Yet to friends, Harold seemed to be hugely enjoying himself. Arthur Brown remembers meeting him in 1946 or early 1947, after a long gap, and finding him as cheerfully bumptious as ever. Brown did not feel that politics had changed him much. ‘He was still a sort of eager beaver who told you all about what he was beavering away at,’ says Brown. ‘He did not emanate any burning passion. What he communicated was that he was very much wrapped up in how to be a junior minister, how to run a committee system and how to get things sorted out. He was mainly interested in the machinery of government – he told me he had set up a bottom-kicking committee. I was reminded that he was very clever and was happy to let you know it.’23
Wilson made a good impression on senior ministers. In May 1946, nine months after his original appointment, George Tomlinson told him that he was about to be moved sideways to the junior post at Fuel and Power, a department in which he had a special interest. Coal production was a mounting worry (within a few months it was to be a desperate crisis) and it was felt that the minister in charge, Shinwell, needed expert help. Wilson was delighted, and cancelled an official trip in anticipation of a call from Downing Street. However, the expected change did not happen, and Gaitskell (still on the back benches) got the Fuel job instead, apparently because Shinwell put his foot down. He had wanted Wilson as his PPS, but, according to Gaitskell, ‘he did not want anyone who was supposed to know about Mining to be his Parliamentary Secretary!’24
Wilson also came quite close to getting a job at the Treasury. Hugh Dalton decided after a year as Chancellor of the Exchequer that he needed an extra minister under him, and sent a personal note to Attlee to this effect. ‘On need for another person/s at Treasury’, he wrote, ‘I would like Harold Wilson to come in as Financial Secretary. He is very able, and has learnt a lot at the Ministry of Works. He does not yet give a very confident impression in the House. But I am confident that I would soon make him confident.’25 A week later Dalton told Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, of his proposal ‘that I should be given a third minister at the Treasury, preferably Harold Wilson’. Bevin’s reply suggests a high opinion of the young minister’s abilities. The Foreign Secretary expressed a hope that the Chancellor ‘wouldn’t anyhow take Harold Wilson from Works, unless George Tomlinson could have a good man in exchange’.26 The extra post was not created, however, until after Dalton’s departure from the Exchequer, when the Treasury’s powers were widened.
Attlee had other plans for Wilson. A few weeks later, the young minister was despatched to Washington to lead the British team at a Commission of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The Commission began work in October 1946, and adjourned at the end of the year. Wilson found it a valuable training session, introducing him to Third World development problems, in which he later took a close interest when in Opposition. The trip also had the incidental, but important, effect of bringing him into close touch with Tom Meyer, head of Britain’s biggest timber importing firm, Montague L. Meyer Ltd. Wilson was keen to increase imports of softwoods for the building programme. Meyer, who was in North America at the same time, helped to provide useful contacts.27
The Commission’s report was presented to Parliament in January 1947. Early in February, Wilson opened the Commons debate on the FAO rather more successfully than he had made his maiden speech. The Daily Herald, Labour’s tame newspaper, called him ‘probably the best ministerial authority on this subject’ (in fact he was the only one), and tipped him for high office.28 A month later came his first promotion. In a reshuffle of junior ministers at the beginning of March, little noticed because of the gathering fuel crisis set off by an exceptionally bad winter, Wilson was made Secretary of Overseas Trade, under Sir Stafford Cripps as President of the Board of Trade, replacing Marquand, who became Paymaster-General.
Although still a junior post, Wilson’s new job was a vital one in the economic conditions of the late 1940s. The Overseas Department, one of the four principal sections of the Board of Trade, was concerned with export promotion and licences, trade treaties and agreements, and commercial relations with foreign countries.29 Wilson’s job involved some routine tasks, like sorting out the request from the MP for Dudley, Colonel George Wigg, for a licence to import sea lions from the United States for Dudley Zoo (one of the beasts was named ‘Harold’ by its grateful keepers).30 But its most important feature was the wide responsibility it gave him in the key area of exports. It offered travel, promising the publicity which always attended foreign visits. And it made Wilson deputy to Cripps, the most dazzling star in Labour’s firmament, and currently in the ascendant.
Cripps was the minister most admired by Labour’s intellectuals. Across the political spectrum, he was regarded as alien, mysterious, almost saintly. In the 1930s, Cripps had been the ‘Red Squire’. A rich, successful barrister, he had originally been co-opted into Parliament by Ramsay MacDonald as a law officer. Following the 1931 crisis, he underwent a conversion to left-wing socialism, and led a series of rebellions against the Party hierarchy which culminated in his expulsion, with Bevan, in 1939. Unlike Bevan, Cripps did not come back to the Labour Party until shortly before the break-up of the Coalition in 1945, having spent the war as an Independent. Yet he had lost none of his standing in the House or the country and – having accepted a succession of key ministerial and diplomatic posts from the Prime Minister – he even appeared at one time as a ‘Churchill of the Left’ who might some day become a challenger for the highest office. By 1945, practical experience had mellowed some of his political beliefs and reduced the number of bees in his bonnet (as Gaitskell called them), but it had not softened his arrogance, or reduced his determination to pursue whatever course he deemed to be right, come what may.
Wilson had solid experience of serving a self-punishing egomaniac much older than himself. To Beveridge-like asceticism and masochistic work habits, however, the President of the Board of Trade added a higher, more visionary idealism, and an ability to command the loyalty of subordinates. Officials appreciated his clarity. So did Wilson. ‘Cripps’s aloof command of detail, his scientific education and knowledge, his administrative genius, his belief in bureaucracy, his patriotism, his Christianity and even his vegetarianism’, as one of Wilson’s earlier biographers puts it, ‘combined to make what Harold Wilson regarded as the perfect politician.’31 Far more than Bevan, whom Wilson always admired but who had many weaknesses, Cripps became Wilson’s political hero, and the closest to a model of how he would like to see himself, and be seen.
At first, Wilson had little to do with his new chief. His immediate assignment was to go to Moscow, where Ernest Bevin was seeking an agreement on Germany. Having just suffered a bout of heart trouble, the Foreign Secretary was considered to be in need of assistance. Wilson was instructed to join Bevin in Russia and take over from him when he left, negotiating on trade.
Accompanied by his personal assistant, Eileen Lane, and a small group of civil servants, Wilson arrived in Moscow on 18 April. Bevin departed shortly afterwards, leaving the young minister – a politician for less than two years – to negotiate on his own. The Soviet trade negotiator was Anastas Mikoyan, an Armenian Houdini who survived innumerable purges and eventually became President of the USSR. Wilson seemed to establish a rapport with Mikoyan. This may simply have been because Mikoyan was adept at handling impressionable young foreigners. Transcripts of their discussions in the Public Record Office, however, show that Wilson had a remarkable command of the details of Anglo–Soviet trade, as well as an impressive bargaining toughness.32
There was one curious, and still mystifying, aspect of the talks. It has since emerged that Wilson suceeded in offending, and even in puzzling, some officials and senior members of the military establishment because of his alleged readiness, during these and later talks, to supply the Russians with jet engines and aircraft that were considered security-sensitive. The mystery, however, concerns the attitude of Wilson’s critics, rather than the minister’s behaviour. The public records do not yield every secret (much of the material remains classified), but they contain enough to show that Wilson, new to his job, referred every major decision back to London, and simply obeyed instructions. At issue were thirty-five Derwent and Nene engines