Leaders: Hugh Gaitskell 1955-63

Hugh Gaitskell (1906-63)

Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell was a middle class, public school educated economist who came from a family steeped in the traditions of Empire and public service. His father Arthur was an official in the Indian Civil Service. He became the leading social democratic politician of his generation. He adopted socialism it did not choose him. Born on 9 April 1906 in Kensington, he was known as a child as 'Sam' - a name which stuck with some people at least until the 1930s. He had strong relationship with his mother and retained, until the 1920s, the probably rather endearing, habit of blushing frequently while talking. He initially attended the Dragon School, Oxford before moving to Winchester. By the time he left Winchester - a school he had little affection for - he had learned to be self-reliant, to decide for himself on such things as friends, reading and holidays. Some writers have played the impact of childhood and early life on Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins concluding in a 1973 portrait by saying that Gaitskell's father had no impact and that this was 'to some extent true of all his family'. However he would have been a remarkable man indeed if the early death of his father, the frequent absences and then remarriage of his mother and the English public school system had had no effect on his personality.

There were two distinct sides to Gaitskell's personality, a warm, pleasant, emotional and giving side that was expressed in private and intimate relationships, and a cool, detached, pedantic and defensive side that came through in public and political situations. The public and private kept separate, the emotional and the analytical divided. Gaitskell's growth as a politician, as a communicator and, perhaps, as a person, was about the way in which the cool, detached, pedantic man increasingly let, or could not prevent, the warm, passionate, emotional, intimate man into the public personae.

While it is straightforward to identify these sides to his character and the evidence for them is plentiful, connecting them to particular elements in his childhood and upbringing, is perhaps more difficult. He had to develop at an early age considerable self-reliance, this was in turn enhanced by his experience at a public school he did not like and through the early death of his father. He idealised his brother Arthur, following him to school and college, competing with him and emulating him until developing his own personality and style. This world taught certain ways of behaviour and relating that despite many later attempts to abandon, he never completely rid himself of. But most of all it reinforced an already highly developed work and public service ethic.

He was also Sam, the youngest son, with a deeply emotional mother who smothered him in love on her visits to England and indulged him as the youngest child. This was the side of the character that was to discover dancing and seek out fun with the same energy with which he could redraft a brief or a speech. That the two sides remained separate and that he kept, in the main, the people and the relationships that appealed to the two sides separate for much of his life, is not an accident, it is a consequence of his childhood.

From school he followed Arthur to New College and continued the dual aspects of his personality by living with the hard working and serious Evan Durbin, while socialising with the utterly frivolous Maurice Bowra. He joined the Labour Party in 1926. After Oxford and a first in PPE, radicalised by the general strike, he spent a year in the Nottinghamshire coal field lecturing for the WEA before moving to Bloomsbury. In April 1937 he married Dora Frost, nee Creditor, with whom he had two daughters. He taught Economics at UCL until the outbreak of World War Two.

In the interwar period Gaitskell was one of a small group of economists who introduced the ideas of J. M. Keynes to Labour politicians like Hugh Dalton. He was Labour's unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate at Chatham in 1935. After wartime service on the home front, working closely with Dalton at the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Board of Trade, he was awarded a CBE in 1945. He was elected MP for South Leeds in 1945 and served as Minister Fuel and Power from October 1947 until May 1950, having been the Parliamentary Secretary at the department from May 1946. From February until October 1950 he was Minister for Economic Affairs before becoming the last Chancellor of the Attlee governments in October 1950. He delivered only one budget, which was dominated by the need for rearmament and which split the cabinet and contributed to the defeat of the government in 1951.

Power was the defining political experience of his life, more important than even the General Strike, because it determined him on the single unshakeable conviction which underpinned much of what was to come later: power was critical, power to put principles into practice. He learnt his politics in the age of power; he practised power in the most successful administration of the century. For the rest of his life he wanted it back; sometimes it prevented him from playing the political game as well as he might. In Opposition he was Shadow Chancellor, also serving as Party Treasurer 1954-56 and campaigned effectively for the leadership which he won in December 1955 with 157 votes, defeating Bevan on 70 votes and the ageing Morrison on 40. He led the party with a zealous belief in the need for it to modernise. His leadership was characterised by a series of bruising internal conflicts. He initially went some way to reconciling the left and worked closely with Bevan on Suez in 1956, but his revisionist policies led to confrontations over nationalisation and Clause IV. He was also committed to the Atlantic alliance and collective security which in turn led to more divisions over unilateralism. His belief in the commonwealth led to a break with his own supporters over membership of the European Economic Community. These divisions resulted in the three great crises that summoned up his period as leader. Following a crushing defeat in the 1959 general election, Gaitskell proposed the updating of Clause IV of the party constitution to reflect modern concerns as revealed in the work of pioneering pollsters like Mark Abrams and in the political ideas of Gaitskell's close friend, Tony Crosland. Despite pinning his personal prestige to a new statement of party aims he was defeated. This led to a concerted attack on his position as leader and the defeat of his defence policy by CND inspired resolutions at the Scarborough conference of 1960. He responded to defeat with his famous 'fight and fight and fight again' speech which rallied supporters of NATO and saw CND defeated at the 1961 conference. At the 1962 conference he dismayed many of his supporters by opposing British membership of the EEC in an equally electrifying platform performance.

