That is Wilson’s own view,46 which was widely held at the time. Attlee later wrote that in bringing Wilson into the Cabinet, he was ‘fortified by Cripps’s opinion’.47 Cripps was not the only Wilson advocate: in a letter sent while on holiday in Guernsey on 15 September, Morrison also put forward the young Overseas Trade Secretary’s name.48 But it was Cripps’s backing that mattered. Wilson’s appointment seems to have been part of a conciliatory package, designed to satisfy the new planning minister’s appetite for power over the economy by surrounding him with younger ministers known to him, whom he could manage. Following Cripps’s critical confrontation with Attlee, Whiteley (the Chief Whip) described what had transpired to Maurice Webb, a pro-Morrison MP, who told Gordon Walker, who reported back to Morrison that Cripps had ‘proposed that Harold Wilson should be at the B of T which would make it a subordinate department under C’.49
After the reshuffle had taken place, Robert Hall, director of the Economic Section of the Cabinet Secretairiat, interpreted the changes in the same way. ‘Cripps has now got three young men whom he seems to trust – in the Board of Trade [Wilson], Supply [George Strauss] and Fuel and Power [Gaitskell],’ Hall recorded. The appointments were to be seen in the context of Cripps’s elevation and tightening grip. ‘It won’t be for lack of power if Cripps fails,’ noted Hall, ‘– he has all the key posts.’50 Dalton must also have been consulted, and seems to have made no objection. Indeed – though one might have expected Wilson’s appointment to cause jealousy because of his youth – it was noncontroversial, and generally approved. Gaitskell, pleased about his own promotion, was happy about this one too. ‘HW was obviously Cripps’s nominee – and a very good one too,’ he noted.51
When the half-expected call came, Wilson was five days into a family holiday in Cornwall, with Gladys, Robin and his parents. He had been spending much of his time in a small boat, setting lobster pots.52 Attlee summoned him to Chequers where, after luncheon, the Prime Minister told him of the Cabinet changes. Cripps was to be economic overlord. Wilson was to succeed him as President of the Board of Trade, the appointment to be made public on 29 September. At the same time, it was impressed on Wilson that he would not inherit Cripps’s former status in the Government. ‘Cripps wants to run the thing with [Wilson], [Strauss]’ (the Minister of Supply), ‘and myself as his lieutenants,’ Gaitskell wrote a couple of weeks later. ‘He made this quite plain to us. We are to have sort of inner discussions on the economic front.’53 Unlike the other lieutenants, however, Wilson was in the Cabinet. At thirty-one, he was the youngest Cabinet minister since Lord Henry Petty in 1806, and the youngest member of the existing Cabinet by a decade.54
It was unlikely, his friends agreed, to stop there. Arthur Brown, who had become an economics professor in the North, wrote a cheerful letter, comparing Wilson to Gladstone, early in the former Prime Minister’s career. G. D. H. Cole congratulated himself on having talent-spotted Wilson in his infancy, and asked if he had yet decided when he was going to become Prime Minister. Even Beveridge managed to be effusive – though, in reply, the young President of the Board of Trade could not bring himself to address his former employer by his Christian name. Wilson also received a letter from Helen Whelan, his former class mistress at Royds Hall, reminding him gently of his prediction in an essay written in 1928 that he would be Chancellor of the Exchequer a quarter of a century later. Wilson replied that he still had six years to go.55
The reaction of the press was generally one of puzzlement although, because there was a Labour government, journalists had become used to odd-looking appointments. Despite the occasional plaudit, the lobby had paid little attention to Harold’s progress on the inside track. ‘Mr Wilson is not a brilliant speaker and his House of Commons performances are no more than adequate,’ judged the Manchester Guardian. ‘It is for his departmental work that he receives promotion.’56 The Observer (profiling him a few months later) agreed that he was ‘not a natural orator’, but predicted a great career for him as one of the future leaders of the Party. It counted it an advantage, as far as the approval of rank-and-file trade-unionist MPs were concerned, that – though brainy – he was not an intellectual in the normal sense, and ‘has none of [John] Strachey’s lucid grasp of Socialist theory’. There was a debate about his accent. The Observer considered his speech to be hybrid, its Northern origins flattened but not hidden by his education. ‘Through the Oxford voice’, it noted, ‘there still was to be heard, faint but unmistakable, the trace of a Yorkshire accent, broadening the vowels, thickening the words.’57 The Manchester Guardian, on the other hand, considered that ‘Oxford has affected neither his manner nor his speech.’58 Both suggested that it helped in Labour terms that, for all his brainpower, he came from an ordinary, unpretentious background.
Other papers stressed his exceptional academic qualifications. Yet what was really remarkable about Wilson was his invisibility. He had risen far and fast without any kind of Labour Party following, within Parliament or outside it. He simply got on with the job, much as he had done in the civil service. He did not have the time, or yet the inclination, to be companionable, and there were many MPs and journalists who were unaware of his existence. According to the Observer, when he entered the House, he had seemed ‘modest to the point of apparent timidity’ (which is not exactly how Oxford or Whitehall contemporaries saw him) and it was ‘difficult to identify him with any of the younger men’.59 He did not cultivate the newspapers. Trevor (now Sir Trevor) Lloyd-Hughes, a Liverpool Daily News reporter who became Wilson’s friend and later his press secretary, recalls him as ‘very shy and remote in those days. He seemed to hide behind pillars in the House and, unlike most politicians, he did not relish talking to lobby correspondents. He seemed to glide around, and did not want to meet people. He was not very likeable and made terribly boring speeches.’60
The shrewdest assessment of the new Cabinet minister was given by Raymond Streat, the Cotton Board Chairman, ten days after Wilson’s appointment. Streat saw him as essentially nonpolitical, in contrast to his predecessor, who would remain in overall charge:
He is quick on the uptake – too well versed in economical and civil service work to rant or rave like a soap-box journalist … Wilson feels no duty to his party to take a political line. So he lets his mind work on lines that come naturally to a young economist with civil service experience. We shall get on easily with him. He is less aloof than the man of austere principles, fanaticism and Christian ideals with whom we had dealt since 1945 – but Stafford will be in effect Wilson’s boss.61
It was as if, because of a difficulty over faulty wiring, the Board of Directors had decided to co-opt the company electrician. He had been brought in to provide technical expertise which the Government needed in order to sort out its economic problems at an exceptionally difficult time.
These problems took a new political turn six weeks after Wilson’s appointment, when Dalton resigned abruptly as Chancellor. Cripps replaced him, but without relinquishing his own recently acquired powers as Minister of Economic Affairs. The brief division between financial and economic governmental powers ended, with a sigh of relief in the Treasury: it was not to be restored until Wilson himself became Prime Minister in 1964. The immediate effect was to make Cripps the third most powerful member of the Government, after Attlee and Bevin. It also gave the new Chancellor less time for direct supervision of the ‘lieutenant’ ministers appointed earlier in the autumn. Wilson had been put at the head of a powerful ministry, which was intended to become the satrap of the even more powerful Ministry of Economic Affairs. Instead, he found himself left to his own devices much more than he had expected.
After Cripps became Chancellor, there was a sense of teamwork on the economic front, with ministers working