i01_11 - JCAL COMMENTARY
Lonely at the Top
By ALAN WATKINS
COME months ago a journalist, making light aconversation, told a minister that he was try- ing to arrange an interview with Mr Harold Wilson. `Ah yes,' said the minister, 'that should be very interesting. If you find out what Harold's thinking let me know. He never tells me.anything these days.' I begin with this anecdote because I believe that it is in his relations with his col- leagues in the Cabinet, rather than in his relations with the parliamentary Labour party, that the roots of Mr Wilson's current difficulties.lie. And in the end it will be his ministers, not the back- bench MPs, who will determine whether he can overcome these difficulties.
Not that Mr Wilson's relations with his col- leagues arc in any way inharmonious. On the contrary, members of the Government appreciate his practice of not interfering. Unlike Sir Anthony Eden, Mr Wilson does not put in peremptory telephone calls to the departments mid-way through the morning to verify that his ministers are hard at it. Unlike Mr Attlee, he does not appear curt or unappreciative: he gives eredit where credit is due, even occasionally where it is not due. Unlike Mr Harold Mac- millan—or for that matter Sir Winston Churchill —in his later phase, he does not go on and on in Cabinet about the state of this wicked world and the Herculean exertions required of him to put matters to rights. (He has, however, been criticised for allowing other people, notably Mr Frank Cousins and Mrs Barbara Castle, to go on and on. A recent addition to this talkative group is, it seems, Mr Richard Marsh.)
Mr Wilson, then, is not overbearing or dic- tatorial. In some ways, indeed, he ir.the very reverse of a presidential•Prime Minister. Nor is it true 4o say that he is aloof: Quite the reverse: be is as chummy and unpretentious as ever. And yet, in Mr Wilson's relations with his Cabinet, there is an element not exactly of aloofness but of remoteness. There is no real rapport. He does not confide in his senior colleagues, or ask their advice. There is nothing like an inner Cabinet.
When Mr Wilson took office in October 1964 it was reasonable t o suppose that an inner Cabinet would in time develop. The natural candidates for inclusion were Mr George Brown, Mr James Callaghan and Mr Herbert Bowden (for whose sagacity Mr Wilson had always bad an unaccountably high regard); also, pos- sibly, Mr Michael Stewart and, for old times' sake, Mr Richard Crossman. The months passed and there was no sign of such a group develop- ing. If Mr Wilson wanted to discuss sterling or the economy, he would call in Mr Callaghan and Mr Brown; if he was concerned _ about the legislative programme, Mr Brown and Mr Edward Short would be summoned; if the prob- lem was foreign policy, it became the turn of Mr Stewart and Mr Denis Healey to say their piece. But there was no group of ministers who met regularly and to whom Mr Wilson could tarn for advice; and so the situation. remains today. Indeed it seems that, following his elec- tion victory, Mr Wilson has if anything become even more remote from his ministers.
But is there no one to whom the Prime Minister can turn for advice? Well, there is. of course. the Paymaster-General, Mr George Wigg. There is Dr Thomas Balogh, whose name is often misleadingly coupled with that of Dr Nicholas kaldor : misleadingly, because Dr
Balogh's functions are rather vaguer than Dr Kaldor's, and his economic reputation rather lower. Then there is the Prime Minister's political secretary, Mrs Marcia Williams; and his press secretary, Mr Trevor Lloyd-Hughes; not to mention Mr Alfred Richman, who has been on temporary loan from the Sun newspaper and whose task it is to advise the Prime Minister on such questions as whether to be photographed by the press with or without a pipe in his mouth.
It is no part of my argument to suggest that any or all of these individuals offer advice to the Prime Minister on important or even unimportant affairs of State. Clearly none of them is in a position to do so. They are dependent for their positions on their loyalty to Mr Wilson and on Mr Wilson's trust in them. This, indeed, is pre- cisely the trouble. The inevitable tendency must be for them to keep telling the Prime Minister how wonderful he is. Admittedly there is no reason why a political leader should not sur- round himself with individuals whose company he finds useful or comforting or entertaining. The doubts arise when their influence is not counterbalanced by more critical advice from more senior political figures. And it is this ele- ment of critical advice which seems to be absent from the present administration.
