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10

THE DOG BITES

After eleven almost unbroken years in government, Labour had forgotten the psychology of Opposition. As soon as ministers handed in the seals of office and Conservatives took their place, it remembered. Habits of restraint and deference were abandoned and ancient practices were resumed. The split that had opened in April widened and the Party broke into warring factions. It was not just a matter of policy, or even of rival ambitions. Beneath the overt causes of the dispute lay deep differences of culture and mood, which made dialogue between the two sides impossible. Even more than in the 1930s, Labour Right and Left became separate nations, defined by custom, mode of speech, even dress. The Right was responsible and respectable, the Left – at any rate the intellectual Left – was modish and bohemian. Never has the Labour Party been more tribal than in the 1950s.¹

At first the conditions suited Wilson perfectly. Other ex-ministers, deprived of official back-up and their ministerial income, took time to readjust, the older ones drifting into effective retirement. Wilson, well cushioned by his Montague Meyer retainer, had already adjusted to loss of office. Before his resignation, he had been regarded as an orthodox minister, and had received relatively little attention in the press, partly because there had been little to say about him. Now the stage was set for him to be an unorthodox and increasingly celebrated back-bencher. ‘In our age of telegraphs and telephones’, Anton Chekhov once wrote, ‘abuse is the sister of advertisement.’² It was a principle which Wilson did not forget in his new campaign to become well known.

Tribal warfare was spiced by an issue seldom mentioned at public gatherings. Attlee was sixty-eight, and could not remain Party Leader indefinitely. Morrison, still regarded as the heir apparent, was only five years younger. If Morrison took over when Attlee eventually retired, the succession would not be satisfactorily resolved, for Morrison, too, would soon be due for retirement. Looking beyond Morrison, there was no clear favourite on the Right. Gaitskell seemed too junior, Shawcross too exclusively legal, Alf Robens too inexperienced.³ The Left, however, could offer a powerful contender: Bevan. Hopes and fears surrounding this possibility lay behind every Labour policy discussion of the next four years.

Wilson was one of those who, for the time being, pinned his hopes on Bevan’s succession. Relations between the two were friendly, though seldom close. As Richard Crossman observed, they had nothing in common.⁴ ‘Nye and Harold were diametrically opposite in every regard,’ says Mikardo. ‘Consequently, they could learn from each other. Nye admired Harold’s agility, sure-footedness, cleverness. Harold admired Nye’s ability to get through to the heart of the problem.’⁵ Where Bevan took a broad view, Wilson was fascinated by detail. Peter Shore (then a Transport House researcher) recalls Wilson in the early 1950s as ‘a walking encyclopedia on industry’, energetic, diligent, ever searching for new information.⁶ Bevan, by contrast, was indolent, volcanic, visionary. ‘Nye was loved but also hated,’ recalls a close Wilson supporter. ‘He was a great, scary figure. When he spoke it was a magnificent, theatrical experience. He could move you to tears, laughter, anything. He frightened the Right.’⁷ Wilson frightened nobody.

The origins of the ‘Bevanite’ movement in the 1950s lay in the inter-war ILP and Socialist League. After the war, there had been no organized parliamentary Left until 1947, when Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo and Richard Crossman wrote a policy statement, Keep Left, which became the starting point of the Keep Left Group. But until the resignations, the Group had been small, and patronized by MPs with little influence. Now it was transformed. Others joined, and by 1952 membership had increased to forty-seven MPs and two peers, including five former ministers.

The Bevanite adventure, mainly in the few years following the 1951 defeat, belongs to the folklore of British socialism. It was a heady episode, in which a band of cheeky, irreverent and irresponsible outlaws merrily challenged a humourless Party establishment. The essence of Bevanism was outrage: the Bevanites were determined to shock. They were the enemies of blimps, snobs and stuffed shirts of whatever political persuasion. They enjoyed the anger of right-wing union barons as much as the bluster of Morrisonian MPs or, for that matter, the indignation of Tory colonels. They were anti-upper class, anti-public school, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-American. Bevanites delighted in being dangerously equivocal about Communism at the height of the Cold War, and they basked in the knowledge that not only did they have in Aneurin Bevan the most inspiring leader in British politics, they also had an enthusiastic following among the rank and file in the still flourishing constituency parties.

