ABSTRACT
In 1970 after the defeat of the Labour Party in the General Elections I was invited by Tom Ponsonby, then General Secretary of the Fabian Society, to work with him in a voluntary capacity. Tom wanted the Society to act as a ginger group in enabling the Party to rebuild and revitalise itself. My job would be to support him in achieving that goal. With Tom I attended that autumn a weekend gathering of the Shadow Cabinet plus key advisers that was held at Buscot Park, the country seat of Lord Faringdon. The purpose of the gathering was to ask what went wrong. One critical, albeit unsurprising, conclusion was that the delaying of devaluation had had devastating consequences for the Labour government’s economic strategy. The significance of this – which I did not realise for some time – lay in the implication that the effectiveness of Labour’s economic strategy was not in doubt. Problems had arisen from ineffective implementation.
