ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Food that was set up as a result of the Cabinet crisis of December 1916 bore, superficially at least, all the hallmarks of the new Prime Minister’s personal philosophy of government. Headed by a Liberal businessman, it was staffed partly by a small nucleus of professional civil servants and partly by a much larger group of temporary administrators, drawn from retail trading, brewing, catering, agriculture, journalism, banking and finance. Over the next three years the ministry gradually established a monopoly over 85 per cent of the nation’s food supplies, and in the financial year ending March 1919 registered a turnover of £900 million. All this was done with minimal expense to the taxpayer – in fact, accounts rendered by the ministry at the end of the war showed a modest profit of one-quarter of 1 per cent. 1 This experiment in state trading was interpreted by contemporaries in various conflicting ways: as a model for permanent state socialism; as proof that socialism could only work in conditions of dire national emergency; and as a landmark in that convergence of state and entrepreneurial interests which some historians have seen as a central theme of twentieth-century British history. 2 The vast range of the ministry’s activities and the volume of its records make it impossible to explore such questions in detail here. The following essay will be mainly concerned with debates about the scope of state control provoked by the wartime food crisis, and with the widely varying and often conflicting contributions to those debates made by Whitehall civil servants and by businessmen drawn into government for the duration of the war.
