An economics lecturer and wartime civil servant, he was elected to Parliament in 1945 and held office in Clement Attlee's governments, notably as Minister of Fuel and Power following the bitter winter of 1946–47, and eventually joining the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Facing the need to increase military spending in 1951, he imposed National Health Service charges on dentures and spectacles, prompting the leading left-winger Aneurin Bevan to resign from the Cabinet.

Gaitskell, unusually, supported the strikers and acted as a driver for people like his Oxford contemporary Evan Durbin and Cole's wife Margaret, who made speeches and delivered the trade union newspaper British Worker.

[3] He was attached to the University of Vienna for the 1933–34 academic year and witnessed first-hand the political suppression of the social democratic workers movement by the conservative Engelbert Dollfuss's government in February 1934.

After her divorce, hard to obtain prior to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, they were eventually married on 9 April 1937, Gaitskell's thirty-first birthday, with Evan Durbin as best man.

[18] She wrote to Evelyn Waugh about a dinner party in 1958 in which Gaitskell and friends from Oxford days "held hands and recited verse because in early life they had loved each other in the same set", until the arrival of her husband "silenced the eminent homos", who "did not seem too pleased.

[30] He had committed a gaffe during the municipal election campaign in Hastings earlier that year, when he recommended that people save fuel by taking fewer baths, adding that he had never taken all that many himself; in the House of Commons in late October Churchill joked that it was no wonder that the Government were "in bad odour" and asked the Speaker if he might be permitted to describe Labour ministers as "lousey", normally an unparliamentary expression, as it would be a simple statement of fact.

[31] Gaitskell made himself very unpopular by abolishing the basic petrol ration for private motorists, but encouraged the building of oil refineries, a move little-noticed at the time which would have important repercussions for the future.

He recommended devaluation by 4 September, but rejected the idea that currencies become fully convertible – in the way that John Maynard Keynes had advocated at the Bretton Woods Conference – as this might prevent governments protecting full employment.

Until then Gaitskell had shared concerns that some countries might stay in permanent deficit and thus effectively use their neighbours for free borrowing, or conversely that Belgium's surplus would enable her to suck gold and dollars from Britain.

Gaitskell, besides the obvious need for a new Chancellor to assert his authority, saw this as a deliberate attempt to bounce the Cabinet publicly, telling Dalton that Bevan's "influence was very much exaggerated" and that he might split the Labour Party as Lloyd George had the Liberals.

Douglas Jay and others attempted in vain to persuade Gaitskell to compromise, but he refused, arguing that two members of the Cabinet should not be allowed to dictate to eighteen, although he agreed not to specify just yet the date at which the charges would come into effect.

His predecessor Stafford Cripps wrote to him praising him for not giving in to "political expediency", whilst he was supported in public by two younger MPs later to be staunch allies, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland.

Charges on false teeth and spectacles were "insignificant" in the context of the greater budget and "financially were neither here nor there" ... but Bevan was "impatient and arrogant and noisy and apparently intent on exhausting the tolerance of his cabinet colleagues".

[80] Historian Brian Brivati believes that the importance of the charges was "irrelevant" to the huge cost of rearmament, which damaged Britain's recovery in the years which followed by absorbing earnings from exports.

[23][86] When the Conservatives returned to power, the new chancellor Rab Butler would get the balance of payments back into surplus in 1952 by cutting overseas spending, a measure which Dell suggests Gaitskell had not wanted to irritate the Americans by taking.

Bevanites took over the constituency section of Labour's National Executive Committee (the "NEC"): Bevan, Barbara Castle, Tom Driberg, Ian Mikardo and Harold Wilson took the top five places with Crossman seventh.

[74][91] He received strong backing from the TGWU whose block vote was of immense importance at the Labour Conference and which was able to exert pressure on its sponsored MPs to toe the party line.

On one occasion in 1953, when Gaitskell called for unity at a Shadow Cabinet meeting, Bevan was observed to give him "a glare of concentrated hatred" and declared: "You're too young in the movement to know what you're talking about".

At a party meeting a few days later (16 March) Bevan accused Gaitskell of having told a direct lie against him and declared that it was "those hatchet-faced men sitting on the platform" who were undermining the leadership.

When Crossman interjected that Bevan "was only half wanting" to be leader, had not made any conspiracy against Attlee and was mainly concerned at voicing protests against Morrison and Gaitskell, the latter replied that "there are extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler.

[98] At the Margate conference that autumn Gaitskell gave a stirring and well-received speech including an apparently unscripted passage stressing his own socialist credentials and arguing that nationalisation was still a "vital means" to achieving that end.

This view was not shared by Gaitskell himself, and after Butler's emergency "Pots and Pans" budget in October 1955, in which he reversed tax cuts made prior to the Conservatives' re-election at the general election earlier that year, he attacked him strongly for allegedly having misled the electorate.

[103] In his letter of 10 August, Gaitskell wrote: "Lest there should be any doubt in your mind about my personal attitude, let me say that I could not regard an armed attack on Egypt by ourselves and the French as justified by anything which Nasser has done so far or as consistent with the Charter of the United Nations.

[114] At Newcastle, with a general election clearly imminent, Gaitskell pledged that Labour's spending plans would not require him to raise income tax, for which he was attacked by the Tories for supposed irresponsibility.

Ignoring advice from his allies, and partly motivated by detailed polling by Mark Abrams which showed that younger voters regarded Labour as old-fashioned, Gaitskell pushed for reform.

At the October 1960 Scarborough Conference two resolutions in favour of unilateral disarmament – proposed by the TGWU and the Engineers' Union – were carried, whilst the official policy document on defence was rejected.

"[126] In the speech Gaitskell summoned up the memory of Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli, where Canadian and ANZAC troops had fought alongside British, mixing his defence of national identity with the tradition of the Commonwealth.

Many, including Tony Benn – a Labour centrist at the time – simply thought him a divisive figure and initially welcomed Wilson as a fresh start who could unite the party.

[140] His longtime close friend Roy Jenkins concluded a decade afterwards, in an article which he later quoted in his memoirs: Because he never became prime minister, and because of the great capacity many considered that he had for the post, Hugh Gaitskell is remembered largely with respect from people both within and outside of the Labour Party.