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 by the Americans for Chiang Kai-shek in China.²² A strong theme was the link Wilson believed to exist between the plight of poorer nations (many of which were still British or French colonies), and relations with East Europe. Wilson’s argument (which fitted the ‘Third Force’ approach of the Bevanites, in opposition to the Atlanticism of the Right) was that Communism could best be combated by removing the need for poor nations to look towards the Soviet bloc, and by building commercial bridges to Russia.

His interest in colonial development was certainly more than casual or debating. At Oxford, it had been one of his main political concerns. Now, with more time at his disposal than when he was in office, he returned to it seriously and – as he usually did when taking up a subject – wrote a paper. The initiative had come in 1951 from the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, chairing a body called the Association for World Peace whose committee members included a number of Bevanites and left-wing experts. In February 1952 Wilson completed a report called ‘The Problem of World Poverty’, which Gollancz published as a pamphlet in May, under the title War on Want.²³ This called for an International Development Agency, and the devotion of 10 per cent of the arms budget and 2 per cent of national income to the relief of world poverty. As in the domestic field, Wilson argued that world problems required ‘something other than the free price mechanism’, if disaster was to be averted.²⁴ The report was widely discussed, and provided the starting-point – as well as the name – for a pressure group.²⁵

This was the time when, as Mikardo says, Wilson was ‘establishing himself as a Leftist’.²⁶ During the spring and summer of 1952 he had an immediate reason for doing so: the first post-election poll for Labour’s National Executive. The Party’s NEC was a body of fluctuating significance. When Labour was in government, it had comparatively little, except as the guardian of the Party Constitution, and the disciplinarian of wayward MPs. When the Party was in Opposition, however, it had a much bigger role – defining policy, speaking for the whole Party between annual Conferences, and sometimes overshadowing the parliamentary leadership (whose membership, however, overlapped with it). The Executive’s own membership was elected in several sections – composed of trade unionists, women members and so on. One had a special symbolism: this was the seven-member constituencies’ section, chosen exclusively by the delegates to Conference from local parties. The annual poll for this section was taken as a political barometer, not only of the popularity of individuals, but also of the relative strength at grass-roots level of the factions.

Since the creation of the section in 1937, the Party establishment’s hold on it had steadily weakened, as one by one conservative figures had given way to radical stars of the Left. Following the 1951 election defeat, there was every reason to suppose that this process would continue, and that Bevanites would capture some of the remaining old-guard seats. Consequently, the Left approached the 1952 Party Conference at Morecambe with some excitement, hoping for an upset in favour of its own standard-bearers. Richard Crossman was one Bevanite standard-bearer, and Wilson was another.

The contest was important for the Bevanites, and important for Wilson, holding out the prospect of a position which would make up for his current weakness in the PLP. Treating the election like an exam, he played to the prejudices of his left-wing examiners among the rank and file. ‘We can’t guarantee full employment unless we take steps to secure a greater degree of social ownership,’ he told a rally in June.²⁷ At an International Socialist Youth Congress in July, he called for the recognition of the Chinese Communist Government.²⁸ On 5 September he published a Tribune pamphlet called In Place of Dollars, nicely timed to anticipate the NEC ballot – stressing his own distance from the policies of the Labour Government of which he had been a member.²⁹

His efforts paid off. At Morecambe in October, Crossman and Wilson trounced Morrison and Dalton, two old war-horses who had been on the Executive since the 1920s. It was the biggest upset at Conference for a generation, and neither of the two ousted leaders ever recovered. ‘Nye’s little dog has bitten Dalton where it hurts,’ was Wilson’s exultant comment.³⁰ It also sharpened his teeth. The Executive seat gave him an independent standing, regardless of the Tea Room, placing him inside the Vatican-like conclave of Transport House decision-taking, hitherto the private preserve of Herbert Morrison. From now on, he was a leader in his own right, and a force to be reckoned with.

Yet there was a negative side. More than the resignations in 1951, the Morecambe vote defined the Party’s civil war. In addition, it turned the hostility of the Right towards the rebels into anger and fear. Not for the last time, a revolutionary mood in the constituencies brought a hardening of attitudes in the PLP. In the summer there had been some talk of a four-man Bevanite slate, composed of Bevan, Wilson, Freeman and Crossman, for the Parliamentary Committee (the Shadow Cabinet) gaining official approval, in return for a promise to disband the Bevanites.³¹ Morecambe, however, pushed the establishment angrily back into its trench. At the beginning of October, Gaitskell vigorously attacked the Left for its factionalism: Wilson retaliated by expressing shock at the former Chancellor’s ‘intemperate outburst’.³² No deal was struck. In the PLP poll for the Committee in November, Gaitskell came third. Bevan was also elected, in twelfth place; Wilson was not elected. For the moment, Wilson had to make do with a role as a rank-and-file rather than a parliamentary leader. Until April 1951, he had been important in the Government, and nothing in the Movement. At the end of 1952, he had a standing in the Movement, but was cold-shouldered by his former colleagues, and by most MPs.

