There were other signs that Wilson’s ‘transition’ to politics was moving apace: and of his appreciation that, as head of a powerful department, politics was something he could not avoid. As the ministry responsible for rationing and controls, the Board of Trade inevitably aroused public resentment, which the President himself could not entirely escape. It was a question of style. The austerity of Cripps’s personality had been well suited to the privations he was required to impose. Wilson, ‘chubbily friendly and human, with a taste for double-breasted waistcoats’, did not carry the same conviction.60 At first, the press did not know how to place the unknown and extremely juvenile President, whose lectures on national morality had a whiff of sixth-form priggishness about them. In politics, it is often a seemingly innocent remark that crystallizes a sentiment which, hitherto, nobody has yet openly expressed: in Wilson’s case, the public sentiment was one of rebellious frustration.
Speaking in Birmingham in July 1948 about a decision he had recently made to take children’s shoes off the ration, Wilson declared that the Government had promised shoes for all. Looking back at his own schooldays (which, compared with those of most politicians, were not so far distant) he unwisely reminisced. He was reported as saying – there was to be controversy over what his words really were – that children in Northern cities had gone barefoot before the war, and were now well clad. One particular passage ricocheted for weeks, if not decades:
The school I went to in the North was a school where more than half the children in my class never had boots and shoes on their feet. I have been up there again, and the children of my old school are now running about with decent shoes because their fathers are in safe jobs and have got the social security which we promised our people.61
What came to be known as Wilson’s ‘barefoot’ speech gave him his first, sharp lesson on the need to avoid giving the press hostages to fortune. The President’s remark – apart from its political message – contained an implied boast about his own ascent from humble origins. What school was he referring to? Attention focused on the small establishment attended by Harold in Milnsbridge. One of the first to react to the contrast between pre-war destitution and post-war socialist plenty was the Mayor of Huddersfield, who emphatically denied that children at New Street Council School had, in his memory, ever gone barefoot.
Wilson had made a gaffe. In the circumstances, he would have been wise to have backed down, with an apology. He did not do so. Instead he gave the press rope, by embarking on a complicated amplification. He insisted that, whatever the facts about Milnsbridge, thousands of children before the war did lack shoes in major cities during the depression:
First, there were thousands of children who actually went barefoot during the war. I referred to this in terms of the slums of Liverpool and other big cities, which I can certainly confirm from my own experience. I did not say or suggest that that was at all the case in Huddersfield; my only reference to barefoot children was in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham … in fact I never suggested that my school friends had to go to school barefoot, as was the case in many more depressed areas. Such a suggestion would have been quite incorrect, I agree.62
His reference to ‘half the children in my class’ never having boots or shoes was not intended, he maintained, to imply that their feet were naked. What he had meant was that more than half of the children in his class were forced to wear clogs, rather than shoes, whereas since the war all parents could afford decent boots and shoes for their children. A reference to clogs in his speech, it was claimed, went unreported.63
Such an explanation merely kept the controversy alive, and annoyed more people. In Ormskirk, which included part of Liverpool, the MP’s remark about Liverpool produced a sharp denial from the Medical Officer of Health.64 Tory papers began to demand: ‘Where are the barefoot children?’ In self-defence, Wilson referred to ‘the “Boots for Bairns” funds run by many Northern newspapers in those days’,65 and quoted a letter he had received from a Birmingham man about the humiliations he had suffered because of ‘being called out of class and given a “free issue” ticket’.66 Naturally, the more tart the minister’s answers, the more delighted the press became. The issue was widened. Soon, and forever, Wilson became the Cabinet minister ‘not indissolubly wedded to the truth’.67 After the furore had died down, Wilson’s speech became part of the lore of Fleet Street, often to be resurrected in later years, and nearly always evoking a reaction. In 1956, the William Hickey column of the Daily Express could still touch a raw nerve by calling him ‘a connoisseur of fiction’ because of the ‘barefoot’ affair. ‘To put the record straight, I say, once and for all’, Wilson wrote in protest, ‘that I have never said, suggested or implied, much less “spread the tale”, that I ever went to school barefoot.’68 It made no difference. Even when he was Prime Minister, journalists raking through cuttings would teasingly repeat the story, or refer to it by innuendo. It was, of course, unfair. But it exposed a weakness that later became chronic: a tendency to overreact to media criticism, to take it personally, and to feel the need to argue down his critics in rational terms, which seldom worked. In all his dealings with a frequently vindictive press, he never learnt the art of riding with the punch.
Yet if Wilson made himself ridiculous over his ‘barefoot’ speech, he remained honourably – indeed almost miraculously – untouched by a scandal which broke that autumn, implicating a junior minister in his own department. The affair concerned the activities of a fantasist and confidence trickster called Sidney Stanley, who was accused of seeking to influence government departments by bribery, flattery, and the bestowal of gifts upon ministers and other prominent persons. If the ‘barefoot’ rumpus was really an attack on an officious young minister who symbolized the sanctimoniousness (as the public saw it) of the whole administration, the Stanley scandal caused excitement because of a public willingness to be fed stories about hypocrisy and corruption among those responsible for licences, permits, coupons and allocations. The main focus was the Board of Trade, and the accusations landed in the President’s lap.
It was a police investigation into the Board, at the request of the Lord Chancellor, which precipitated the scandal. Early in the inquiries, Wilson gave the police full scope to examine people and papers at the Board. He also made an immediate report to the Prime Minister, which induced Attlee to set up a tribunal under Mr Justice Lynskey to clear the air. It was the lurid, and often comic, public proceedings of this tribunal which resulted in the resignation of John Belcher, Parliamentary Secretary at the Board of Trade, after admitting that he had received small gifts. There was a witch-hunt aspect to the affair, and all those with the most trivial contact with the notorious (and ludicrous) Stanley, who specialized in buttering up the great, were briefly smeared: Dalton, Cripps and Bevin each suffered moments of indignity. Wilson, however – the Cabinet minister closest to the scandal departmentally, and Belcher’s immediate boss – had had no contact with Stanley, and his name, in consequence, was scarcely mentioned.69
As President of the Board of Trade, Wilson was conscious enough of what lay behind the Lynskey affair, as behind the ‘barefoot’ row – a growing public restlessness at the continued imposition of controls which had been accepted as necessary in war, but were regarded as irksome and irrelevant three years after the arrival of peace. The question the Government had to face – part economic, part ideological and political – was when, and where, controls might be reduced. Since Wilson’s department was responsible for many of them, it fell to him to decide on the selection of controls for abolition, and on the way any such process of de-control should be presented. It was a further sign of his growing political awareness that he turned his ‘bonfire of controls’ into a publicity stunt.
In one respect, Wilson had been particularly lucky in the timing of his appointment. He had arrived at the Board of Trade during an acute economic crisis, but just as the tide was turning. The months that followed were a period of rapid recovery, and the year 1948 was one of success, with a massive revival of industry, and an enormous improvement in exports, which reached