to a minor and unnecessary cut in the social services which was ‘well within the margin of error of any estimates’. He declared his belief (which subsequent events vindicated) that the arms programme could not be carried out, because it depended on a supply of raw materials from abroad that would not be forthcoming in adequate volume; and, therefore, that the Chancellor should have budgeted for a smaller expenditure on arms and a larger expenditure on social services. He referred, as had Bevan, to the breach in the concept of a free health service: he ‘dreaded how the breach might be widened in future years’.60 In one sense, like Bevan, he took his stand on principle; yet, in another, he was objecting to the elevation of a technical detail into a point of principle, where no principles were at stake. (He was to employ much the same argument against Gaitskell in the Clause IV and unilateralist arguments almost a decade later.) To those who cried ‘principle’ he replied, in effect, with a principled rejection of bad tactics, and of the presentation of a policy, the broad line of which he agreed, in terms that provoked unnecessary conflict. Instead of offering, as Bevan had done, a clash of rival values, he presented himself as an exasperated conciliator regretfully parting company from an inflexible dogmatist.
‘I was never a Bevanite,’ he insisted later.61 In effect, his resignation speech said the same. He made clear his determination to appear the more sober and reasonable of the two Cabinet rebels. Unlike Bevan, he went out of his way to express his regret, and to pledge his continued support for the Government.62 If MPs suspected crocodile tears they did not show it: Wilson’s ten-minute statement was applauded several times. Afterwards, Gaitskell privately contrasted Bevan’s disastrous speech with the speeches of Wilson and Freeman, which ‘were restrained and in a way more dangerous’.63
Wilson’s resignation turned him into a back-bencher for the first time, I am sorry in a way,’ Streat noted at the end of April. ‘Wilson is from many aspects a thoroughly nice young man. He has brains and can work fast and well. I think now he will become just a political jobber and adventurer.’64 It was rumoured in the press that he would contest either East or West Ham at the general election, instead of Huyton, and that he had been offered a directorship in the British film industry at £10,000 a year, double a Cabinet minister’s salary.65 Wilson denied both stories. Before resigning, he had taken care to square his own constituency party, which had passed a resolution condemning the health charges on 15 April. On 5 May Huyton ‘fully endorsed’ his resignation and asked him to stand again at the next election.66 ‘He was given a tremendous reception,’ reported the local press. ‘Cheer after cheer came from the crowded room in Progress Hall, Page Moss.’ Wilson – who by this time had abandoned the search for a bolt-hole – said that he had been asked to stand for other seats, but Huyton remained his choice.67
With this matter settled, he announced that he had accepted an appointment as ‘economic adviser’ by the firm of Montague L. Meyer Ltd, a major timber importer. It was to be a part-time job, with an undisclosed remuneration. Tom Meyer, the head of the firm, described Wilson as a ‘very old friend’ with an unrivalled knowledge of world conditions and trade, who was ‘not only a very fine politician, but a natural businessman’.68 The Financial Times was sceptical. Wilson, it drily observed, ‘has no more knowledge of the timber trade than we have of whether Atlantis ever existed’.69 Wilson remained an employee of the firm for more than a decade, frequently representing it abroad and maintaining links with the Eastern bloc throughout the 1950s, at a time when such contact was rare in political circles, or anywhere else.
The arrangement, which had been agreed in principle before he resigned, secured his future. It gave him an office at Meyer’s headquarters in the Strand and a secretary, at a time when back-bench MPs did not have offices and secretaries; and it gave him a substantial income, for school fees, mortgage repayments and travel, at a time when MPs’ salaries were extremely low. Provided he could stay in Parliament, he was now well placed for the next phase of his political career.
The idea of the Left as a party within the Party was greatly strengthened when Bevan, Wilson and Freeman met the already existing, but hitherto somewhat marginal, Keep Left group of MPs on 26 April. The excitement in some sections of the Movement, and the anger and alarm felt within the Cabinet, reached a new pitch. The Left saw the split as pregnant with opportunity, the Right