Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer

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Attlee then gave a speech at the newly built Royal Festival Hall demanding an end to groups within the party.

Gaitskell and Wilson met with Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Cripps at Chequers on 19 August, and Bevin and Cripps agreed with some reluctance to devaluation. Labour had proved it could be a party of government, competent in office and achieving results for working people.However, Dell comments that he often went into excessive detail, including personally overseeing economic forecasts, and held excessively long meetings.

A strong speaker, he became popular in trade union circles for his denunciation of capitalism as unethical and his promise of a socialist utopia. Bevan gave a speech to the Tribune party at the conference, declaring that the Labour Leader needed to be a "desiccated calculating machine". By August–September 1951 the Treasury were taken by surprise by a full-on sterling crisis, which they passed on to the incoming Conservative Government.In a final effort to stave off an inevitable Gaitskell victory, Bevan proposed that he and Gaitskell both withdraw in Morrison's favour, but Gaitskell rejected the offer. At the party meeting Bevan refused to agree to toe the party line, but the issue was defused by a conciliatory motion by the centrist "Keep Calm" group, passed against the wishes of the platform. Crossman noted that this forced Bevan to be loyal to Gaitskell (15 December 1956), making the two men allies of a kind.