Sir Ronald Mcintosh
Civil servant who struggled to solve the 1974 miners’ dispute through the bipartisan council ‘Neddy’
SIR RONALD MCINTOSH, who has died aged 99, was a gifted and self-confident civil servant who throughout the 1970s was at the centre of Conservative and Labour governments’ efforts to make their pay policies stick and head off economic failure.
Dapper, innovative and immensely able, Ronnie Mcintosh – an advocate of centralised industrial planning – was to Roy Hattersley “one of the men in Whitehall who knew best”. Denis Healey put it more caustically: “The trouble with Ronnie is that he thinks he’s Jesus Christ.”
From 1973 to 1977 he was directorgeneral of the National Economic Development Office, seeking consensus between industry and trade unions. Mcintosh – who had served mainly in the Board of Trade (BOT) – observed: “Almost all my experience in Whitehall has been a kind of preparation for a job of this sort.”
Mcintosh hoped for his own department, but William Armstrong, head of the Civil Service, told him too many Labour ministers had praised him. Yet he was a lifelong friend of Edward Heath – sharing his love of sailing – as well as of Roy Jenkins, and worked closest on pay policy with the Conservative Robert Carr.
At Carr’s Department of Employment, he wooed Tory ministers back to the idea of an incomes policy, while urging employers not to give in to heavy wage claims. When he first met Margaret Thatcher, she exclaimed: “You are the man who wouldn’t let me pay my teachers the salaries they deserved.”
“Neddy”, the National Economic Development Council, which Mcintosh’s office (“Nedo”) serviced, had been set up by Harold Macmillan to generate a French-style industrial policy driven by consensus. Its monthly meetings brought together the prime minister, cabinet ministers, union leaders, the CBI, nationalised industry chairmen and mandarins.
Yet Neddy, even with Mcintosh’s involvement, could not avert the 1974 miners’ strike which brought down Heath’s government. He tried under Labour to make Neddy more effective, leaving for the private sector before Mrs Thatcher came to power.
Mcintosh increasingly felt that Britain needed a coalition government under someone like Jenkins. Indeed Jenkins later mused over lunch with him whether he should have waited for such an eventuality instead of moving to Brussels.
Late in 1976 Mcintosh delivered a lecture advocating a long-term strategy, higher priority for manufacturing and continuity in economic policy. Healey rebuked him; the Queen invited him to lunch, at which the Duke of Edinburgh told him he had merely been stating the obvious.
Ronald Robert Duncan Mcintosh was born in Cumberland on September 26 1919, the son of a doctor, and brought up in London.
From Charterhouse, where he was head of school, he went up to Balliol in 1938, meeting Jenkins on his first day and Heath soon after. That autumn he campaigned for Robert Lindsay, master of the college, against Quintin Hogg in an Oxford by-election overshadowed by Munich.
When war broke out, Mcintosh joined the Merchant Navy. Sailing from Barry, he arrived in the River Plate to see the recently scuttled Graf Spee breaking surface. Returning, he contracted malaria and was admitted to hospital in Freetown.
Arriving in Gravesend at the height of the Blitz, he abandoned pacifism but
stayed with the merchant marine. One voyage to Singapore was diverted to Australia 36 hours before the colony fell; he tended a crew member who died of smallpox.
After a month in quarantine, Mcintosh returned in the Lycaon, picking up 60 survivors from a convoy attacked by U-boats. He was aboard another freighter in the Humber when a German bomber’s payload exploded either side of the ship.
His last vessel was a Liberty ship, the Samoresby; the crew went over in the Queen Mary to collect her, returning with ammunition. Mcintosh spent V-J Day loading corned beef in Rosario, and ended the war a First Mate.
Returning to Balliol, he was tutored in Economics by the future Lord Balogh, then joined the Board of Trade in 1947. He worked on setting up the Monopolies Commission, and attended the Havana Conference which led to the GATT trade agreement.
In 1949 he was appointed general manager of the Dollar Exports Board, formed to get exports into North America. Three years followed responsible for the cotton industry, then from 1955 he worked on a trade agreement with Australia to replace Imperial Preference.
Mcintosh was posted to New Delhi in 1957, helping British firms negotiate the country’s Byzantine licensing system. He dined with Nehru and a visiting Edwina Mountbatten a fortnight before she died.
He returned in 1961 to a Board of Trade headed by Heath; visiting Durham, Heath treated Mcintosh and the dean to a recital on the Cathedral’s organ. After Macmillan appointed Hogg minister for the North-east, Mcintosh took charge of the Bot’s new regional development division.
Coming to power in 1964, Harold Wilson set up a Department of Economic Affairs under George Brown to offset the “negativity” of the Treasury. Brown asked Mcintosh to devise a regional policy with a group of young industrialists. He later worked with Harold Lever on launching Labour’s Industrial Reorganisation Corporation.
