Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

was wrong. ‘The Budget of April 1951 may fairly be considered a political and economic disaster, for all the immense talent of its author,’ the historian Kenneth O. Morgan has argued persuasively. It was particularly insensitive for a fledgling Chancellor, facing opposition from a senior colleague, to refuse to treat health service expenditure any differently from food subsidies.²⁹ Denis Healey, who had little time for Wilson then or later, believes that Wilson had the better case on defence spending.³⁰ Much of the enormous rearmament programme was never carried out, and the subsequent Conservative Government implicitly acknowledged Gaitskell’s error, Churchill admitting as Prime Minister that Bevan ‘happened to be right’.³¹ Wilson himself always insisted that he resigned on the rearmament programme, in the context of an over-stretched economy, not on the health charges (though the Cabinet minutes show that he stressed both). There was also a departmental concern: as President of the Board of Trade, Wilson had been made aware that military demands, at home and in the United States, were exacerbating shortages of sulphur and essential metals, such as nickel, tungsten and molybdenum.³² But to fight was one thing, to go another. Normally, as one former colleague puts it, ‘a minister who disagrees makes his views known, but stays.’³³ What makes Wilson’s decision so odd is not the logic, in terms of policy, but the risks he was willing to take, and the damage he was prepared to inflict in order to defend it.

      Behind the issue itself lay personalities and wider politics. In his memoirs, Wilson blames Gaitskell’s inflexibility on the one hand and strategic cunning on the other. According to Wilson, the Chancellor treated opponents as heretics, trouble-makers or fools, while at the same time nurturing an ambition eventually to seize the Leadership for himself, it was not long before that ambition took the form of determination to out-manoeuvre, indeed humiliate Aneurin Bevan,’ claims Wilson, ‘If he could defeat Nye in open conflict, he could be in a strong position to oust Morrison as the heir apparent to Clement Attlee.’³⁴ This became the accepted view among Bevan’s friends, who saw the whole crisis as (in Peter Shore’s words) ‘an attempt to ease Bevan out, by creating a situation he could not accept’.³⁵

      Few of Bevan’s friends, however, believed that Wilson’s resignation was motivated solely by a desire to prevent this happening, or by the issues under dispute. They supported and applauded the gesture, while assuming that the underlying motive was self-interest. Normally a resignation jeopardizes, if it does not terminate, a political career. That is the puzzle. ‘He may have thought Nye represented the beating heart of the Labour Party’, suggests Tony Benn, elected in 1950, ‘that the Party under Herbert Morrison had lost its vision and would move to the Right.’³⁶ Michael Foot believes that Wilson was ‘naturally attracted to Nye’.³⁷ Most others – on Left and Right – take for granted that it was a move on the chessboard.

      ‘Wilson believed Bevan would become Leader, and that to make his own way he needed to court the Left, which was on the rise,’ says Woodrow Wyatt, who was moving in the opposite direction.’³⁸ ‘Harold had discovered that the right wing didn’t trust him,’ maintains Harold Lever, ‘If he was to have muscle in the Labour Party, it would have to come from the Centre and Left.’³⁹ Ian Mikardo ties the decision to the coming election, in April 1951, the Labour Government was getting more and more discredited,’ he argues. ‘Harold didn’t want to be associated with the run-down. He was deserting a sinking ship, and going with people he thought would compose the new leadership. He was leaving the dead bodies of people who were not going to be key elements in the next Labour Government.’⁴⁰ Others point out that Wilson was well aware that, in the Labour Party, leaders had tended to come from left of centre.

      A divergence over policy, which included a shrewd assessment of the likely impact of defence spending on the economy; a personal rift, in which jealousy may have played a part, coupled with frustration about Gaitskell’s style; fascination with Bevan, and appreciation of his potential, linked to a bitter determination, if possible, to block Gaitskell’s path: all were doubtless contained in the pot-pourri of reasons for backing the Minister of Labour. There may also have been another factor, little noticed at the time, but certainly a major preoccupation for Wilson. This was his growing anxiety about Huyton and the danger – which was beginning to look like a near certainty – that he would lose it in an election that could happen at any moment.

