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Wilson's two most influential and eminent economic advisers would have no official role in his government. Nicholas Kaldor, 55, and Thomas Balogh, 57, are both Hungarian-born and are known as "those evil Hungarians," nicknamed respectively "Buda" and "Pest." Balogh, a mercurial left-wing Oxford economist, near neighbor of Wilson in suburban Hampstead, has long been the dominant influence in his economic thinking. As a quid pro quo for restrictions on wage raises, Buda and Pest have convinced Wilson that he needs control over corporate profits and dividends and a tax on capital. Officially, Labor intends only to nationalize the trucking industry and the private sector of steel, but Wilson reserves the right to set up competitive, state-owned plants in industries that are conspicuously inefficient.
Wilson's closest adviser is R.H.S. Grossman, 55, a lively left-wing will-o'-the-wisp who was a don at Oxford's New College when Wilson was an undergraduate there. Wilson, who meets all his other associates at his House of Commons office, often discusses policies late into the night at Grossman's house in shabby Vincent Square. Dick Crossman drew up Gaitskell's social security program; and in the Wilson government he would head a newly created Ministry of Higher Education. It might better be called the Ministry for Expanding Education. Aware of the explosive demand for universities (see EDUCATION), Labor is committed to accommodate 200,000 students in universities by 1970.
Plain & High. Always a lonely man, Wilson is even more isolated as leader of the party. He sees few of his old leftwing supporters outside working hours, even declines colleagues' dinner invitations on the grounds that it would be unfair to listen for hours to one man's views and still enforce his 15-minute cutoff on office interviews with other associates. Men who have worked with him for decades and live in his Hampstead neighborhood have never stepped inside the modest, cluttered house at 12 Southway, where he lives with his wife Mary, a Congregationalist minister's daughter, and their two sons, Robin, 19, and Giles, 15. Says one acquaintance: "I don't think anybody really knows Harold. He hasn't got any friends, as you and I mean the word."
Wilson almost never attends a play or a concert, confesses to feeling "guilty" if he wastes even a few weekend hours on a novel. Sighs an old acquaintance: "He's dull and devious—God, how devious—diligent and deliberate. He hasn't got a principle in his head, except that to him the Labor Party is the ark and its policy Holy Writ."
Wilson's austere social life has proved a bitter disappointment to Fleet Street, which found party-loving Hugh Gaitskell's capers a fertile source of copy. "I prefer beer to champagne and tinned salmon to smoked," insists Wilson. "I am on the side of plain living and high thinking." Actually, Wilson likes steak and wine as well as the next man, but he tucks into packaged custard, stewed rhubarb and canned meat with schoolboyish gusto.