After the war, Keynesianism became the universal doctrine among younger economists, and Wilson had no difficulty in adapting to it. But he did not acquire the enthusiasm for the new teaching which made others see it as a crusade, and he always retained Beveridge’s interest in the counter-doctrine of socialist planning. Part of the reason was, as we have seen, that he had been harnessed to a distinguished zealot who increasingly favoured such an approach over the mixture of state control and free enterprise favoured by Keynes and the American New Dealers.22 But there was also a negative factor: Beveridge apart, Wilson did not find himself in an environment in which Keynes’s ideas were the focal point of attention.
There is an important difference here between Wilson, a Liberal who became a socialist, and other economists with whom Wilson later had dealings, in particular Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, two socialists who became Keynesian evangelists. For men like Gaitskell and Jay, democratic socialism’s lack of economic theory had always been a worrying deficiency: they fell on The General Theory as on a philosopher’s stone, seeing in demand management a means of giving practical effect to Labour’s egalitarian aims. In the case of Gaitskell, a junior lecturer at London University, where the fiercely classical Lionel Robbins held sway at the LSE, there was an added frisson: Keynes’s ideas provided ammunition to hurl in intra-faculty fights. For the much younger Wilson, who had read The General Theory as an undergraduate, there was much less to get worked up about.
Engrossed in his empirical study, Wilson was concerned, not to apply, but to deconstruct, aspects of Keynes’s theory. Wilson’s term-time research work was based at the recently established Institute of Statistics in Oxford High Street. Colleagues included Arthur Brown, Elizabeth Ackroyd, Goronwy Daniels, Richard Sayers, George Shackle and Richard Goodwin, among the younger economists. Unlike Cambridge, the Institute did not have ‘a strong General Theory flavour’. Unlike London, it did not have a strongly anti-General Theory flavour either: in the battle between Keynesians and Robbinsites Oxford did not take sides. There was not even a civil war. ‘I do not remember that there was any division of the sub-faculty into pro- and anti-Keynesian factions,’ says Arthur Brown. It was therefore easy and natural for Wilson to stand aside, unmoved by the claims of those who, like Gaitskell and Jay, ‘blended together into a heady mixture’ the various advances in economics of the 1930s of which The General Theory constituted only one part.23
It would be fanciful to trace Wilson’s later affinity to the socialist Bevanites, and the Keynesian Gaitskellites’ distaste for Wilson, to this difference: yet it provides a piece in the jigsaw. Implicitly, Anthony Crosland pointed to the cerebral distinction between progressivism’s cavaliers and roundheads in The Future of Socialism, published in 1956, when he expressed an aesthete’s disdain for socialism based on a good filing system. A good filing system, plus a good slide rule, formed a central part of Wilson’s policy approach: and was one reason why Gaitskellites regarded him as a dull dog.
In 1938 Beveridge made Wilson a Research Fellow at University College, on a stipend of £400 a year, with free rooms and meals in college. This was the first step to a full fellowship, which contemporaries assumed was his goal. At the Institute he was regarded as clever, and a fellowship was expected to come his way. But he was never considered brilliant or intellectually inspiring. ‘Harold was not top flight technically. He was more of a practical chap,’ says Brown, who knew him well in the 1938–9 academic year. ‘His strength was in applied economics. He became more and more applied, in the sense that he took current problems to pieces.’ The future mapped out for him was as a Beveridge-in-miniature, teaching and writing about economic and social policy. ‘He looked set to become the kind of academic who gets involved in looking at present-day issues,’ according to Brown. The idea that he might go into politics was not discussed in the essentially apolitical environment of the Institute. Wilson was visibly ambitious, and emanated a confident, even cocky, sense of control over his destiny. Brown recalls saying to his own father in 1939 that his friend had everything he needed to get to the top, ‘except charisma and oratory’.24 But the ‘top’ Brown had in mind was academic, not political. Nobody saw Wilson as a man with strong views, or a sense of mission.
Yet this was the time when Wilson took his first tentative step towards a political career: he joined the Oxford University Labour Party. Later, he gave elaborate explanations for his change of loyalty. At a personal level, he claimed that it was ‘G. D. H. Cole as much as any man’ who pointed him towards Labour.25 Wilson had come into contact with Cole, the godfather of inter-war Oxford socialism, at University College, where Cole was Economics Fellow. But he had never been a member of the famous, and somewhat exclusive, ‘Cole group’ of young Oxford socialists, that included such luminaries as Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin.26 Now, as a close colleague, he fell greatly under Cole’s spell, finding in him a much more congenial mentor than the irascible Beveridge. ‘Harold admired him very much,’ says Mary, who took little interest in politics, but much in Oxford and its personalities.
Cole was renowned as a recruiter of talented young men to the socialist cause, and it was very much in character that he should have provided encouragement. Since, however, Wilson had taken the significant step of resigning from the Eighty Club – thereby severing his link with leading Liberals – in February 1938, before he started at University College, his allegiances seem already to have been on the move. Wilson also cited a political factor: his concern about unemployment, based on childhood memories, his father’s recent experience, and his own practical study of the subject. But this, in itself, is not quite convincing either. The Liberals – party of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes – were just as interested in unemployment as Labour.
There may not have been a single reason. However, the obvious explanation is the most plausible. If Wilson still contemplated a future in Parliament, then Labour was the only practical vehicle for such an aspiration. It is likely, indeed, that he had had such a switch long in mind. According to Mary, it was always his intention to establish himself professionally, and then look for a way to enter politics.27 This was also the impression Leslie Smith received when he talked to Wilson in the early 1960s. Smith recorded that the future leader ‘never lost sight of his ultimate goal. Even during the closing stages of his intensive cramming [for Schools] he indulged in his favourite imaginings.’ Apparently his day-dream at this stage was to become Labour (not Liberal) candidate for Huddersfield or Colne Valley, and eventually to be Foreign Secretary.28 If that is correct, then it did not need Cole, or Herbert’s second bout of unemployment, to persuade Harold to dump the Liberals.
It helped, of course, that the Labour Party was changing. Labour had recovered notably in the 1935 election, while the Liberals had further declined. At the same time, the Labour Party had become much more congenial to a middle-of-the-road progressive like Wilson. It had acquired a more pragmatic group of leaders, its foreign policy had hardened, and it had shed its more utopian commitments. It had also begun to develop a philosophy which many Liberals found easy to accept. Hugh Dalton’s Practical Socialism for Britain, published in 1935, advocated the kind of socialist planning within capitalism that had Beveridge’s approval. Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case, published in 1937, injected Keynes into socialist policymaking, partly under the influence of the Oxford-based ‘Liberal–Socialist’ economist, James Meade. Both books were symptomatic of a new, policy-orientated approach which was much more to Wilson’s taste than the revolutionary flourishes that characterized the Left earlier in the decade.
It was not exactly a traumatic leap. Wilson’s initial involvement in the party he had just joined was as an academic specialist, rather than as a campaigner. The Fabian Society (which amalgamated with Cole’s New Fabian Research Bureau in 1939) absorbed some of his attention. At Cole’s suggestion he wrote a chapter on ‘Government Control of Railways’