It was a sharp jolt. The appointment kept Harold and Gladys together, and kept Harold out of active service. But it was an interruption in Harold’s hitherto smooth upward progress, and it placed both of them in unfamiliar and uncongenial surroundings. Neither of them knew or liked London. Harold lost the illusory sense of importance which the status of even a very minor don in Oxford conveys: Gladys, stuck in a two-room flat contemplating the hire-purchase furniture, and knowing nobody, was lonely and disorientated. Very soon, however, the pace of the war quickened for everybody.
The previous Christmas, Clement Attlee – Leader of the Labour Party, and a University College man – attended a gaudy at his old college, and met Wilson for the first time. There was talk of Winston Churchill: should he be brought in as war leader? ‘Not Churchill’, Wilson remembered Attlee saying dismissively. ‘Sixty-five, old for a Churchill.’45 In May the Government collapsed and Churchill became Prime Minister, just as the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries, breaking through the French defences at Sedan.
Wilson was suddenly and briefly very busy. His responsibilities with the Anglo-French Committee, of which he was now Joint Secretary, included the preparation of weekly, then daily, reports on available supply routes, as port after port fell to the enemy.46 The fall of France, however, also brought about the fall of the Committee. In July Wilson and Dennison were both transferred to the Economic Section of the Cabinet Secretariat, of which Professor John Jewkes was currently head. Wilson was put to work on forward estimates of industrial manpower requirements: and found himself touring some of the places he had visited in the course of his work with Beveridge.47
The Economic Section, first under Jewkes and later under Lionel Robbins, became a power-house of influential advice on the running of the war, casting a spider’s web of bright individuals and innovative ideas through the committee system of Whitehall. In the judicious words of Edward Bridges, Secretary to the Cabinet, it marked ‘a great step forward in the use made of economists in relation to the central problems of Government’. Containing many of the most promising young economists in the country, it operated as a highly practical senior common room or university department, with the Government as its laboratory. It was also, implicitly, a Keynesian fifth column. Maynard Keynes had been drafted back into the Treasury as Economic Adviser, and Sir Kingsley Wood’s 1941 Budget showed the clear impact of his influence, inaugurating the ‘Keynesian’ Revolution. The Economic Section helped to consolidate it. Charged with the duty of presenting ‘a co-ordinated and objective picture of the economic situation as a whole and the economic aspects of projected Government policies’,48 the Section brought the revolutionary Keynesian teaching to departments and officials who had not previously encountered it, and helped to turn it into the new orthodoxy.
Wilson’s recruitment to the Section was part of an expansion which took place in the spring and early summer of 1940. Other newcomers between April and July included Lionel Robbins, James Meade, Norman Chester, Peggy Joseph, Evan Durbin and Richard Stone. By July there were seventeen members in all,49 of whom Wilson – barely twenty-four – was by far the youngest. ‘Harold was a little shy of us,’ recalls Sir Alec Cairncross, himself an earlier recruit. Wilson kept his own counsel, associating more with the much older Jewkes than with those closer to him in age. Despite this element of distance, he was seen as a useful member of the Section. ‘He was obviously very clever’, says Cairncross, ‘and he was very witty and entertaining.’ As at the Institute, he was not regarded as an intellectual high-flyer, or the source of ideas, but as a practical expert.
Nobody associated any particular political outlook with him. He seemed much less political than his colleague Evan Durbin, also a future Labour MP.50 Durbin ‘looked at the war economy through the eyes of an aspiring politician’, while Wilson ‘at no time confessed to any political ambitions’. Cairncross did not discover that Wilson had any political opinions at all until they had known each other for several months. In a discussion over dinner, Wilson surprised his companions by attacking the ideas of Lionel Robbins, who (though by now won over by Keynes) retained his fiercely anti-socialist reputation. ‘You don’t believe all that stuff Lionel is putting out, do you?’ said Wilson suddenly. But he gave no indication, then or later, of distrusting the market mechanism.51
If Wilson had imagined that Whitehall would liberate him from Sir William Beveridge, he was shortly to be disillusioned. Because of his own background in the field, he was detailed to attend the Manpower Requirements Committee of the Production Council, of which he was made Joint Secretary. The Chairman of the Committee, the last of the ‘ancient war horses’ to be brought back into government, was Beveridge. The master–servant nexus was thus restored. Early in 1941, Beveridge, who had been made an under-secretary at the Ministry of Labour, invited Wilson to join him as head of the Ministry’s Manpower, Statistics and Intelligence Branch.52 Wilson – despite all his reservations about his old boss – accepted, and left the Cabinet Secretariat.
Even before making the move, Wilson had spent more time with Beveridge than with his Section colleagues, apart from Jewkes and Dennison. To a large extent, Wilson remained what he had been before the war: Beveridge’s research assistant. But in some ways, the relationship had changed. Wilson had acquired the ability to manage his master. According to Cairncross, Jewkes (who was also working on Manpower) ‘used to explain that he and Harold Wilson tried to handle Beveridge in the way a wild elephant is tamed by being led between two tame elephants: the wild elephant pushes in one direction and gets pushed back. In this way the wild elephant learns to keep to the road set for it.’53
Jewkes and Wilson also occasionally had to deal with another rogue elephant in government: the Prime Minister. As members of the War Cabinet Secretariat, they took their share of more general official duties. Once, on night duty, they took a telephone call direct from President Roosevelt. They had to get the Cabinet Secretary to wake Churchill, and then they listened as Roosevelt promised fifty destroyers, exacting in return an assurance that if the Germans invaded and gained ground, the ships would be returned. On another occasion, Wilson had to take notes at No. 10 during a conversation between the Prime Minister and General de Gaulle, in which the leader of the Free French asked for the transfer of French gold, held by the Bank of England. Wilson recalled Churchill protesting in schoolboy French to the insistent soldier: ‘Mon cher Général, quand je me trouve en face de la Vieille Dame de Threadneedle Street, alors je suis tout à fait impotent.’54
For Beveridge, the first months after his return to Whitehall were a twilight period, as he struggled angrily for a role worthy of his talents. The chairmanship of the Manpower Committee was not an important post, and carried no executive responsibility. It did, however, give him a foothold in an area that interested him. It also helped to create a leftish team of University College dons dealing with manpower: in addition to Wilson, there was G. D. H. Cole, responsible for local fieldwork. Clashes with Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, however, led to Beveridge’s eventual sacking. In June 1941 Beveridge was removed from administrative work and put in charge of an investigation into the use of skilled manpower in the armed forces, while retaining the services of Wilson, as Secretary of the Committee, and those of another Oxford don, Frank Pakenham, as one of his personal assistants.
Beveridge also agreed to chair an interdepartmental inquiry, which began work in July, into the co-ordination of social insurance.55 He asked Wilson to act as secretary, ‘but by this time’, Wilson records, ‘I was fully involved in other work and had to decline.’56 If he had not been, the offer might have been resistible: for Beveridge was gaining a Whitehall reputation as a nuisance, and his inquiry was regarded as a form of exile. Later, Wilson must have kicked himself for missing the opportunity. In May 1942 Beveridge turned his undivided attention, not just to the problem of social insurance, but also to the much wider question of post-war social reform.57