After the end of the war in Europe, the Coalition broke up and a Caretaker Conservative Government took over, pending the general election which was held on 5 July. Shortly after the dissolution in June, Harold’s old friend Robert Steel, now also a don, met him by chance in Barclays Bank in Oxford High Street, opposite St Mary’s Church. ‘I’m standing in the election,’ said Harold. ‘Oh, really,’ replied Steel. ‘For which party?’ Wilson told him that he was putting up for Labour, against Commander King-Hall. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Steel cheerfully, meaning that he thought he wouldn’t.38 This was the general view, though by now Harold knew he had a decent chance. Gladys did not expect him to win, and had not fully considered the implications if he did so. Their present life suited her, and she saw no reason, for the moment, why it should not continue.39
Nationally, the 1945 campaign was quiet. In Ormskirk it was scarcely noticed by the disparate inhabitants. The main excitement was on the Conservative side. Tory supporters, ignoring the Labour candidate, directed personal abuse at Commander King-Hall, whom they regarded as a deserter. The Commander, who stood as a so-called Independent National, later complained bitterly in his News-Letter about the behaviour of ‘a small section of the Conservative Party’ in Ormskirk, and its ‘meaningless claptrap’.40 Unfortunately for King-Hall, the ‘small section’ included the Prime Minister, who did his own bit to wreck the Commander’s chances by sending a telegram to the official Tory candidate, A. C. Greg, saying that he did not wish to see Commander King-Hall in the new Parliament. The Manchester Guardian rushed to King-Hall’s defence. ‘None has worked harder to “put across” the coalition idea,’ it declared.41
Wilson was delighted at the family feud among his opponents. Travelling with his father and a cheerfully chaotic band of activists, he was the least well known of the three candidates, as well as the dullest speaker. He claimed, or let others claim on his behalf, a working-class background.42 Mainly, he stuck to official briefs. After the result was known, a chastened King-Hall described Wilson as ‘a highly intelligent young man, who made all the stereotyped party promises’.43
A series of Gallup polls, published in the News Chronicle, pointed to a Labour victory. Scarcely anybody believed them. Later, in a study of the election, Wilson’s old politics tutor, R. B. McCallum, called the 1945 election ‘the Waterloo of the political meteorologists’44 – that is, of old-style commentators who assessed public opinion by wetting a finger. Wilson, the statistician, may have had a better sense than most of what was going to happen. If so, he did not let on. ‘We certainly weren’t sure about the result,’ says Mary.45 After the poll and before the count (delayed for the collection of the overseas services vote) Hugh Dalton made a private guess that Labour would gain eighty seats, and cut the Tory overall majority to a hundred. Similar predictions were made by politicians and observers of all persuasions. Dalton noted, however, that the large number of triangular contests, where previously there had been straight fights, would help Labour.46
In the intervening weeks, Harold returned to Oxford, where Gladys looked forward to a restoration of the pre-election status quo. In late July, Herbert and Harold went up to Ormskirk for the count. At first there was some doubt. The Tory candidate had polled so strongly that if the Conservatives had united behind King-Hall, Wilson would probably have been defeated. Soon, however, it became clear that a huge national swing of opinion to Labour, combined with an emphatic reassertion of the two-party system, had swept the Independent Commander into political oblivion. Wilson won by a large margin, though with a minority of votes cast: 30,126, compared with 23,104 for Greg and 11,848 for King-Hall.
Gaining a seat in the House of Commons is the most important single event in any British political career. Up to this point, all is fantasy and, from the point of view of nonpolitical observers, vanity. After it, anything is possible. For Parliament is a tiny talent pool, without much talent in it, from which governments of several score ministers are drawn. Anybody representing a major party who enters the Commons, with even a modest amount of vigour and judgement, is likely to achieve prominence sooner or later, if he or she so chooses. Harold Wilson did so choose.
He was also more than modestly equipped. Indeed, alongside the amateurs, dilettantes and semi-retired union officials who made up the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he was unusually well qualified. Wartime Whitehall had provided an excellent training ground. As a civil servant, he had gained a reputation for his prodigious energy, his appetite for detail, and for a mental agility which some saw as superficial but which was in any case impressive. In a party where formal qualifications were rare but prized, he was one of only forty-six MPs with an Oxford or Cambridge degree. Among this élite group, he had the unusual asset of a regional, non-public school background. He did not – unlike some products of the pre-war universities – carry with him the burden of a Communist or fellow-travelling past. He was also exceptionally young. The 1945 PLP was largely composed of novices: two-thirds of its 393 members were new to the House. Most, however, were already middle-aged. Wilson was one of only half a dozen not yet thirty.
Wilson’s youth and potential were quickly noticed by the press, eager for anything to say about the largely unknown batch of first-time entrants. Echoing newspaper comments before the election, the News Chronicle called him ‘outstanding among the really “new” men on the Labour benches’ and ‘a brilliant young civil servant … regarded by the Whitehall high-ups as one of the great discoveries of the war’.1 He was also noticed by the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. On 4 August, in a second batch of appointments which followed the premier’s return from Potsdam, Attlee made him Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Works, George Tomlinson. Wilson became the first new MP to be given a job and one of only three new Members to be brought into the Government at the time of its formation.
Why was he singled out? Wilson believed that the Prime Minister’s sentimentality towards University College had something to do with it.2 Attlee gave credence to this view when he told an interviewer in 1964: ‘I had heard of him as a don at my old College and knew of the work he had done for the Party. I therefore put him into the Government at once…’3 Since Wilson had done next to no work for the Party, the college link should presumably be reckoned important. But there were other factors. Wilson was known to Tomlinson, his new boss, who was MP for a neighbouring seat and may have asked for him. He also had an even more powerful patron, later disillusioned, in Hugh Dalton, the newly-appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer.4
Dalton had encountered Wilson as an official in the Mines Department in 1942, and met him again at the 1945 Party Conference, before the election. There was also another meeting, just after the result, at which Wilson acquitted himself well. A few days before the Prime Minister’s offer, Dalton held a private party (later famous among its participants as the ‘Young Victors’ Dinner’) at St Ermin’s Hotel off Victoria Street. To this the Chancellor invited a group of new MPs who had caught his eye. Guests included George Brown, Richard Crossman, Evan Durbin, John Freeman, Hugh Gaitskell, Christopher Mayhew, Harold Wilson, Woodrow Wyatt and Kenneth Younger.5 The majority were public school men, and several had been Oxford-trained dons. Only Brown was not either a recently demobbed officer or a recently discharged temporary civil servant. Most of those present later made their mark, in politics, journalism and diplomacy.
The dinner concluded with a seminar. Dalton asked each in turn to give his views, student-fashion, on the problems facing the Government and the policies which should be pursued. When Wilson was asked to speak, he declared, according to a note made by Gaitskell:
there should be publicity as soon as possible to show that the major difficulties with which we were faced: coal and houses, in particular, were not due to the Labour Government. If possible this publicity should be combined with the announcement