In February 1949, after an investigation into possible corrupt practices in the Board of Trade, Belcher resigned his ministerial and parliamentary offices when the Lynskey tribunal determined that he had misused his powers as a minister by granting favours in return for small gifts.
As minister, he sought to build up good relations with the business community, and maintained that while he may have been unwise in his choice of friends and associates, his actions did not amount to corruption.
While many in the Labour Party at that time questioned the ethics of ministers or officials accepting even the smallest of gifts or favours, Belcher's view was more relaxed, an attitude that Stanley was able to exploit.
[10] The gifts themselves were relatively small – a suit of clothes, a gold cigarette case, a week's hotel expenses in Margate – and Belcher saw nothing wrong in accepting them.
[9] Stanley was not Belcher's only provider of largesse; the distiller Sir Maurice Bloch, who was seeking licences for the importation of casks, presented the minister with dozens of bottles of wine, sherry and whiskey, scarce and highly valued commodities at the time.
Consequent to this motion, the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, appointed a High Court judge, Sir George Lynskey, to chair the tribunal, assisted by two King's Counsel.
[16] Sixty witnesses testified during this time,[16] but much of the focus of press and public interest was in the relationship revealed between Belcher and Stanley during the latter's testimony, which extended over fifteen hours.
[18] Despite the supposedly neutral nature of the tribunal, Belcher was subjected to a particularly harsh cross-examination by the attorney general, Sir Hartley Shawcross who, according to Lewis Baston's account of the proceedings, "had prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg [and now] turned his aggressive courtroom tactics against a junior minister in his own government".
[9] Something of the same courtroom aggression was deployed by Shawcross against Mrs Belcher, who appeared as a witness and whose personal finances were examined in minute detail, an experience which left a lasting trauma.
It rejected most of the allegations made against Belcher, and exonerated all other ministers and public figures except for George Gibson who, it reported, had sought material personal advantage from his dealings with Stanley.
It concluded that Belcher, by accepting gifts, had been improperly influenced in the exercise of his ministerial responsibilities, in particular in relation to a decision to withdraw a prosecution against the football pools promoter Harry Sherman for exceeding his permitted paper allocation.
[29] On leaving the House of Commons, Belcher wrote a series of newspaper articles which were published in the Sunday Express between 6 February and 6 March 1949, setting out the picture as he saw it.
[20] He took early retirement from the railways in 1963,[20] and died at Chase Farm hospital, Enfield, on 26 October 1964, aged 59,[31] just after the General Election that brought Labour back to power under Wilson.
[32] Nevertheless, many of Belcher's friends and colleagues were angered by what they saw as the humiliation of a working-class minister at the hands of the seemingly aristocratic Shawcross, who after Labour's election defeat in 1951 quickly lost interest in the party and parliament, preferring to build up a lucrative business career outside of politics.
In the 1990s, more than 40 years after their father's downfall, Belcher's daughters visited his old constituency and found that older party members still remembered him with affection and were sure that he would have been re-elected, had he been allowed to stand for parliament again.
[20] Baston summarises thus: "Belcher was a bright, idealistic, working-class socialist, who was harshly treated for his naïve attempts to forge a good relationship with business and became a martyr to the puritanical standards of conduct in public life in the austere Attlee era.