Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

Wilson who recalls him saying, many years later, that he had hoped Cripps would lay the ground for his own succession, and that ‘it was a blow when Hugh got it.’¹⁵ If that is correct, then – however disciplined Wilson might have been in other ways – he had allowed his appetite to get dangerously out of hand. For if Wilson had once seemed the obvious successor to Cripps, this had ceased to be the case. In May, Robert Hall of the Economic Section noted that Wilson’s stock was falling, and ‘he who was once thought to be the obvious next Chancellor, is not now so regarded.’¹⁶ Still, as Gaitskell triumphantly put it, ‘one does not look for reasons for jealousy.’¹⁷ Wilson could consider himself better qualified academically than Gaitskell, and was senior in rank to him in the Government. The Chancellorship had been his childhood fantasy. These were reasons enough.

      In January 1951, Aneurin Bevan was moved from Health to Labour. This was a sideways step, rather than a promotion. He was reluctant to make the change. A few months later, he told Dalton that Attlee had double-crossed him. ‘I refused for some time,’ he said, ‘I only agreed when he promised there should be no cut in the Social Services.’¹⁸ Two months later, Ernest Bevin was shifted out of the Foreign Office because of his deteriorating health, and Morrison became Foreign Secretary: an appointment which added to Bevan’s frustration.

      Yet there was more to Bevan’s gathering attack on the Government’s expenditure plans than bad temper. As we have seen, Bevan had backed his arguments with the threat of resignation long before any of the ministerial changes to which he objected had been made. Not only had he strongly disapproved of Cripps’s proposals for cuts in the social services following devaluation: in the winter of 1950–I he had opposed the drift into rearmament and into a greater defence commitment in the Far East. He had frequently argued that it was part of Soviet strategy to try to force Western countries to undermine their economies by spending money on arms, and so embitter their own peoples.¹⁹ By the time that Gaitskell announced his intention to levy charges on false teeth and optical services as part of a package of economies to finance the defence programme, it was well known that Bevan had deep objections to such a policy.²⁰

      It was less well known that the President of the Board of Trade shared them. Wilson had backed Bevan against Cripps in Cabinet over post-devaluation cuts. But he had taken no public stance, and he continued to be regarded as an orthodox member of the Cabinet.²¹ Indeed there is one piece of evidence which suggests that Wilson’s immediate reaction to Labour’s losses in the election was to blame the Left. Streat’s diary records a conversation just after the result, in which the President offered four explanations for the Government’s set-back. One was Bevan’s notorious ‘vermin’ speech (Bevan had caused an outcry by calling the Tory Party ‘lower than vermin’); the second was ‘a fear that the Labour Party would be driven by its left wing to nationalize for the sake of nationalization’. The others were housing and the cost of living, on which Wilson felt that the Conservatives had the best of the argument. Streat concluded, not unreasonably, that Wilson ‘must be taking up a position in the councils of the Labour Party in opposition to all that Nye Bevan stood for’.²²

      If, however, Wilson briefly toyed with the idea of attacking Bevan rather than supporting him, his position altered over the months that followed. By the beginning of 1951, he was firmly allied on spending issues with the newly appointed Minister of Labour. From the start of this controversy, the Chancellor doubted his sincerity.

      Early in 1951 Cabinet accepted a programme of rearmament. Wilson was one of the principal opponents. Gaitskell believed that those who argued against did so ‘partly just as an alibi in case the programme could not be fulfilled or exports dropped catastrophically’. He identified a cleavage in the Government between ministers who recognized the Communist menace, and ‘anti-Americans’ who did not, some of whom were playing to party opinion. He considered Wilson the worst offender:

      One cannot ignore the fact that in all this there are personal ambitions and rivalries at work. HW is clearly ganging up with the Minister of Labour, not that he cuts very much ice because one feels that he has no fundamental views of his own, but it is another voice. The others are very genuine.²³