At the beginning of 1953, Wilson visited North America. He was shocked by what he encountered: a nation paralysed by the McCarthy witch-hunt. There were implications at home, and for himself. He had no sympathy for Communism, then or ever – despite what a few individuals in the so-called intelligence community had already begun secretly to believe. But he had a great deal of interest in the Soviet Union, partly because of his experiences as a negotiator at the Board of Trade, and more immediately because of the requirements of his employer, Montague Meyer. The company’s involvement in East–West trade was already considerable, and soon increased with the slight easing of Anglo–Soviet relations, following the death of Stalin. Thereafter, Wilson – always representing his firm though sometimes taking on commissions for other companies – travelled frequently to Russia, extracting from these business trips some political points as well. To the Left, he was able to present himself as a man in touch with the ieaders of the socialist bloc; to the public, he could appear as an international statesman above party, who performed on a world stage. Both roles added to the suspicions of the Labour Right, and of those within the security services who were predisposed to consider anybody who visited the Soviet Union as half-way there politically.

Wilson’s first trip to Russia since 1947 took place in May 1953. Before setting out, he undertook to write a series of articles for Reynolds’ News, which billed him as ‘the first leading British Socialist to visit Russia since the death of Stalin’, and as the man who had carried through ‘some of the biggest trade deals ever concluded between Britain and the Soviets’.³³ His unusual journey was presented as a modern version of Marco Polo’s travels, with a socialist slant. Stopping en route in East Berlin, he met a Chinese Communist trade mission, and then flew on via Prague to the Soviet capital. In Moscow he stayed in the National Hotel, and was put up in Room 101 which – as the British Embassy later discovered – was wired for vision as well as sound, indicating that the Russians considered that he had ‘visual potential’.³⁴ After lunching with the British ambassador and a meeting with his old negotiating comrade, Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy prime minister and Trade minister, he had an hour-long ‘personal’ audience with Molotov, a key figure in the reigning oligarchy, thereby up-staging the British Government which had been actively seeking talks with the new leadership.³⁵ Returning via Budapest, he put in a well-publicized word for a British businessman, Edgar Saunders, imprisoned by the Hungarian regime since 1949 on charges of espionage.

Back in London, Wilson irritated his opponents, both in the Labour and Conservative Parties, by adopting the role of the discreet and judicious super-diplomat. Asked whether his conversations with Soviet leaders had any relation to the British Prime Minister’s proposal for a Big Power Conference, he answered mysteriously that a reply to Sir Winston Churchill was to be expected.³⁶ He revealed, however, that when he mentioned the Conference, Molotov had said: ‘Most interesting’.³⁷ There had also been an opportunity to do some sightseeing. ‘No barriers were placed in my way,’ Wilson claimed; ‘I was allowed to see everything I wanted.’³⁸

Such was the parliamentary interest in Russia that fifty MPs attended a briefing session he gave in the House of Commons. Crossman suspected that most of his friend’s knowledge came from British journalists and diplomats, but ‘he did a magnificent job of blowing out his information so that he could tell us everything that was happening in Russia.’³⁹ Soon, Wilson was developing a man-of-the-world line which went down well on platforms, especially left-wing ones. ‘We have got to learn to live with this new Soviet Union,’ he was wont to say, speaking with the authority of a hardened explorer. ‘Since I have been there I have learnt that it will be much easier now than under Stalin’s one-man government.’⁴⁰ All in all, he had capitalized brilliantly on an extremely short and, politically speaking, unproductive visit.

