George Brown resigns as Foreign Secretary: 15 March 1968 Posted on: 15 March 2018 George Brown (left) and Harold Wilson in The Hague, 1967 (Ron Kroon/Anefo, Dutch National Archives)
Recalling those days one is not only impressed, but almost oppressed, with the sense of how many issues we were faced with and had to handle at the same time.1 When George Brown stormed out of Downing St in the early hours of 15 March 1968, it was not the first time he had threatened to resign. On this occasion the trigger was his allegation that he had been deliberately excluded from an emergency ministerial meeting called in response to an American request to close the London foreign exchange market during an international gold crisis. His intemperate outburst in front of other ministers, accusing Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson of lying, crossed a line. This time he did not retract his resignation, and this time Wilson accepted it. Wilson and Brown later gave very different versions of the events of 14 to 15 March: the Prime Minister asserting that all present agreed Brown’s behaviour was intolerable; the Foreign Secretary accusing Wilson of taking decisions in a ‘presidential’ fashion over the heads of ministers.2 Wilson’s canny but manipulative prime ministerial style is welldocumented, as well as his habit of relying on a small group of advisers including Marcia Williams. George Brown’s mercurial temperament, sometimes exacerbated by alcohol, is also well-known: as Denis Healey put it, ‘when he was good he was very good, but when he was bad he was horrid’, though Foreign Office officials, according to Sir Denis Greenhill, found they could forgive his ‘instability, intolerance and cruelty’ because of his ‘undoubted brilliance and the rightness of many of his policy aims’.3 Nevertheless, Wilson and Brown were men of exceptional ability who had worked together for years, successfully if not always harmoniously. Wilson appreciated Brown’s talents and judgement, and Brown recognised Wilson’s toughness and skill in leading Labour to victory in 1964 and to re-election with an increased majority in 1966, keeping a fractious Cabinet of ‘big beasts’ together. So why did the break come on 15 March? Loss of patience and mutual exasperation played a part: but a snapshot of the wider context indicates that the responsibilities of power and problems of policy faced by the two men were also a key element in what happened.
63
