Managing Decline #19: Patrick Gordon Walker

British Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century

At some point this year, I hope to publish a book on Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century. This will cover the thirty-one men who held the position, from Lansdowne to Robin Cook. These will be whole life profiles, but as a taster I will be posting each week extracts covering just their time as Foreign Secretary. This week, Patrick Gordon Walker, one of the more obscure incumbents, with the second shortest tenure of my thirty-one subjects.

Patrick Gordon Walker’s short period at the Foreign Office was the pinnacle of a brief Cabinet career. An unlucky politician – if he is remembered at all today, it is for the two electoral defeats that bookended his three months as Foreign Secretary.

Unlike previous Labour Foreign Secretaries, Gordon Walker’s background was firmly middle class – a chid of the Raj, educated at Wellington and Christ Church College, Oxford, before becoming a don. He entered politics in the thirties and became an MP in 1945, rising to join Attlee’s Cabinet as Commonwealth Secretary, where he served for twenty months before the government lost office.

By the late fifties, Gordon Walker had become close to Hugh Gaitskell, acting as his chief of staff. He briefly contemplated standing for the leadership after Gaitskell’s untimely death in early 1963, but instead served as campaign manager for George Brown.

Despite Brown’s defeat by Harold Wilson, it seemed that Gordon Walker had prospered, becoming Shadow Foreign Secretary. But for Wilson, this was partly a case of ‘divide and rule’ and it allowed a more amenable appointment than Brown or Healey, who both wanted the role. Wilson had already decided that he would be his own Foreign Secretary, every bit as much as Macmillan had been. Gordon Walker may have brought to the role a combination of experience and intellect, but he would be only the supporting act – an unnamed Labour front bencher apparently noted cruelly that Gordon Walker was “the best Selwyn Lloyd we’ve got”. Scarcely less bluntly, Crossman’s diary records Wilson telling him that “Gordon Walker would do as he’s told”.

Wilson’s view, as he told Gordon Walker, was that foreign affairs could not win elections for Labour, but it could lose them. His aim was to dispel any concerns by reassuring Britain’s allies – primarily the wary Americans – as well as the electorate that Labour would represent continuity. Gordon Walker set out his thinking in an article for the journal Foreign Affairs in early 1964 – it was no accident that he had chosen an American publication. In response to German demands for equality of status within NATO, President Kennedy had proposed a shared NATO nuclear force – the MLF, or Multilateral Force. Britain – both Conservatives and Labour – felt this idea was misguided. Gordon Walker argued in Foreign Affairs that Britain could no longer afford to maintain a nuclear arsenal itself and should allow its existing V-bomber fleet to run down in return for a share in shaping American nuclear policy and wanted France and Germany (later adding Italy) to be equal partners in that process. Britain remained committed to a global role and its presence east of Suez, reliant upon a greater use of mobile forces. In the privacy of his diary, he proposed reducing troop levels in Germany and transferring resources to the Indian Ocean, “where force can still be used”. In May 1963, Gordon Walker visited Washington to persuade the Kennedy administration face to face and the following month he travelled with Wilson to Moscow.

Gordon Walker had comfortably won his Smethwick seat in 1945, but the character of the constituency was changing, and his majority steadily fell through the 1950s. The difficulties he would face in the 1964 election had not come out of the blue, and as early as 1962 he had warned Gaitskell that he might be in trouble. The real problem was poor housing, with extremist elements such as the local branch of the ‘Birmingham Immigration Control Association’ placing the blame on immigration. As it happens, Gordon Walker’s own position on immigration was on the right of his party, but he had become a particular focus because – as Shadow Home Secretary – he had opposed the restrictions introduced by the Conservative government in 1961. Seen as a Hampstead intellectual, out of touch with his constituents, Gordon Walker lacked the talent for knockabout politics which might have saved him. He was defeated on a swing to the Conservatives of 7.2%, compared to a national swing to Labour of 3.5%. His opponent, Peter Griffiths, carried to Westminster after an ugly, racist campaign, was denounced in the Commons by Wilson as “a Parliamentary leper”.

Wilson had promised Gordon Walker that he would become Foreign Secretary even if he lost his seat, and he kept his word – as much as a show of defiance to the Smethwick voters as it was a gesture of magnanimity. It also reflected the lack of experience Wilson had at his disposal – Gordon Walker would be one of just three survivors from Attlee’s Cabinet in the new government. But it meant he had to combine the onerous duties of the Foreign Office with campaigning in a by-election for a new constituency. This was to prove an impossibly demanding combination.

As Gordon Walker’s tenure was so short, examination of some of the tensions within the Cabinet and Labour Party on foreign policy are best left to the next chapter. Wilson did implement some changes right from the start: Barbara Castle took on the new role of Minister for Overseas Development, though the position failed to live up to the original hopes – largely due to the worsening financial position. Castle was in place for little more than a year and none of her successors had the same impact; after 1967, the position was demoted below Cabinet rank.

