ABSTRACT
Hugh Dalton became one of the most prominent Labour figures during the 1930s, following the disastrous general election of 1931 which saw the Parliamentary Labour Party reduced to about one-sixth of its former size. Later, he became a member of Winston Churchill’s wartime Coalition Government and subsequently was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer in Attlee’s post-war Labour government. Ben Pimlott, in his introduction to The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton (1986, p. 465) described Dalton as ‘the most economically literate of all modern Chancellors apart from his protégé Hugh Gaitskell’.
