Whether or not the possibility of a tacit buy-off – a seat in return for staying in the Government – entered Wilson’s head, it certainly occurred to others, who were aware of his predicament. Wilson himself mentions in his memoirs that when Ernest Bevin died on 14 April, at the height of the dispute, the prospect of selection in Bevin’s seat, Woolwich East, ‘was used in a plot to lure me out of the Bevan camp’. He claims to have turned down such an offer.44 That such an idea was still being actively discussed until just before the resignations is indicated by a Daily Telegraph report on 25 April (after the ministers had left the Government). Almost on the eve of their departure, the resigners had apparently hesitated in the hope of a compromise in the health charges issue; and, moreover, ‘Mr Wilson had also received assurances that a safer seat than his present constituency … would be found for him.’
Both sides can signal, without meaning anything definite by it. Wilson may have believed that he was offered a bolt-hole: Hugh Dalton’s diary makes it plain that Dalton was working hard to make sure he did not get one. Two days before Bevin’s death, Dalton and Morrison decided between them that Wilson should be given no favours. ‘I rang up Windle this morning before Cabinet as agreed with Morrison’, Dalton recorded on 12 April, ‘and told him this was a joint message from Herbert and me – Harold Wilson must not be helped to find a better seat; if Huyton was to be lost, let him lose it! Windle said he wasn’t helping. I said Wilson had suggested to me that he was. Anyhow Windle took the point!’45 Such a combination of heavyweights was virtually insuperable, and we should assume – whatever may have happened earlier, or whatever may later have been leaked – that it now blocked off any short-term possibility. ‘Who dishes out safe seats in the Socialist Party?’ wrote John Junor in the Express on the day of Wilson’s resignation. ‘The man in control of the machine, Mr Herbert Morrison. And Mr Morrison’s hostility towards Bevan men must at this moment know no end.’
This was how the Tory press saw it, and it was still true up to a point. But what upsets like the Wedgwood Benn selection in Bristol showed was that Morrison and Transport House had become unreliable patrons. A quick fix was what Wilson urgently needed: if Transport House had been able to provide one he might have been interested. In the absence of one, he had to take account of the changing political conditions. Bevan offered a possible solution. He did not follow Bevan because of his constituency predicament. But he was well aware that, if it came to the crunch, a pro-Bevan stance was likely to make him a good deal more marketable.
Wilson got little credit for his resignation, at the time or later. Although it was on a point of principle, most people did not regard it as genuinely ‘principled’. Probably, few resignations are: scratch the surface of most outwardly ‘principled’ resignations and you find, alongside the point of principle, a thwarted ambition, a clash of personalities, or a simple weariness and desire to quit. Enough has been said about Wilson’s behaviour to suggest a mixture of motives. However, the conventional view that he did not start moving leftwards until after he resigned is wrong.
‘He did not emerge as a questioning figure until he decided to leave the Government,’ says Jo Richardson, then Secretary of the Keep Left Group.46 In public, this was true. But there had been a period of growing restlessness. When he resigned, he was still a young man and – in many ways – an unformed one with, for a politician, an unusual lack of political experience. Psychologically, he was on the move: some time before the health charges crisis, the transformation from Wilson the bureaucrat to Wilson the polemicist and agitator had begun. He had never broken ranks as a minister, but he had taken the left-wing position in the Government on steel nationalization, and on expenditure cuts. More important, ‘The State and Private Industry’, which he had written and presented to colleagues nearly a year before resigning, was emphatically a questioning document, of a distinctly leftish kind. The April 19 51 row took him one stage further, and provided a kind of blooding.
Until the late 1940s, Wilson’s world had been peopled by dons and civil servants. He did not undergo the apprenticeship which is the lot of nearly all successful politicians in normal times, of passionate argument and factional disputation among the rank and file outside Parliament, and later on the back benches within it. He read, he absorbed, he remembered, he discussed with officials and fellow ministers, he spoke, and he initialled documents. There was little time for anything else, and the world of political ideology was as unimportant as it was mysterious to him. Keen socialists did not so much dislike, as disregard him. ‘He was like an unusually able motor car salesman’, says Freeman, ‘– very bright and very superficial.’ His parliamentary associates, such as they were, mainly consisted of the group of ministers around Cripps. It was here that his political education had begun.
The most attractive and forceful member of Cripps’s circle was Aneurin Bevan. Wilson’s adult experiences had been administrative. But his early ideas of politics had been romantic. Aneurin Bevan offered romance, and radical authority. ‘Nye’s royal command was very hard to resist,’ observes Freeman.47 Bevan took a friendly, avuncular interest in Wilson, and became one of the few politicians (as well as one of the first) to cross the Wilsons’ doorstep in Southway. Long before the resignations, according to Mary, she and Harold got to know Bevan well. ‘Nye was very, very fond of Robin,’ she recalls. He and Jennie came to a fireworks party in Hampstead when Robin was about six – that is, in 1949, during the post-devaluation debate. The Wilsons have a snapshot of Nye in the garden, wearing a black beret and holding a sparkler. Bevan used to treat Harold almost like a child himself, and call him ‘boy’.48
Bevan, too, had his circle – which began to be Wilson’s as well. One of its members was Wilson’s own PPS, the very radical Barbara Castle, who had been closely associated with Cripps and Bevan in the 1930s in the office of Tribune. Castle provided an important link between Bevan and Wilson, with whom she developed a friendship – his closest with any parliamentary contemporary – that lasted for the rest of their linked careers. She introduced Wilson to Michael Foot, another Bevan friend, in 1947.49 People like Castle and Foot were far to the left of Wilson, and were not encumbered by ministerial office. They did not shape his beliefs. But it was in their company, sitting at Nye’s feet, that he learned to be political. Gaitskell’s friends sneered at Wilson’s discovery of ideology; so did many of Bevan’s. Foot, however, believes that it was sincere. ‘You couldn’t have called Harold’s radicalism socialism’, he says, ‘but he did have radical instincts. Like Nye, he wanted things to move, to change. No doubt he also thought there was a real possibility of Nye becoming Party Leader – no doubt he did make that calculation. But he also had a genuine sympathy for him.’50
Wilson was not initially a member of the small group of MPs that identified itself with left-wing causes; and he did not involve himself in the early anti-Gaitskell discussions that preceded the 1951 crisis. At first, the key participant was John Freeman – who, though only a junior minister, had a wider following than Wilson, and was thought by the Left to be a bigger catch. Before long, however, the President was drawn into the group, and began to take a vigorous part.
Freeman himself recalls that, as he began to contemplate resignation, ‘I became conscious of Wilson operating in the same mode on one flank.’ Soon both Wilson and Freeman were attending meetings in the House of Commons and at Richard Crossman’s home in Vincent Square, together with Mikardo, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle and other left-wing opponents of the Chancellor’s plans. Some ministers who did not in the end resign also attended. According to Freeman, Sir Hartley Shawcross came to one meeting. Elwyn Jones was sympathetic, and John Strachey, the War minister, ‘wavered backwards and forwards’. The dominating presence was always that of the Minister of Labour. The discussions were about policy. Freeman believed, like Wilson and Bevan, that ‘defence plus welfare was too much for the economy to bear,’ and took