      The selection of the twenty-five-year-old Anthony Wedgwood Benn to fight a by-election in Sir Stafford Cripps’s old seat, Bristol South-East, in November 1950 was a significant event, not just because of the youth of the candidate and the lustre of the man he was to replace. Wedgwood Benn won the nomination despite the inclusion on the short-list of Arthur Creech Jones, a respected former Colonial Secretary who had had the misfortune to lose his seat the previous February. Transport House had done its best to secure the Bristol South-East selection for Creech Jones, just as it had worked to get Cripps selected almost twenty years before. This time, however, there was a breath of rebellion in the constituency air. Since the end of the Second World War, constituency party membership had been expanding fast. Where, in the past, it had been possible for Tammany Hall tactics to hand selections to members of the hierarchy who had Transport House approval, it was becoming much less easy. Bristol South-East was a sharp reminder that a defeated minister, however important, could not automatically expect a ticket back.

      The Bristol selection was of immediate interest to Wilson, because of the likelihood that, like the luckless Creech Jones, he would soon be looking for another berth. Unemployment stared him in the face. ‘Harold has to put in such a lot of time at Huyton to be sure of retaining the seat,’ Gladys told a friend. ‘He’s started a weekly “surgery” where he answers all the problems of the people – and if he can’t give an answer he jolly well makes sure that someone else does.’⁴¹ In January 1951, the Conservatives moved into a 13 per cent lead in the national opinion polls, rising to 15 per cent in March before easing slightly to 12 per cent in April. On 5 April, a by-election in neighbouring Ormskirk (Tory-held, on new boundaries) showed a 6.2 per cent swing against Labour. Just before the Budget crisis, it was noted in the press that Wilson’s prospects in Huyton, where there was a very active Tory challenger, looked gloomy.⁴² Once the prescription charges row broke, the issue of his own possible resignation, and his constituency prospects, became closely entangled.

      The turning-point in the crisis had come on 3 April, when Bevan made a famous public outburst, telling a crowd in Bermondsey that he would never be a member of a government which made charges on the National Health Service for the patient. Next day Dalton, who supported some aspects of Bevan’s defence argument and tried to act as honest broker between the two sides, talked to Wilson at length. The President of the Board of Trade used the opportunity to tell Dalton that he ‘would have to consider his own position if Nye resigned’. According to Dalton’s diary account, Wilson also said that ‘he couldn’t hold Huyton and was thinking of moving.’ The Labour Party national agent, R. T. Windle, had advised him ‘to wait till the last moment’, presumably meaning the end of the Parliament, when any sudden vacancy had to be filled in a hurry, and consequently was easier to fix centrally. Dalton replied brutally that resigning ‘wouldn’t help him find a better ‘ole [i.e. a better bolt-hole] with the aid of Transport House’.

      When Dalton said that the health charges issue was a very narrow one on which to resign, Wilson made a reply which indicated, not only how his own mind was working, but also how far ahead the rebels’ strategy had been planned. ‘He said it would soon be widened,’ Dalton wrote. ‘Nye, once out, would attack on Foreign Policy, etc. He was young enough to wait for power and leadership.’ Dalton, whose main loyalty was to Gaitskell, reacted to these calculations with despair and disgust. Formerly, he had seen Wilson as one of his ‘young men’, a protégé. No more. ‘Harold Wilson is not a great success,’ he noted angrily. ‘He is a weak and conceited minister. He has no public face. But he is said to be frantically ambitious and desperately jealous of Hugh Gaitskell, thinking that he should have been Chancellor. He has disappointed me a lot.’

      Why – we may wonder – did Wilson mention both his plan to threaten resignation (which was not yet known to most colleagues) and his constituency anxiety and intentions to Dalton, of all people, who was known to be a close friend of Gaitskell? Possibly Wilson – understandably overwrought, and