Cripps was now at his zenith, but he was not – despite his own, and the Treasury’s, intentions – an absolute monarch. The 1947 Economic Survey, published early in the year, had anticipated a switch from a ‘system of co-ordination’ to ‘direct economic administration by one leading Minister’.3 The switch did not happen. The Treasury provided chairmen of the Import Programmes Committee, the Overseas Negotiations Committee and the Committee dealing with the Marshall Plan and proposals for West European economic integration. There was also the influential new planning staff, now part of the Treasury, and the Economic Section of the Cabinet Secretariat. According to Cairncross, control of these bodies enabled Cripps to ‘weld together economics and finance and at the same time keep an eye, as a former President of the Board of Trade, on industrial and commercial policy’.4 Yet, even with Cripps as Chancellor, ‘direct economic administration’ was never imposed. According to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor’s position remained one of co-ordination, and there was ‘no question of interfering with the departmental responsibilities of Ministers’. Though the combination of the MEA and the Treasury under one head strengthened planning, the Chancellor remained no more than primus inter pares?5 Thus the new President of the Board of Trade, despite Cripps’s moral power and standing within the Government, kept a degree of independence.
Wilson’s role in the post-1947 arrangements was as a link between high politics and the world of technical economics. His promotion coincided with a revival of the influence of professional economists, heralded by the setting up of Sir Edwin Plowden’s Planning Group and a strengthening of the Economic Section.6 Part of Wilson’s value to his colleagues was as a minister – the only one in the Cabinet until Dalton’s return in 1948 – who was able to talk to the economists in their own language. This meant that he could command attention. Yet there was also a down side to being a minister who was an economist. While laymen were easily impressed by any competent handler of the alchemy, the Government’s own economists were harder to manage. They tended to have high – sometimes unrealistically high – expectations of members of their own fraternity who, in the words of Lionel Robbins (applied not to Wilson but to Dalton) had succumbed to an ‘infatuation with politics’.7 They wished to be deferred to by a fellow economist who understood what they were saying, and were annoyed when they were not. Such an attitude was also tinged with jealousy towards a colleague who had the good fortune not merely to advise, but to make decisions.
That Wilson had himself been a member of the Economic Section added to the irritation he easily aroused. The feeling that a junior economist, even one who happened to be in the Cabinet, ought to defer to his seniors, helped to turn Robert Hall, director of the Economic Section, against him. It greatly annoyed Hall that Wilson seldom, if ever, consulted him.8 There were also other reasons why the economists in Whitehall became lukewarm, if not actively hostile. In particular, there was a developing suspicion (A. J. Ryan had had it at the Mines Department) that, in making decisions, Wilson was often more concerned with presentation than with substance. ‘The feeling was that Harold tried to do the clever thing,’ says Cairncross, once Wilson’s colleague in the wartime Economic Section, who had become an economic adviser to the Board. ‘He pretended his visits to Moscow were very important for British trade. In fact, they weren’t. He got the reputation at the Board of Trade for being more clever than statesmanlike.’9
From the first, Wilson was better regarded by his own civil servants than by economists. In some ways, Wilson was a familiar type. The Board’s permanent staff had become used to brilliant young men from the universities, such as Oliver Franks, Richard Pares, Richard Kahn, Douglas Jay, Hugh Gaitskell and W. B. Reddaway, who had served the department as temporaries and left their creative mark. Wilson, who had himself briefly served in one of the department’s outposts and knew the civil service ropes, seemed to belong to the same breed. Naturally friendly and approachable, he was able to establish a relationship of easy formality with his advisers. There was admiration for his ability to understand complex problems. ‘You felt he could do your job,’ says one former official.10 He had a sparring relationship with his heavyweight permanent secretary, Sir John Henry Woods, and a good intellectual rapport with the deputy secretary, Sir James Helmore.
Wilson was lucky in his principal private secretary Max (now Sir Max) Brown, a New Zealander and former wartime temporary with a similar professional background, as an economist and statistician. Brown had previously worked in Cripps’s private office. He was struck by the contrast. ‘Cripps tried to be human, but couldn’t quite manage it,’ Brown recalls. ‘He was kindly, felt his politics deeply, but wasn’t too involved in departmental affairs. Compared with Wilson he was a much more formidable character and much more committed. By contrast, Wilson was almost one of the lads. He was very quick, with a photographic memory.’ Brown saw Wilson as a ‘North of England Radical’, whose commitment to the Labour Party did not seem to go far beneath the surface. Wilson’s own instincts, as befitted a disciple of Lord Beveridge, were ‘pressing him towards welfare state reforms’. Unlike the economists, he did not think of Wilson as excessively political. On the contrary, he saw him almost as a crypto-official, who ‘had more of a civil service than a political background and, in these early days, he was happiest with civil servants’.
What most struck Brown, at the time, was his master’s acuteness rather than his depth. ‘Some people think fast and stop,’ he says. ‘Others think three or four times, but not fast. Wilson belonged in the first category.’11 Raymond Streat felt much the same. ‘Harold Wilson reacts too quickly, too smoothly and readily for an impression of particular purpose to emerge,’ he noted just before Cripps became Chancellor. The young President seemed to concentrate more on the trees than the wood. ‘He is nice enough as an open-hearted sort of young man and a fond father of a young family,’ wrote the Cotton Board Chairman, ‘to be all right if he does not entirely forget big things by allowing himself to be preoccupied with a million small ones.’12
This was not quite fair. For ‘a million small things’ was precisely the business of the post-war Board of Trade, an enormous, sprawling giant, with disparate powers and little uniting them. By 1949, the Board had a total staff of 12,694 organized in nineteen major departments, requiring two Parliamentary Secretaries beneath the President, and twelve regional offices, to help carry out its wide-ranging tasks.13 It was, as one writer later pointed out, both a paradise and a deathtrap – giving limitless scope for Wilson’s administrative flair, but distracting him, because there was so much to be done, from the wider implications.14 Yet it was better to be master of detail than to be swamped by it, and Wilson gained a reputation on both sides of the House for his ability to find his way through the labyrinth. One Tory MP who had been in the Commons since 1921 paid Wilson the compliment that ‘he had never known a President of the Board of Trade with a greater technical grasp of his subject, more verve, more foresight and greater courage.’15
Wilson left the running of the department, and liaison with the Treasury, to Sir John Henry Woods. He himself took a close interest in regional policy (which meant implementing parts of Dalton’s 1945 Distribution of Industry Act); in the creation of a new Monopolies Commission; and in high-profile overseas work, including necessary adaptations to international trade brought about by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The aspect of his work which required his immediate attention, however – and the one which aroused his greatest interest – was the continuing prospect of a trade agreement with the Soviet Union.
By late 1947, relations between the USSR and the West had deteriorated