There was also another theme: Wilson the softener of stony Bolshevik hearts. ‘Recently in Reynolds’ News’, he reminded his readers in August, ‘I wrote of my appeal to Mr Molotov and Mr Mikoyan to join with us in the war on want. In the past few days the Russians have announced that they are prepared to contribute money and technicians to this war. Let the nations take heart from this and convert the present “phoney war” on want into a total war.’⁴¹ This was a prelude to the publication, on 10 August, of The War on World Poverty, a book built round Wilson’s report, commissioned by Gollancz. It extended his ambitious (critics felt utopian) argument for an International Development Authority, with funds, staff and power, and the objective of raising support for underdeveloped areas by 2 per cent per head each year, which would require a contribution by advanced countries of 3 per cent of their national income. It also proposed a popularly elected World Assembly, to which the Development Authority (as a ‘world public corporation’) would be responsible.⁴² Nothing much came of these proposals, which their author played down in later years. Wilson’s interest in overseas development, however, survived into his periods of office in the 1960s and 1970s, when he included a minister responsible for aid in the Cabinet, embodying (as he put it in a 1967 tribute to Gollancz), ‘the ideals which had inspired us all under Victor’s leadership’.⁴³

Wilson’s seriously left-wing phase was brief. As early as the autumn of 1952, he was being presented in the press as a potential bridge-builder who, though seen as a Bevanite, ‘might use his influence to iron-out the difference between the wings’.⁴⁴ After Morecambe, a note of sobriety re-entered his utterances; and by the end of 1953 he had unmistakably begun a careful crab-walk back towards the centre of Labour’s political spectrum. The reason was simple. The Bevanite challenge had failed, and Wilson saw no virtue, therefore, in continuing his political isolation.

The failure was in Parliament, not in the constituencies. At the 1953 Party Conference in Margate, the Left did even better than at Morecambe, and Wilson’s own NEC vote increased by 50 per cent. Conference, however, was swiftly followed by a contest for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. Bevan challenged Morrison for the second time in two years and for the second time was soundly beaten. ‘Should [Bevan] go on leading a group which seems to repel everybody else from supporting him?’ asked Crossman.⁴⁵ Wilson felt the same dilemma, though more acutely. Bevan was an emotional, even a sentimental, left-winger. Wilson was a practical one. Association with the Bevanites had been appropriate in the wake of the resignations, and it had given him a valuable credential, which he had cashed at successive Conferences. Now that he was securely on the NEC it was no longer so useful and set rigid limits to his possible support in the PLP. At the same time, he was becoming exasperated by the behaviour of some of the wilder people who were currently his allies.

He retained, forever, his tribal markings. His resignation, his Chairmanship of the Group, his Brains Trust appearances, his election to the NEC in Bevanite colours, above all the permanent hostility felt towards him by the Right, continued to identify him. Nevertheless, a crack began to appear within the Bevanite Group between those Mikardo calls ‘the principled’ and those he calls ‘the pragmatists’. Wilson and Crossman were pragmatists. Cynics believed that the aim of the pragmatists was to distance themselves just far enough from the Party establishment to hold the continuing support of the Left, but not far enough to lay themselves open to the charge of publicly rejecting official policy. ‘Wilson knew he had committed himself by his resignation to a very long game,’ reckons John Freeman. ‘He also knew that he had now better get himself into good standing. That is why he moved away from the hardline Bevanites.’⁴⁶

It was the issue of German rearmament that decisively separated Wilson from the ‘principled’ Left, some of whom never forgave him. The question was whether, and how, the newly established Federal Republic should contribute to Nato’s defences. This, in turn, was linked to the wider question of Britain’s role within the Alliance and its relationship with the Soviet bloc. For the Labour Party, the whole subject was a minefield, causing more bitterness than any other controversy until it was superseded by the problem of nuclear weapons.

In February 1954 the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, presented to Parliament proposals for the early setting up of a European Defence Community, in the interests of Western security. Herbert Morrison, for the Opposition, gave general support, expressing Labour’s approval of government policy towards the rearmament question, despite the misgivings of many MPs. At first, Wilson seemed to voice the concerns of the minority. ‘Wilson caused a lot of resentment by attacking Attlee over German rearmament,’ recalls Douglas Jay. ‘When, later, it was suggested that Gaitskell should ask him back on to the front bench, the steady old trade union types said: “Why the hell?”’⁴⁷ At a PLP meeting on 23 February, Wilson made a skilful, carefully worded statement against the Party position. ‘It was a quiet, inoffensive speech without any edge to it, such as I could never possibly deliver,’ wrote Crossman.⁴⁸