Oddly enough, there is a parallel here between Mr Wilson and Mr Edward Heath. Mr Heath, like Mr Wilson, tends to keep his distance from his more experienced colleagues: he prefers to confide not in Mr Reginald Maudling and Mr lain Macleod but in Mr Peter Walker and Mr John MacGregor. However, a leader of the oppo- sition can behave in this slightly capricious fashion and only a few people are directly affected. It does not really matter. On. the *other hand, if a Prime Minister handles his affairs in this way the entire conduct of government is called in question. The trouble, I hasten to make clear, is not solely or even mainly that the Prime Minister goes uncriticised by his senior colleagues. There is no point in criticism for criticism's sake. Rather the trouble is a lack of co-ordination in the Cabinet as a whole.
After that rather lengthy prolegomenon, let me give some current examples. First, the Eldo incident. Here it seems that there was simply no agreed policy in the Cabinet. Mr Callaghan
wanted Britain to withdraw, whereas Mr George Thomson and Mr Stewart—or at any rate the Foreign Office—did not. The result was a premature report, then denial, then confusion. Pspite a gallant attempt by the Guardian (which must by now have firmly established itself as the Prime Minister's favourite newspaper) to demonstrate that the 'withdrawal' was really a devilish clever plot by the Government to r,,et better value for money from Europe, the hole episode was reminiscent of nothing so much as a piece of in-fighting between US service depart- ments in pre-McNamara days.
Or take, again, the East of Suez controN ersr. Here, similarly, the economic ministers are in favour of saving money. And this is the really important political fact----tot that the parlia- mentary Labour party is uneasy about the Government's policy, but that Mr Callaghan and Mr Brown are. Though on Wednesday ministers ' trooped obediently to the party meeting to record their support for Mr Wilson, they cannot be expected to persist in this complacent posture. For it is not only Mr Callaghan and Mr Broun who are dubious. According to my calculation, a majority of the Cabinet agree with them. The roll-call of dissentients would probably go some- thing like this: Lord Gardiner, Mr Jenkins, Mr Houghton, Mr Jay, Mr Greenwood, Mr Cros- land, Mr Crossman, Mr Gunter, Mr 'Cousin:, Mrs Castle and Mr Lee. In other words, the East of Suez policy does not express the collecthe view of the Cabinet. More important, it does not express the view of the Cabinet's two MOst im- portant members, next to the Prime Minister. It expresses the view of Mr Wilson, Mr Stem art and Mr Healey.
In more frivolous mood, let us take. as a further example of a general lack of Co.-ordina- tion, the 'invitation' for Mr WOodroW Wyatt to appear before the liaison committee 'of the par- liamentary Labour party. Somehow—it is diffi- cult to say precisely why—the very act of sum- moning Mr Wyatt to be disciplined has about it a touch of the ridiciilons, an aura of Greyfriars School. When Mr Wyatt then turns to Mr Squelch and loftily denounces the rotters who leaked the news that he was to be put on the mat, the merely ridiculous becomes the farcical. We are spirited away from Greyfriars School and into the Whitehall Theatre. But who wac responsible for the appallingly mikjudged decision to court-martial Mr Wyatt? Mr Wyatt himself believes that it was , Mr Emanuel Shin- well. And, certainly, Mr Shinwell allowed the cat to emerge smartly from the bag when on the World at One programme he Proclaimed to the nation that he was meeting his colleagues later in the day to consider what should be done about Mr -Wyatt. Other' observers detect the hand of Mr Edward Short, who was furious at Mr Wyatt's Daily Mirror piece. Whoever %US responsible, it is difficult to believe that the decision was soberly taken at any very high le‘ el.
My final illustration, which is of a rather different kind, comes from question time on Tuesday. Mr Wilson was curiously muted. Was this because he had made a deliberate decision to keep quiet and turn the other cheek? Perhaps- And yet, there was about his performance an air of worry, of loneliness almost. He seemed to sense ' the solitariness of his position. This solitariness, however, is self-imposed. It could quite easily be brought to an end if Mr Wilson look some of his colleagues into his confidence: if he made them real and not notional parties ta his decisions. If he were to do this, there is song basis for saying that the Government would function more smoothly than it is at the moment.
Previous page
