Men and Issues

Abstract

During the first five years of Conservative government, the parties and institutions drifted out of sympathy with the political ethos of the immediate post-war consensus in response to changing external conditions and their members’ increasing discontents. Those who staffed industry’s and unions’ central organisations, however, and even more the Civil Service mandarins, still took for granted the existence of a common interest in the 1944 White Paper’s blend of mutual advantage and reciprocal obligation — if the leaders of the institutions could only be made to accept them. But the mandarins had first to contend with a novel impediment: the Churchill government’s suspicious attempts to rearrange or downgrade their functions.