Although that crisis seemed serious then, compared with the present threat to the world banking system, it was small beer.
I count myself fortunate in having met both generations of politicians and scientists. For a raw young MP to be confronted by Sage Bernal was an experience and a half.
Already suffering from physical ailment, and surrounded by some marvellous women who took it in turns to look after him in the evening of his life, he was a fount of ideas and vision.
He catapulted us into the future with promises of electronic miniaturisation and biotechnology. He warned us of the considerable social upset that these advances might cause.
Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was altogether different At first, I thought he was toweringly formidable.
He had been in charge of situations for the previous half century and since he had commanded guns on the Barham at the Battle of Jutland, as a midshipman, in the First World War. Blackett also saw action in 1914 off Port Stanley in the Falklands Islands. When I met him he was marvellous to work with.
I believe the technological revolution would have been better served if Blackett had been appointed to a real job and rather than to an advisory one to Frank Cousins, who became Minister of Technology.
Even the most heavy-weight scientists and snobbish to the end about their colleagues, would have accepted a Nobel prize winner of Blackett’s stature.
What they would not accept was that vain and dreadful C.P. Snow, whose appointment as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Technology was as insulting to the scientific community as it was to the Labour Party.
A fortnight after being made a minister and this raconteur said that he had joined the Labour Party simply to make sure that “they did nothing too silly”. His laziness became a legend in the corridors of power.
His ministerial diary for the day often consisted of a lunch at a club and little else. Snow was Harold Wilson’s biggest ministerial blunder.
Altogether different was Vivian Bowden, now Lord Bowden of Chesterfield, in those days a man of frenetic and driving energy.
He wanted to bring to Britain the great Techntsche Hochscgule of Germany, and laboratories like those run for Philips of Eindhoven by the famous Professor Casimir. Vivian one day told us that he had “sacked his secretary”.
It transpired this was his permanent secretary, Sir Bruce Fraser, one of the greatest Treasury mandarins of the day Vivian had acted without reference to his secretary of state and the Head of the Home Civil service, or the Prime Minister. Little wonder that he went back to his post of principal of UMIST.
Whitehall did not understand him, and he certainly did not understand Whitehall ” That was a great pity.
Kenrick Wynne-Jones was altogether less turbulent He understood the art of getting along with politicians, and found a power base for himself through friendship with the Labour leaders of the day from the North and such as Ted short and Lord Glenamara.
Ever constructive and logical, Wynne-Jones influenced events, and was a credit to the concept of the Life Peer I miss them all. Micro apple-cart
WHEN it comes to press manipulation and the Ministry of Defence has nothing on Apple Corporation, maker of the famous Apple microcomputer.
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