      On 15 March the Chancellor advocated at the Health Service Cabinet Committee a limit to expenditure on health at the existing level of £382 million. He also recommended the imposition of a charge for false teeth and spectacles that was expected to raise £13 million (£23 million in a full year). At full Cabinet a week later, Bevan angrily denounced this proposal, declaring that if the Chancellor was not prepared to accept a tolerance of a few million in his budgeting, he should meet his difficulty by reducing defence expenditure. Wilson strongly backed him. ‘The President of the Board of Trade said that he found it difficult to take a final view of the Chancellor’s proposals without having full information about the Budget,’ the Cabinet minutes record. ‘He agreed with the Minister of Labour that a question of principle was involved and that a free National Health Service was a symbol of the Welfare State. If the proposal for charges was accepted, it would be widely said in the United States and elsewhere that this country had abandoned one of the main principles of the Welfare State. He thought there would be difficulty in spending the amounts allocated for defence in the next financial year because of raw material shortages and other shortages; and he would therefore have preferred to see a cut in defence expenditure rather than a scheme of charges under the National Health Service.’²⁴

      On 8 April the Minister of Labour returned to the attack. Reiterating his concern about the danger of rapid rearmament to the economies of Western democracies generally, Bevan threatened to resign if the charges were implemented. At a reconvened Cabinet meeting later the same day, Wilson told colleagues for the first time that if the Cabinet maintained their decision to introduce charges, ‘he would feel unable to share collective responsibility’ and would resign as well.²⁵

      Wilson later recalled trying to persuade Gaitskell, in a taxi, not to regard Cabinet as a battleground, but as a place for give-and-take.²⁶ This was Wilsonism. It was not Gaitskellism: the Chancellor did not yield. On 9 April Wilson joined Bevan in warning Cabinet of the danger of back-bench abstentions – which could force an election – if there was a ‘departure from the principles of a free Health Service’.²⁷ Next day Gaitskell announced the changes in his Budget speech. On 12 April, Herbert Morrison, chairing Cabinet in the absence of Attlee who was in hospital for a duodenal ulcer operation, ruled that the Health Services Bill could not be delayed. At Cabinet a week later, Bevan said that he could not vote for the Bill on the Second Reading. In hospital Attlee, kept informed of developments, described Bevan as a ‘green-eyed monster’, implying that jealousy was at the root of his rebellion.²⁸ On 22 April Bevan resigned. Wilson followed him out of the Government on 23 April, together with John Freeman, a junior minister at Supply.

      Why did Wilson resign? Public attention throughout the dispute focused on the Chancellor and on Aneurin Bevan. Politicians and journalists argued bitterly about the rights and wrongs of Bevan’s resignation. The political damage it caused to the Labour Party was attributed to him. Harold Wilson was barely noticed. Yet, of the two Cabinet resignations, Wilson’s remains the more intriguing.

      The 1931 crisis apart (when the whole Cabinet offered its resignation after failing to agree to the Chancellor’s proposal for cuts in benefits), resignations from Labour governments had been rare. Before 1951, a total of four ministers had resigned because they refused to continue to accept collective responsibility: but of these only one was a Cabinet minister (Sir Charles Trevelyan in 1931) and only one other was of any prominence (Sir Oswald Mosley in 1930). A parallel between Mosley’s resignation and that of Bevan (who had considered following Mosley into the New Party) did not escape the notice of Cabinet veterans in 1951: both departures involved more than a simple disagreement, and both were presented as broad, passionate and ideological appeals to the Labour Movement. Wilson’s resignation, on the other hand, had no parallel. Unlike any of the other resigning ministers, including Bevan, Wilson had hitherto appeared a conventional politician of prosaic opinions, who made reasoned calculations, who preferred compromise to confrontation, and whose judgement had so far not failed him. He was not unstable or impulsive. None of this proves that his resignation was cynical. But it does leave us with the question of what he hoped to achieve.