Wykehamist chancellors and bringers of misery...
OF all the Prime Minister’s broken promises, among the least surprising was almost exactly a year ago – to appoint a Cabinet “that truly reflects modern Britain”.
Today, 17 of the 26 Cabinetattending ministers received a private/independent school education: a two-thirds proportion that closely reflects the England cricket team’s top batting order, but not the seven per cent of the general population.
Old news, yes, and I raise it only because one of the 17 is Rishi Sunak, current Cabinet star and no less than the sixth Chancellor of the Exchequer educated at Winchester School (annual fees £41,700+, if you were wondering). Still adrift of Eton, which has also provided over a third of our Prime Ministers, but not bad going.
Incidentally, and confusingly, they’re called Old Wykehamists, after the school’s 14th century founder and Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham – and, more importantly, to distinguish them from the residential hoi polloi, who are mere Wintonians.
Anyway, I was impressed, the highest-achieving contemporary ‘Old Boy’ from my school being the lead singer of the 1960s rock band Procul Harum.
What struck me particularly, though, was that, of the five preSunak Wykehamist Chancellors, more were Labour than Conservative – technically anyway. I sense you’re already curious, so we’ll take them in reverse order.
Sunak’s immediate Wykehamist predecessor was Lord (then Sir Geoffrey) Howe –Margaret Thatcher’s longest-serving, and possibly longest-suffering, Cabinet minister, who presented her government’s first five Budgets.
Of which easily most dramatic was the March 1981 ‘Austerity Budget’, which seriously challenged George Bernard Shaw’s famous assertion that, if all economists were laid end to end, they would still not reach a conclusion.
The Government’s so-called monetarist policy involved further deflating an already seriously declining economy with a severity that upset even its own MPs – raising both personal taxation and excise duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco at a time of already high inflation and rapidly rising unemployment.
Though not actually prostrated, some 364 academic economists did manage to reach an agreed conclusion, and wrote a letter to the Times disagreeing profoundly. Howe’s policy had “no basis in economic theory”, and would “deepen the depression and erode the industrial base of our economy”.
In a kind of way, both sides were right. Unemployment rose to a 50-year high, the country’s industrial base did collapse; but eventually that recession did end, though at economic and social costs we are arguably still paying.
Before Howe in the Wykehamist list were Labour’s pair – chronologically Sir Stafford Cripps and Hugh Gaitskell. Sir Stifford Crapps, as the BBC once introduced him (beware, Sishi Runak!), had a remarkable career: son of a Conservative MP, a rich barrister, expelled by Labour as a
Communist sympathiser, wartime Ambassador to the USSR, then re-joined Labour and the post-war Attlee Government as President of the Board of Trade.
Succeeded there in 1947 by a young Harold Wilson, Cripps had the relatively good fortune of becoming Chancellor just as, thanks largely to US grants and loans, the war-crippled economy was very gradually improving.
Instinctively and religiously austere himself, Cripps retained an extensive rationing system and raised taxes. But this enabled him also to prioritise education and social services spending, oversee the development of the national insurance system and NHS, and restore the housebuilding programme.
His place in history was ensured, as perhaps the principal political architect of the 1950s’ growing economic affluence. Sadly, he saw none of it, dying of cancer in 1952.
Cripps’ successor as Chancellor for the final year of the 1945-51 Labour Government was Hugh Gaitskell, eventually his party’s next Leader and – description, not conjecture – in some ways Sunak’s most comparable predecessor. Gaitskell, at 44, was the slightly older, but both were unusually young for their first full Cabinet appointment to be to this most senior of posts.
Sunak’s sequence of full and quasi-Budgets is obviously unique, but Gaitskell’s single April 1951 Budget presented the particular problem for a Labour Chancellor of somehow increasing arms expenditure, including on nuclear weapons, following the ending of the US Marshall Aid programme.
Gaitskell’s provocative solution was to introduce prescription charges for NHS-supplied glasses and dentures, prompting senior ministerial resignations, including party leadership rival Aneurin Bevan, and Harold Wilson.
Fourth in this reverse list of
Sunak’s Wykehamist Chancellor predecessors is Robert Lowe (1868-73), author of one of the better job descriptions: “More or less a taxing machine – entrusted with a certain amount of misery which it is his duty to distribute as fairly as he can.”
He also, like my primary school friend Robert, suffered from albinism – congenital lack of pigmentation
– so, though not a particularly memorable Chancellor, I’m pleased he gets a mention.
Which leaves the ‘not technically’ Conservative Chancellor referenced near the beginning – Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, Chancellor of the Exchequer AND Prime Minister, 1801-04. However, with the Conservative Party uninvented until 1834, technically a Tory.
Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham
Of the five pre-Sunak Wykehamist Chancellors, more were Labour than Conservative