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The Chancellors: A History of the Chancellors of the Exchequer, 1945-90
Excellent Book
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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January 5, 2026
Dell is a clear writer, with a good understanding of public finance, and also was trained as a historian. He gives a reasoned verdict on chancellors all the way back to Hugh Dalton who became chancellor in 1945. I have a tendency to assume that politicians of the past were more honest and competent than those of the present. This book is a good antidote to this view.
Dell doesn't seem especially impressed by any of the incumbents of the office. Maybe this is because he feels that he'd have done a better job than any of them. He certainly was in with a chance of becoming chancellor, and seems to have a good understanding of the pitfalls of the job, although this might have been obtained with the hindsight of researching this book. If he had written it, and then become chancellor, he would almost certainly have been better prepared than anyone who actually got the job.
There is a lot of coverage of the relationship between the chancellors and the mandarins at HM Treasury, which, given that the book was written by a politician, is fairly sympathetic. It must be immensely difficult to both give the best advice to a chancellor, and also be sensitive to the political constraints that he has to operate under. One interesting aspect of this relationship is the different timescales over which the institutional memory of the Treasury and that of politicians operate. The treasury was smarting from some bad advice it gave RA Butler in the early 1950s decades later, probably when politicians had forgotten all about it entirely.
One common theme across most of the accounts is how chancellors are frequently blown off course by inaccurate economic forecasts. Even though forecasting now must be hugely more sophisticated than that available to, for example, Harold Macmillan, it seems to be equally unreliable. The new fad of endlessly proposing fiscal rules, and then breaking them, does not really help matters.
Dell doesn't seem especially impressed by any of the incumbents of the office. Maybe this is because he feels that he'd have done a better job than any of them. He certainly was in with a chance of becoming chancellor, and seems to have a good understanding of the pitfalls of the job, although this might have been obtained with the hindsight of researching this book. If he had written it, and then become chancellor, he would almost certainly have been better prepared than anyone who actually got the job.
There is a lot of coverage of the relationship between the chancellors and the mandarins at HM Treasury, which, given that the book was written by a politician, is fairly sympathetic. It must be immensely difficult to both give the best advice to a chancellor, and also be sensitive to the political constraints that he has to operate under. One interesting aspect of this relationship is the different timescales over which the institutional memory of the Treasury and that of politicians operate. The treasury was smarting from some bad advice it gave RA Butler in the early 1950s decades later, probably when politicians had forgotten all about it entirely.
One common theme across most of the accounts is how chancellors are frequently blown off course by inaccurate economic forecasts. Even though forecasting now must be hugely more sophisticated than that available to, for example, Harold Macmillan, it seems to be equally unreliable. The new fad of endlessly proposing fiscal rules, and then breaking them, does not really help matters.
Displaying 1 of 1 review