Attlee was unwell, Cripps was ill and had had to retire and Ernie Bevin was dying The top leadership was fading away. Who would take their place? Cripps's successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer was Hugh Gaitskell and Wilson would have been less than human if he had not been jealous of another economist coming into the Cabinet over his head. When Gaitskell, at the behest of the Americans, decided to finance a heavy programme of rearmament, was it envy and ambition that motivated Wilson to oppose it? Or was it simply that as a good chief of the Board of Trade he had to warn the Cabinet that the programme was impossible and that his own department could not procure all the raw materials needed?Certainly he was not personally piqued as was Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the revolt, by Gaitskell's insistence on diluting the National Health Service by levying charges for false teeth and spectacles. One must remember that, though Wilson was by this time a mature cabinet minister, he was still an inexperienced politician who had been sheltered from the politics of rivalry and ambition by his giant department. Did he think that soon, when Labour had fought and lost the election, Bevan would replace Attlee as Leader and he, Wilson, would be Number Two?It was long years in opposition that allowed Wilson to make himself into a politician, a potential leader and a brilliant House of Commons orator and wit Bevan gave him the clue - ''Cut out the boring detail''. Wilson studied Bevan's methods and, elected to Labour's front bench, he made his attacks on Tory budgets a joyful annual event.Noting the change in imagery when Macmillan succeeded Butler as Chancellor, he said that Butler's had been equestrian and horticultural, ''curbing the spirited horses'' and ''pruning the roses'' while Macmillan had gone to the electrician to describe the ''blowing of fuses and the pulling out of plugs''.
Rarely, commented the unfriendly Daily Telegraph, ''has the clown been played to such effect''.When the Tories subsidised industry, Wilson described the Treasury as ''a Public Assistance Board for mendicant capitalists'' and, when they decided to tax compensation paid to company directors, the Tory benches looked to him ''like a collection of St Bernards that had lost their brandy'' Macmillan took a connoisseur's delight in Wilson taunts. But when Macmillan became Prime Minister and claimed to draw on the heritage of both Gladstone and Disraeli, he did not enjoy Wilson's jibe, ''He has inherited the streak of charlatanry in Disraeli, but without his vision; and the streak of self- righteousness in Gladstone without his dedication to principle.''For many years after Labour's defeat in 1951 there was bitter strife in the party between fundamental socialists, with Bevan at their head, and the revisionists, led by Morrison and Gaitskell, who did not believe that the new social and political reality went with the traditional total commitment to socialism. Many people in the party, and Wilson was one of them, stood between the two camps or had a foot in both of them.In later years, Wilson claimed that he was never a Bevanite, simply a co-belligerent with Bevan sharing a place in the wilderness But there was more to it than that. Wilson appeared on Tribune brains trusts and was popularly regarded as one of Bevan's lieutenants. That is why he was elected to the constituency section of the National Executive. His status depended not only on his intellect and on his reputation as a minister but on the support of the Left.When Bevan resigned from the Shadow Cabinet because of disagreement with the policy on German rearmament, Wilson as runner-up in the last election automatically inherited his place. Bevan demanded that he resign at once, and when he refused warned him: ''You'll lose your seat on the Executive.'' ''Not so,'' Wilson said, ''I'll come top.'' So he did.
He had learnt to show Conference as much sport in Tory-bashing as Bevan himself could, though he made the journey to the socialist promised land seem longer and more arduous.Wilson lost nothing of his standing in the party, though he did in the country by hinting that Oliver Poole, the Tory Deputy Chairman, was somehow connected with a leak in the City about an impending change in the Bank Rate. A Tribunal of Inquiry showed there was nothing in it and Wilson, humiliated yet defiant, narrowly avoided disaster in a 90-minute speech in the Commons. With his back to the wall he was at his best.His capacity for equivocation - or compromise - reached new heights after the loss of the 1959 election, a loss for which he shared responsibility with Gaitskell by an unconvincing claim that Labour's plans for a better Britain could be financed out of increased production without putting up taxation.Gaitskell now wanted to amend Clause IV of the party's Constitution. Wilson was not a fundamentalist but he argued that the clause represented the central myth of the party, and so should be kept as it was The conflict was defused, but then moved to Defence.