In 1968 Mcintosh moved to the Cabinet Office – reckoning Wilson, Jenkins and Healey gave the Cabinet meetings he attended “the intellectual horsepower to match any other”.
As Heath led the Conservatives to power in 1970, Mcintosh joined the amiable Carr at Employment. They pursued an “n minus one” policy to drive down public sector pay increases – lowering the “going rate” despite a 27 per cent increase for the miners.
After a brief spell at the Treasury, coordinating pay and prices policy, Mcintosh in June 1973 was appointed director-general of Nedo, with permanent secretary rank, as the Coal Board and the miners were beginning pay negotiations. Ministers thought the miners would settle within the statutory limit, then war in the Middle East pushed up the price of oil. Heath nevertheless ruled out exceptions to the pay policy.
The NCB offered the maximum permitted, which the miners rejected, and as they banned overtime Mcintosh began looking for a way out. Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph wanted to settle, but Tony Barber, the Chancellor, and Jim Prior persuaded Heath to stand firm and the three-day week ensued.
At Neddy’s December meeting Mcintosh hoped for progress, but an argument broke out over the three-day week, then Heath weighed in to say the whole thing was the miners’ fault.
Mcintosh knew the miners would eventually get a higher settlement. But as the NCB and NUM prepared a joint approach to the Pay Board, Heath put up the shutters.
A further opportunity was lost at Neddy’s first meeting of 1974. The TUC promised that an exception for the miners would not be jumped on by other workers, but Barber rejected the offer, despite Mcintosh highlighting the positives. On January 24 the NUM called a strike.
Heath called an election over “who governs Britain”, and lost, Wilson returning with a minority government.
In wake of the strike and with the economy weak, Wilson hoped Neddy could help revive the economy. But the situation worsened, amid concerns that an authoritarian government could take over. Mcintosh asked the Treasury what it had up its sleeve, and was told no one had any idea.
Early in 1975 Mcintosh warned of a dangerous slide in investment unless government, industry and unions joined forces to boost productivity. Then he told journalists Healey was becoming less optimistic about an early global upturn. Rebuked by the Treasury, he said: “This is an occasion for making no comment and going for a nice walk.”
Mcintosh laid the groundwork for a summit chaired by Wilson to develop an industrial policy playing to Britain’s strengths – an initiative Wilson himself torpedoed by giving Chrysler nearly £200 million without strings.
When Wilson’s successor James Callaghan turned to the International Monetary Fund for help, Mcintosh met the “gnomes of Zurich” who would ultimately lend the money, and tried to head off the deflation the Fund was demanding.
Mcintosh decided to leave Nedo before the election Callaghan was expected to call in October 1978; ministers struggled to find a replacement. With Mrs Thatcher in power and the unions marginalised, Neddy was wound up by Nigel Lawson.
Mcintosh joined the boards of Fisons – where he was briefly in line to be chairman – London & Manchester Assurance and SG Warburg. Siegmund Warburg believed passionately in graphology, so Mcintosh had to submit a sample of his handwriting to a Swiss lady who scrutinised it for flaws in his character.
Through Warburgs, he became in 1982 chairman of the engineering firm APV, turning its fortunes round. He fought off a takeover from Siebe, negotiated a merger with the food processing machine-maker Baker Perkins and acquired the Danish dairy equipment firm Pasilac. Mcintosh handed over to Sir Peter Cazalet in 1989, leaving APV with 14,000 employees and annual sales of £700 million.
As Communism collapsed, Mcintosh proposed that APV lead a consortium to help outlying parts of Russia develop an integrated food chain. A pioneering arrangement for Ukraine was signed in Kiev in 1990 in the presence of Mrs Thatcher.
Next year John Gummer, agriculture minister, dispatched Mcintosh to avert a food shortage in St Petersburg. A “model” farm was set up, and basic management techniques secured dramatic gains in output.
From 1992 to 1997 Mcintosh chaired the British Health Care Consortium. Based in Ekaterinburg, it offered health services in deepest Russia pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, hospital design and construction, staff training in Britain and help with financial management. In 1993 he accompanied the health secretary Virginia Bottomley to Kazakhstan.
Mcintosh married a Catholic, but only joined the Church after the 1960s reforms of Pope John XXIII – received eventually by Cardinal Hume, whose sister was a family friend.
In 1992 Hume appointed him to a commission investigating the Converts’ Aid Society, which supported Anglican clergymen who became Catholics. Its committee had dined heavily in clubland, and Hume wound it up. Mcintosh went on to fund the restoration of the chapel in Madeira where English Mass is celebrated.
Mcintosh published Challenge to Democracy (2006) and a memoir, Turbulent Times (2014). He was appointed CB in 1968 and KCB in 1975, knighted by the Queen alongside his boyhood idol Charlie Chaplin.
Ronnie Mcintosh married Doreen Macginnity in 1951. She died in 2009; there were no children.
Sir Ronald Mcintosh, born September 26 1919, died April 1 2019