At this stage, Wilson and Bevan seemed to be at one, opposing the Morrison line, yet – unlike others on the Left – refusing to regard the issue as one of fundamental importance. Over the next few weeks, however, Bevan’s attitude hardened. The rearmament question also became linked to a critique of Anglo–American policy in the Far East. In April, following the British Government’s signature of the EDC agreement in Paris, Bevan reacted explosively, over German rearmament and, more particularly, over the failure of the Labour leadership to repudiate Eden’s acceptance of proposals by the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, for a ‘united front’ against Communist aggression in the Far East, which Bevan saw as ‘tantamount to the diplomatic and military encirclement of republican China’.⁴⁹ The row reached its climax when Attlee stated the Shadow Cabinet position at Question Time in the House. Acting on impulse, Bevan advanced to the dispatch box and openly disassociated himself from the Party Leader’s statement. Next day, without consulting his ‘Bevanite’ friends, he resigned from the Shadow Cabinet.

The Right responded to this outrage with satisfaction: Bevan had damaged himself far more than those he intended to attack. ‘Now, as Attlee said, our own outside left has shot through his own goal’, Patrick Gordon Walker, a Morrisonite, wrote to a supporter. ‘The truth is that Nye was furious because Clem told him off about his behaviour in the House, when he barged his way to the dispatch box and openly contradicted what Clem had just said … Nye got into a temper and resigned in a sulk.’⁵⁰ The question was how the Left was going to react to the emotional behaviour of its leader. The answer hinged on the reaction of the exceedingly non-impulsive Harold Wilson.

Wilson’s position on American foreign policy, as on German rearmament, had been little different from that of Bevan, if less vehemently expressed. In 1951, Bevan and Wilson had resigned at the same time, though placing different emphases on the reasons for their resignations. On this occasion, there was even less light between them. Nevertheless, Bevan’s abrupt departure from the Shadow Cabinet presented Wilson with an uncomfortable dilemma, because Wilson had been runner-up (placed thirteenth, for twelve places) in the Parliamentary Committee election at the start of the session, and so – by Party rules – automatically took the vacant place, provided he was prepared to accept it. Not to do so would amount to resigning with Bevan (1951 over again) which would make him appear a doctrinaire Bevanite and ‘Nye’s little dog’ once more, two kinds of reputation he was keen to avoid. But to accept would be treated as treachery and opportunism, especially by Wilson’s normal associates.

The ‘principled’ Left believed that Wilson had no choice: he must stay out with Bevan. ‘In my innocence, I took it for granted that Harold couldn’t possibly distance himself openly from Nye by taking that place’, recalls Mikardo, ‘particularly as he had strongly supported Nye on the issue of policy in South-East Asia which had led to the resignation.’⁵¹ Bevan also took it for granted, declaring that he would regard Wilson accepting his place as ‘a gross act of personal disloyalty to myself’.⁵² Wilson, however, no longer accepted Bevan’s authority and was angry – understandably so – at being asked to make a decision of such painful self-abrogation, when Bevan had not bothered to seek his opinion first. With Crossman’s backing, he decided to accept the Shadow Cabinet place with a show of reluctance, giving as his public excuse the need to preserve Party unity.⁵³ At first, Bevan seemed half-persuaded to bless such a plan, then – finding a phalanx of core ‘principled’ Bevanites angrily hostile to Wilson – reverted to his earlier pose of growling resentment.

Wilson saw Attlee and elaborated his position. The Party Leader listened impassively to the explanation, then responded with a single word: ‘Quite.’⁵⁴ Wilson’s letter to the secretary of the PLP, prepared with the help of Crossman and George Wigg, Bevanite MP for Dudley, and released to the press, was intended to make things better. Its transparently disingenuous contents, however, had the opposite effect:

As you will realize the situation created by the new Standing Order places me in an extremely difficult position.

I am in entire agreement, as the party knows, with Aneurin Bevan on the policy issues involved – on the dangers not only of Mr Dulles’s policies in South-East Asia, but also on German rearmament.

Obviously, therefore, it is extremely difficult to accept co-option to a vacancy caused by his resignation.

Nevertheless, what matters in the last resort is the unity and strength of the party. I have given a great deal of anxious thought to this question over the past 10 days, and have not lacked advice.

