Timeline 102762 Australia 02 Operation Manna by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-01-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18 | Treading Water

Thursday 14th February 1963

Government House, Cheltenham

If the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had had a Chancellor of its Exchequer – or rather, had had an ‘Exchequer’, that was – the man who had held the post of Economic Secretary to the Treasury[69] on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962, might have been ‘it’. Might being the operative word because although the Economic Secretary was the man specifically responsible for the answering of written and oral Parliamentary questions, and theoretically, also for the drawing up of regulations, statutory orders, the probity of financial institutions, and for advising other Treasury Ministers on economic policy, he was not responsible for actually ‘making policy’. In other words the job of Economic Secretary was one of those jobs that ‘somebody had to do’, a rite of passage, a test a candidate for high office simply had to pass if he was ever to ascend the greasy pole of political life.

Edward Dillon Lott du Cann had not been the worst Economic Secretary in living memory in his relatively short – war-abbreviated – stint at the Treasury but neither had he set the world on fire. It did not help that all and sundry knew that he was a businessman first and politician second, and that Edward Heath had never really had a great deal of time for the man.

Du Cann was ‘slippery’, the Prime Minister had concluded years before when he was still Chief Whip, and even in the fifties he had suspected that sooner or later that the Honourable Member of Parliament for Taunton - with his large coterie of ‘City friends’ - would become a liability. Others found the thirty-eight year old Oxford educated friend of the author Kingsley Amis[70] and former Second World War motor torpedo boat commander a charming, accomplished ‘operator’.

It was while he was serving in the Royal Navy that he had met yachtsmen and businessmen Owen Aisher and David Wickens. Aisher, who with his father had pioneered the manufacturing of concrete roofing tiles had set up Marley Ltd in the 1930s. During the war Marley had been heavily involved in the building of the Mulberry harbours for the Normandy Landings and after the war had become a major supplier to the building industry. Wickens had set up British Car Auctions in 1946. With such connections it was hard to know how du Cann could fail in business.

However, rather than being handed – as the only surviving Treasury minister – the Chancellor’s brief, the Prime Minister had included it in his own portfolio, and retained du Cann in the capacity of an ex officio ‘advisor’. Inevitably, du Cann’s nose had been somewhat put out of joint by this – the very notion that he was anybody’s errand boy, even the Prime Minister’s, was to say the least, disappointing - but in typical fashion he was making the best of a bad deal.

For example, for the purposes of this morning’s meeting he had styled himself ‘Economic Advisor

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