Within the Foreign Office itself there were also new roles for two of the Ministers of State. Britain’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations had always been an official but, in a move to give him increased status, Lord Caradon filled the position at ministerial level. This arrangement was retained until 1970 but not repeated for any of his successors. Lord Chalfont was brought in to the department with specific responsibilities for disarmament. Whilst he became a more than usually prominent junior minister, again this was an experiment that was not repeated. Gordon Walker never had the time to implement his ambition to merge with the Commonwealth Office, a task for which he was well qualified; that would have to wait until 1968. He was able to ensure the appointment of Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a relative outsider as High Commissioner in Delhi, as Permanent Under-Secretary to succeed Sir Harold Caccia. Gore-Booth was not the first choice but he was to prove an able ‘new broom’.[1]

Wilson’s commitment to continuity had effectively neutralised foreign affairs as an election issue. The differences between the two parties amounted to a matter of nuance and can be summed up as Labour having less enthusiasm than the Conservatives for the independent nuclear deterrent and the EEC; more for the Commonwealth and the UN; and a greater appetite for condemning apartheid South Africa. Over the next six years any distinctiveness Labour might have had on these issues was to become very blurred.

The first shift in Labour’s position, soon after the election, came when the new government discovered that the Polaris project (initiated under Macmillan after the Nassau summit with Kennedy) was so far advanced that cancellation made little sense. Wilson, Gordon Walker, and Denis Healey (the Defence Secretary) meeting as a Cabinet committee made the decision to continue with the programme. Only the proposed fifth submarine was cancelled (and it bore all the signs of only having been included in the plans as a potential sacrificial lamb for just this eventuality). Although other programmes were to be cut, Polaris survived, largely because of the sunk costs, and all four of the new submarines were commissioned into service before the government left office.

The most critical issue facing the Labour government was the economy. The decision was made early that devaluation of Sterling was out of the question – so the deficit would be dependent on foreign credits while the government pursued its policy of growth, underpinned by centralised planning and selective intervention. The result was a series of economic crises until 1967 when devaluation was forced upon the government.[2]

This dire state of the economy and the decision not to devalue the pound had a very direct and immediate impact on foreign policy. It meant that maintaining the goodwill of the American administration was essential. The bargain agreed in Washington that December was that Britain would maintain its global commitments, specifically its presence in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Gulf, and would support the American involvement in Vietnam. Unfortunately, that global presence was especially costly in terms of foreign currency and maintaining it was a major strain on the reserves – leading to the vicious circle that ensuring the United States’ support of the economy only placed the economy under greater pressure.

There was also agreement on a British counterproposal to MLF. Britain would pledge its nuclear submarines, to be matched by American vessels, to a NATO force to be called the Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF). This would have the advantages over MLF that it showed that Britain would not maintain an independent nuclear deterrent; avoided the spread of nuclear weapons; and brought the prize of obtaining a share of American nuclear policy making. In a first foreign policy win for the government, President Johnson was persuaded to agree, abandoning American support for MLF. The ANF had a short life as a concept, and Wilson ensured that discussions moved slowly, complicated by discussions with the Soviets on nuclear non-proliferation. The first nail in its coffin came with de Gaulle’s announcement in 1966 that France was leaving NATO’s integrated command structure; the second and final nail when Willie Brandt’s SPD came to power in West Germany and signalled that they had no interest in acquiring a share in nuclear hardware.

The visit to Washington proved to be the last significant event of Gordon Walker’s brief time at the Foreign Office. Reg Sorensen, the MP for Leyton, had reluctantly been persuaded to retire to allow him a way back to the Commons. It proved to be a poor choice, but Gordon Walker was unwilling to contest a seat further away from his London home. There was local resentment at being foisted with Gordon Walker, who lacked Sorensen’s long association with the borough, and once again the campaign had an unpleasant racist tinge. Having inherited an 11,000-vote majority, Gordon Walker was defeated by a margin of just 205 votes. Accepting his misfortune with some dignity, he telephoned Harold Wilson that night to offer his resignation.

This was not quite the end of Gordon Walker’s political career, but he never regained the same standing in the government. He contested Leyton again in the 1966 election, this time winning the seat convincingly. He rejoined the Cabinet and was made Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1967, though was sacked by Wilson the following year. Gordon Walker remained an MP until 1974 before taking a seat in the Lords. He was found dead in the back of a taxi arriving at Parliament in 1980.

Patrick Gordon Walker’s career must be regarded as a disappointment. It was sheer bad luck that he was out of office in his prime during the thirteen years of Conservative government after 1951. His defeats at Smethwick and Leyton were also unfortunate but his lack of street-fighting political skills was partly to blame and it had proved at best a mixed blessing to have chosen to become so closely identified with the Commonwealth. And although not covered in this extract – but will be in the book – at both the Commonwealth Office and Education, he demonstrated a damaging lack of political sensitivity. As for the Foreign Office, Gordon Walker never had the opportunity to prove himself, and will always be a case of what might have been.

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[1] Gore-Booth had a bizarre brush with controversy in 1968. As President of the Sherlock Holmes society, he led a group that went to the Reichenbach Falls to re-enact the struggle with Professor Moriarty. Richard Crossman protested to the Prime Minister that this was inappropriate conduct, a complaint which Michael Stewart had no difficulty in fending off.

[2] This is the most cursory summary: more will be said in the subsequent chapters on George Brown and James Callaghan, who were the responsible ministers in 1964.