My conclusion is that in the party’s interests it is impossible for me to refuse co-option.⁵⁵

‘It was so shabby,’ says Mikardo. ‘Wilson agreed with Nye on the issue, but didn’t mind using Nye’s misfortune for his own advantage.’⁵⁶ One Bevanite MP, A. J. Irvine, publicly cancelled an engagement in Huyton, to emphasize his disapproval. What was odd about the letter was that Wilson should have imagined that anybody would be taken in by it. The logic of the argument was, of course, impeccable. Yet even the most naïve and trusting newspaper reader did not imagine that the main concern of a politician when accepting a leg up the political ladder was the unity of the party, or that the ‘great deal of anxious thought’ had been purely altruistic. The letter reeked of humbug. It was an example of precisely the tortuousness of which Wilson was accused, even more frequently than he deserved. Yet it was a key strategic move. Wigg (who backed Wilson on this issue, and became a loyal and well-rewarded supporter) later wrote that the decision to accept Bevan’s place marked Wilson’s ‘first long stride towards No. 10 Downing Street’.⁵⁷ By quarrelling with the hard-core Bevanites, Wilson achieved the objective of making himself more acceptable to the PLP majority. ‘Old MPs, who for the past three years have battled against Bevanism, were presenting Mr Wilson as The Man Who Changed His Mind,’ wrote the Daily Mail’s political correspondent. ‘They believe he will work smoothly with Mr Attlee and the Party whips.’⁵⁸ Even the Economist discussed the new phenomenon of Centre-Left ‘Wilsonism’. (‘But what is a Wilsonite?’, ruminated Dalton. ‘He’s a clever little chap, with a sure political touch. But not magnetic.’)⁵⁹ The manner of the decision, however, contributed to the sense that every position taken, even every speech or remark, by Harold Wilson was part of a chess game, and that nothing he did should ever be taken at its face value.

Crossman, who saw Wilson as a grandmaster, approved. His diary contains a remarkably prophetic passage, which describes his own discussion with Bevan, in which he protested that Wilson had every right to accept:

Nye said, ‘of course he has got the right but he will kill himself if he agrees to go on the Committee.’ I then said that, in my view, it was now far more likely that Harold Wilson would succeed to the premiership than that Nye would. He was just the type of man who would succeed Attlee. To which Nye replied, ‘If he’s that kind of man, I don’t want anything to do with him.’ I then said, ‘Don’t be silly. You’ve always known that he’s that sort of man and the events of the last three days have made no difference to that.’⁶⁰

The remark is interesting, not only because it shows that Wilson was already being discussed as a future contender for the Leadership; but also because it marks a staging-post in Crossman’s own, fast developing and vitally important attitude to Wilson. Hitherto, despite Wilson’s Cabinet experience, Crossman had been seen as a more powerful force on the parliamentary Left. Hereafter, Crossman increasingly saw Wilson as the Left’s best hope among the younger leaders, and hence a horse to be backed. Meanwhile Bevan, by resigning, had done himself serious damage, and the possibility that he might become Leader – which the Right feared, and the Left longed for – receded. ‘I judge that [the] Bevan boom is well past its peak,’ Dalton noted that summer. ‘… He’s quarrelled with Crossman and Wilson. New Statesman announced the other day that neither Morrison nor Bevan can now ever lead the Party. And Wilson is trying to edge his way along on his own.’⁶¹

The edging was difficult at first because of the disgust felt by the ‘principled’ Bevanites (some of whom, however, were almost as angry with Bevan for resigning as with Wilson for not backing him). They always held it against him. ‘It made me realize’, says Mikardo, one of Wilson’s harshest critics, ‘the true extent of Harold’s ambition. Nye had ambitions, it was one part of his life – but there were other parts. Harold was ambitious and nothing else, obsessively ambitious.’⁶²

Bevan, meanwhile, nursed his bitterness and wounded pride. Relations with Wilson were never fully restored. At first, Bevan was inclined to boycott the regular Bevanite lunches at Crossman’s house in Vincent Square. ‘Dick’s folly and Harold’s ambition have created a disastrous situation,’ John Freeman wrote to him, trying to win him round to the need for discussion.⁶³ Wilson tried to make amends by delivering what Crossman called ‘the most left-wing speech of his career’,⁶⁴ denouncing Western policy in Indo-China, where the French were fighting a rearguard action against Communist insurgents. To a May Day rally in Manchester, Wilson stressed three things:

