Bevanism, however, was a fashion which extended far beyond Labour Party confines, affecting many people in the universities, journalism and broadcasting; and for the first time in his life, Wilson discovered the joys of being fashionable. Politically, these were his lotus years. ‘Harold went back and did the ground work of being an ordinary MP after all that time of being in the Cabinet,’ says Mary.8 ‘At the time of his 1951 resignation’, says Woodrow Wyatt, ‘he didn’t really know what ordinary MPs were like, let alone activists.’9 The early 1950s was a time for finding out. During his sojourn on the proper Left, he imbibed its atmosphere and spirit, acquiring a way of looking at the world, and especially at the Labour Party, which coloured his outlook for the rest of his career.
The question of whether Wilson was ever a genuine socialist or left-winger remains shrouded in ambiguity and blurred definitions. ‘The thing that decided who was on the Left was Vicky’s cartoons,’ says Ian Mikardo.10 To be ‘on the Left’ had much to do with the company you kept. ‘What a mysterious thing “the Left” is,’ Crossman mused in 1951. ‘Why is this person Left and this person Right? What binds the group together?’ His own answer was in terms of personalities: he concluded that in British politics ‘loyalty to people and not ideas is universally regarded as the prime quality.’11 In the 1950s, the touchstone of ‘Leftness’ was loyalty to Bevan, and those who were only half-loyal were considered only half-Left. At the beginning Wilson’s ‘Leftness’ was beyond dispute, not because his loyalty to Bevan was unconditional, but because he recognized Bevan’s virtues and saw him as a necessary ally. Mikardo notes that Crossman and Wilson were often highly critical of Bevan when he made tactical errors, or went off at a tangent without consulting his friends. Nevertheless they recognized that ‘without him we wouldn’t be a force to be taken seriously’.12 It was this recognition which, for as long as it lasted, constituted their ‘Leftness’.
Wilson served briefly as Chairman of the Bevanite Group. This caused resentment among some established members, who felt that he had been parachuted into a position of left-wing prominence simply on the basis of his resignation. ‘People were saying: “Who is this bloody fellow, who has never shown any patch of comradeship, yet naturally assumes a leadership role?”’ recalls Jo Richardson, who was secretary of the Group. She herself felt keenly his lack of socialist roots, and that he had not been ‘brought up in any Left tradition in the Party’; she was also irritated that he treated her like a junior clerk in his former department.13 Mikardo, reflecting the views of the uncompromising Left, felt that Wilson was using the Bevanite movement, like everything else in his life, as a stepping-stone. Yet both Richardson and Mikardo acknowledge his value to the Group. ‘He made a very good job of being Chairman,’ says Mikardo. ‘He ran the Group, and kept it going and active.’14 According to Richardson, Wilson ‘helped to give the Bevanites an air of reality. They were walking a tightrope by having a group at all.’15
One element in the Bevanite campaign was the Tribune ‘Brains Trust’, a travelling circus that toured the country raising the consciousness of the faithful. Wilson became a star performer, finding himself well suited to the question-and-answer format of the meetings. A question-master (usually Mikardo) compered the ‘Trusts’, which were loosely based on a popular radio programme. On either side sat a small team of left-wing ‘experts’, who included, in varying cocktails, Wilson, Crossman, Castle, Foot, Sir Richard Acland, Jennie Lee, Stephen Swingler, Geoffrey Bing, Leslie Hale, Julius Silverman, Fenner Brockway, Tom Driberg, Bill Mallalieu, Konni Zilliacus, Hugh Delargy, (Lord) Gavin Faringdon and Harold Davies. Meetings were crowded, noisy and overwhelmingly pro-Bevan. They gave Wilson a rigorous training course in the knee-jerks and erogenous zones of local activists.
Popularity on the circuit, however, risked unpopularity in the PLP, where most MPs regarded the Bevanite tourists as shameless self-publicists. Envy was a large part of it: many back-benchers led comparatively prosaic lives. ‘The situation of the parliamentary party created the conditions for septicaemia,’ says Roy Jenkins. ‘Half of its members were unused to living a London life, with the free mornings that Parliament then gave them. With parliamentary salaries low, many Members lived in cheap Bloomsbury hotels, and used to come down to the House for something with which to occupy themselves. They did their correspondence and sat in the Tea Room. Some took to drink, some to character assassination, and a few to both.’16 Unlike more fastidious leaders, Wilson kept his eye on the Tea Room. Lord Glenamara (formerly Ted Short) remembers him as a frequent visitor, chatting happily to working-class MPs. ‘Harold loved gossip – including all the personal details about families, dogs and so on,’ he recalls.17 Nevertheless, for as long as he threw in his lot with the Left, he was an obvious Tea Room scapegoat. As a minister he had been a two-dimensional politician whom nobody really knew or thought much about. As a rebel who was blamed for the 1951 split and defeat, he ceased to be anonymous and became slippery instead. There was a sense of him – and a realization of this became a source of heartache for Wilson – as an elusive, and hence especially dangerous, enemy.
A key anti-Wilson influence in the parliamentary party was Hugh Dalton, who now saw him as a mischievous renegade to be stamped on. ‘Dalton had a catholic desire to help the young’, says Jenkins, ‘until they did something to displease him.’18 Wilson had incurred deep displeasure by attacking a higher-order protégé, Gaitskell. Thereafter Dalton’s scorn was withering, affecting the group of younger MPs still in his circle. Tony Benn remembers that a lot of the venom directed against the former President of the Board of Trade ‘came out of Dalton’s hatred’. He also recalls the strength of the poison. ‘They just loathed him. They thought his economics were phoney, that his principles didn’t exist.’19
Right and Left did not argue with each other. Within each camp, however, there was strenuous debate, partly stimulated by the need to compete with the other side. On the Left, Wilson was appreciated less as a creative force than as a foil: his experience of government provided insights others did not have. At a Bevanite weekend conference at Lord Faringdon’s house at Buscot a few weeks after the election, Wilson sparred with the economists Thomas Balogh and Dudley Seers, and refused to be bullied by Bevan into accepting the crude thesis that a mere cut in the arms programme would remove, at a stroke, the dollar gap. Crossman appraised the new recruit clinically. ‘Whenever an idea is put forward, he remembers without fail an occasion on which he did it or set up a committee on it when he was at the Board of Trade,’ Crossman noted, adding: ‘His complacency must be unique, but he has a good mind, is an excellent member of a group and is likeable into the bargain.’20 Crossman was soon to become Wilson’s closest associate on the Left, with whom he was to intrigue and tiger-hunt for the next two decades.
Wilson’s actual views were hard to pin down. Since his cleverness and knowledge made it possible for him to argue every position, and he frequently shifted ground, critics wondered whether he had any. ‘His bonfire of controls made it unclear whether he believed in dirigisme or not,’ says Jenkins.21 Among serious, economically literate Bevanites, however, he had a small but significant following. A keen admirer was Peter Shore, who provided a one-man Wilsonian fifth column within the predominantly Morrisonian Labour Party headquarters. In Shore’s view, Wilson had a definite philosophy, embracing both domestic and foreign affairs. At home, he appeared staunchly interventionist; internationally he was keenly interested in the Third World, and critical of Britain’s costly rearmament programme. In particular, he was anxious about the continuing support