His attempt to change Clause IV and his two great conference speeches were typical of his style of leading from the front and his faith that the party could be persuaded to adopt his positions by the force of rational argument. This didacticism was matched by his faith in economic intervention as a means of improving society. He chose to be a socialist because he believed that it was right rather having been born into it and he was impatient with those who did not share his faith. Though an inspirational leader for those who agreed with him, he inspired passionate dislike amongst his political opponents. In the final analysis his ability to hold the Labour Party together was questionable, though the substance of the policy differences between the two wings of the party in the 1950s appear much less profound in hindsight than they did at the time. For example his revisionism was conducted within strict intellectual and emotional limits that rejected market economics in favour of Keynesian demand management and planning. Though he was convinced of the need to transcend nationalisation as the main means of achieving greater equality, he remained dedicated to the ends of social justice and retained a deep seated faith in state action. Moreover, he did not believe that the historical Labour Party needed to be abandoned to achieve a modern and relevant approach and was very much of the 1931 generation in his suspicion of pacts with other parties. He was wedded to the Labour Party and had a strong belief in its ability to change. His sudden death on 18 January 1963 in London robbed him of the opportunity of being Prime Minister and thus his career has an unfinished quality about it. Moreover, he made a major mistake in the 1959 campaign when he pledged that the Labour Party would not increase taxation. This focussed the campaign on Labour as a tax and spend party. While his next campaign might have been more effective he would not have been in as good a position to exploit Conservative problems over Profumo and other scandals, because of the nature of his own private life and his affair with the socialite Ann Fleming. He had undoubted qualities of leadership and revealed himself in the great struggles of his career as a man of the highest integrity and courage, but his single-mindedness, which could often appear as stubbornness, must leave a question mark over the claim frequently made for him as being the best Prime Minister Britain never had. Hugh Gaitskell's legacy to the Labour Party was a style of confrontational leadership and a political approach of brutal frankness. He was intellectually and emotionally woven into the Labour Party and Labour Movement in a way which his society love life could not obscure. His revisionism was a commitment to the future of the Labour Party as an independent political entity. He did not toy with coalition or merger with Liberals but advocated, in his attempt to replace Clause IV, the modernisation of the Labour Party so that it absorbed the radical centre. His brand of economic intervention and central belief in equality, were entirely incompatible with liberalism. He did not believe that the destruction of the historical Labour Party was necessary for the formation of a revisionist Labour Party. His legacy is therefore of an alternative model of modernising leadership, one followed by Neil Kinnock and John Smith and espoused by the current Chancellor of the Exchequer and not the current Prime Minister. Tony Blair's modernising leadership contain flexibility on one issue, above all others, that Hugh Gaitskell contemptuously rejected after the 1959 election: the integrity of the Labour Party as an independent political force was not negotiable. The lessons of 1931 were burned into Labour leaders of his generation and he was not about to repeat the error. But that did not mean that the Labour Party should not change and that any debate on means was worth having. In this respect he has most in common with Gordon Brown, but he was also very much a man and a politician of his time and his central faith was in the power of economic theory to improve human life.

Hugh Gaitskell's publications include: Chartism (London 1929); In Defence of Politics (London, 1954); The High Cost of Toryism (London, 1956); Recent Developments in British Socialist Thinking (London, 1956); The Challenge of Co-existence (London, 1957); Labour and the Common Market (London,1962); and, edited by Philip Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell (London, 1983). Works about Hugh Gaitskell include Bill Rodgers, (editor), Hugh Gaitskell 1906-1963, (London, 1964); E.J. Goodman, Hugh Gaitskell and the Modernisation of the Labour Party, (PhD, Nebraska, 1965, (University Microfilms International, Catalogue number 6601020); Stephen Haseler, The Gaitskellites, (London, 1969); Geoffrey McDermott, Leader Lost, (London, 1972); Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography, (London, 1979); 'Hugh Gaitskell', in John Vaizey, Breach of Promise (London, 1983);'Hugh Gaitskell' in Michael Foot, Loyalists and Loners (London, 1986); 'Hugh Gaitskell: The Social Democrat as Hero' in David Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma, (London, 1991); 'Hugh Gaitskell: 1955-1963' in Peter Shore, Leading the Left (London, 1993) 'Hugh Gaitskell' in Ben Pimlott, Frustrate their Knavish Trick (London, 1994) and Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell, (London, 1996).