First, not a man and not a gun must be sent from this country in support of French imperialism in Indo-China; secondly, we must not in this country join, form, or in any way encourage the formation of an anti-Communist alliance in Asia, and thirdly, the road to peace in Asia is the road of Nehru and not of Dulles.⁶⁵

Words, however, came easily. To the Left, it was deeds that counted. When asked on television by Malcolm Muggeridge whether he was still a Bevanite, Wilson could only wriggle. ‘The question’, he replied, ‘is not quite as simple as it sounds. Certainly I have not changed any of my ideas about politics.’⁶⁶ In Parliament and on the Shadow Cabinet Wilson became a lonely figure, regarded by the Left as a traitor and the Right as a blackleg. They voted for him, acknowledging his abilities and value to the Party. The Left continued to prefer him to Gaitskell and Morrison, and the Right continued to prefer him to Bevan. In November 1954, he was re-elected to the Parliamentary Committee in twelfth place; in June 1955 he climbed to fifth. Thereafter, except in 1960, he was never out of the top three. But they did not like him.

*

In June Wilson made a second Meyer-financed trip to Russia. The press speculated that ‘the globe-trotting of this super commercial traveller’ was intended to prepare the ground for his eventual succession to the Party Leadership, or at least Labour’s foreign portfolio. During the visit, Wilson had a meeting with Malenkov – it was pointed out that he was the first leading British politician to do so since the new General Secretary had succeeded Stalin. ‘Anyone visiting Moscow at the present time comes away with the firm conviction that this Soviet nation does not want war,’ Wilson declared on his return. ‘We are so dominated by the fears and attitudes of the Cold War and the growth of Great Power blocs that we have not yet fully realized the possibilities of closer Anglo-Soviet understanding, with Britain restraining America on the one hand and Russia restraining China and other revolutionary forces in Asia on the other.’⁶⁷ This was the familiar ‘Third Force’ theme: Britain as a brake to American ambitions. The right-wing press interpreted it as a bid for the Bevanite vote for the NEC, about which Wilson had some anxiety.⁶⁸ By now, however, Wilson was playing a different hand. He did not cease to make tribal noises. But these were accompanied by other, firm, signals that he stood for the sensible, moderate, responsible Left, not the wild and reckless Left represented by Aneurin Bevan.

The new stance was helped by Bevan’s own behaviour, following his second resignation in three years. In September, Bevan made a biting attack on Gaitskell, in which he implied that the ex-Chancellor was a ‘desiccated calculating machine’. Some felt that the insult fitted the former President of the Board of Trade more closely. Wilson’s own calculation was simple: the deeper Bevan dug his own grave by outbursts of this kind, the better for his own reputation as a force for reason. ‘Harold may be a simpleton’, wrote Crossman, which of course was the opposite of the truth, ‘but I can’t help suspecting that his buoyant optimism was due to a partly conscious recognition that this speech had given him the Leadership.’

Inch by inch, the gap dividing Wilson from Bevan widened. In November Bill Mallalieu, a leading Bevanite, leaked to the press that Wilson ‘had virtually opted out of the Group’. Privately, Wilson attacked the Left’s hardline newspaper, remarking that ‘Bevanism is impossible without Bevan but would be far better without the Tribune.’69 By this, of course, he meant that parliamentary Bevanism would be better off. To the ‘pragmatic’ Bevanite or Centre-Left MPs, the growing left-wing movement in the constituencies and trade unions had become an embarrassment: for Wilson, Crossman and their friends what mattered was the PLP, and constituency enthusiasm was something that could get out of control. Bevan, on the other hand, saw the movement as a bomb waiting to be ignited. The difference was important, especially as Bevan’s parliamentary base weakened. ‘The decline of the Bevanites is very marked,’ Gordon Walker observed later in the same month. ‘They were routed in the Party over SEATO & outvoted nearly 2–1 over the Paris Agreements and German rearmament.’ Wilson had noticed the same thing: he was determined not to be marginalized in the arena that mattered most.

In March 1955 Bevan provoked another crisis by attacking the Labour front bench in a Commons debate on the issue of the first use of nuclear weapons, and by appearing to threaten a revolt against Attlee’s leadership. He was swiftly punished by having the whip withdrawn, and there was talk of expelling him from the Party. On the Right, Gordon Walker pressed for the extreme penalty, arguing that Bevan’s base in the constituencies had weakened, and his behaviour had isolated him.⁷⁰