He repeated the point, defiantly, at a noisy meeting in Bromley a month later, after the Government’s package of cuts had been announced. His attacks on Winston Churchill for ‘lies and misrepresentations’ and for ‘making party political capital out of the nation’s problems’ brought howls of protest, enabling him to respond with deliberately provocative sarcasm: ‘it is surprising to see such touching affection for the Leader,’ he said – adding, to the delight of his own side: ‘This “leader” concept, this “führer” principle, is something which is getting dangerous at the present time.’ To a chorus of Tory shouts, he declared: ‘Our policy is one of production, exports and controls … It may well be that the election when it comes will be fought on this business of controls.’60
The election date was announced in January. Wilson had a busy campaign. His Cabinet post made him a national figure, widely in demand. Despite his developing line in repartee, his speeches were safe and moderate. He spoke of ‘a battle for freedom … in the full sense, economic, moral, and social as well as political freedom’,61 yet claimed: ‘I have never read Karl Marx.’62 But he also liked to boast about his visits to Russia and his understanding of the Soviet system, ‘I have been on the road to Moscow three times’, he told a red-baiting heckler in Rhyl, ‘to get trade agreement for Britain with the Soviet Union. Anyone who knows anything about Communism knows that the best bulwark against Communism in this country is social democracy.’63 Despite the marginality of his new constituency, he embarked on a whistle-stop tour of North Wales and the North-West.
Last minute predictions put the two major parties almost equal.64 Fortunately for Wilson, Labour ended up 2.7 per cent ahead in the actual voting, with an overall Commons majority of 7 seats. His own result was a microcosm of the country as a whole: 21,536 compared with 20,702 for his Conservative opponent, with 1,905 for a Liberal and 387 for a Communist. The margin of victory, 834 on a minority vote, was one of the smallest in the country, and made him vulnerable to the slightest further swing to the Conservatives.
Afterwards, Wilson told Dalton that ‘RCs swung violently against him in the last three days’,65 and he told Raymond Streat that the Tory candidate had played the Catholic card against the Labour Government on the educational issue. When the ballot boxes from Catholic wards were emptied and the votes unfolded, he saw at once that these areas had gone solidly Tory, ‘It could only have been because of the recommendations of the Church.’66 There was no doubt, however, that he had received a nasty fright. Other 1945 new boys with bright futures, also ministers – David Hardman, Christopher Mayhew – lost their seats: though some got back in, their political careers never recovered. For the second time, Wilson had been very lucky. He could not be confident that his luck would hold. Throughout the precarious new Parliament, his behaviour was conditioned partly by the knowledge that at any moment the adventure on which he had embarked in 1945 might be abruptly ended.
*
If Wilson’s political career had finished once and for all in 1950, it would have been a noteworthy one. His record was unique. Under thirty-four when Attlee went to the country, he was the only member of the very large ‘class of 1945’ to attain Cabinet rank during the Parliament. Enemies later dismissed him in this period as Cripps’s errand boy, a grey and anonymous technician of no political weight: yet, at an age when none of the Big Five – Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Cripps and Dalton – were even MPs, Wilson had become one of the Cabinet’s mainstays, his bank-manager appearance a familiar image on the newsreels of austerity Britain. Not only did he run a major economic department while still in his early thirties, at a time when economic departments were more powerful than they had ever been before, he had played an important part in the historic decision over devaluation, and continued to be seen as a possible successor at the Treasury. He was not glamorous, but glamour was not the style of the 1940s. He stood for unpretentious youth, well-trained efficiency and modernity in an elderly and, in some ways, old-fashioned administration.
The experience had its effects. Before, he had been friendly and approachable, yet also self-contained; now he was deprived of the possibility of equal relations with his contemporaries. Feed a grub with royal jelly, Churchill reputedly said of the unassuming Attlee, and you turn it into a queen bee. Yet Attlee had grown to political maturity on comparatively humble fare. Wilson’s rapid promotion, and high responsibilities at an early age, had given him an understanding of government that served him well during later years of Opposition. But it also isolated him. He became distanced, not only from working-class back-benchers whose routines he had never shared, but also from other well-educated MPs, some of whom were rising in the Government. To the public school socialists (many of whom later coalesced into the so-called ‘Hampstead Set’), Wilson seemed a dull fellow, narrow and socially inept for all his cleverness and bonhomie. It began to be a convention in these circles to regard him with a subtly snobbish contempt, masking jealousy.
Pomposity was one accusation levelled against him. Excessive self-regard was another. Robert Hall found him ‘very conceited’,67 Streat thought him egotistical. ‘Wilson’s chief interest is Wilson,’ the Cotton Board Chairman noted just after the election.68 Since a young Cabinet minister from a humble background might be forgiven for having a high opinion of himself, the real objection was that he was bad at hiding it. This was Gaitskell’s complaint, as the two ascending politicians began to take different routes. If there was a fault, however, it may not just have lain with Wilson. At the beginning of 1950 Gaitskell composed a character analysis of his rival which is as interesting for what it says about Gaitskell’s own circle as about Wilson and how he was perceived:
It is a pity that Harold Wilson, whom I regard as extremely able and for that reason alone most valuable to the Government, should offend so many people by being so swollen headed. It may, of course, be that I am regarded as a rival of his and therefore my friends are always talking to me in deprecating terms about him. But I do not think this is altogether the case. What is depressing really is not so much that he is swollen headed but that he is such a very impersonal person. You don’t feel that really you could ever be close friends with him, or in fact that he would ever have any close friends … How different he is, for example, from John Strachey with whom one may often disagree but who is a real person with interests and feelings rising above politics, and with whom one can have that emotional and intellectual intercourse which is really the stuff of friendship though it does not always go with friendship. And, of course, for me there are others of whom that is much truer, such as Douglas, Frank Pakenham, and even to some extent Nye Bevan.
Gaitskell was not alone in finding Wilson, then and later, ‘a very impersonal person’. Yet a notable aspect of this passage is that apart from Bevan (whose name is added as an afterthought and with whom Gaitskell was about to pick an Homeric quarrel) all those ‘with whom one can have that emotional and intellectual intercourse which is really the stuff of friendship’ were educated at Winchester or Eton.
We should not over-simplify the barrier that divided Wilson from such people, whose intellectual leadership counted for so much in the Labour Party. A Winchester education did not necessarily unite Labour politicians: it could, as later between Crossman and the Gait-skellites, push them apart. Neither did it create an unbridgeable gulf: Gaitskell was to have relationships of almost equal intimacy with disciples from less exalted academies. Nevertheless, to an alumnus of a provincial grammar school who had every reason to be proud of his success, the Bloomsburian exclusiveness of Gaitskell and his circle must have been extremely trying. Between Gaitskell and Jay during the devaluation debate, moreover, there seemed to exist an unspoken bond – social and psychological – that kept Wilson at arm’s length.
Recording how he reached his decision in July 1949 that a change in the parity was necessary, Gaitskell wrote that, having revised his own views, I found that at just the same time, Douglas Jay, my closest friend in the Government and Economic Secretary to the Treasury, had changed his too.’69 It is possible to imagine that, for all his outward confidence and conceit, Wilson did not find relations with these two powerful intellectuals easy: and was deeply conscious that,