Don’t be ashamed if you can’t understand the Budget. Economics is a notoriously tricky business. Even chancellors of the exchequer find themselves flailing about in the dark, dependent on the guidance of others. Winston Churchill explained his disastrous policy of returning sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925, by writing:
‘I had no special comprehension of the currency policy, and therefore fell into the hands of the experts.’
(That sentence appears in the unpublished draft of his History of the Second World War. It was excised from the final version, by whom and for what is unknown.)
Churchill’s candour about his own limitations reveals something of his character, but his breezy contempt for the ‘experts’ is striking. Churchill revered expertise — a fact that emerges from David Edgerton’s brilliant and iconoclastic Britain’s War Machine, a book that debunks the myth that Britain was militarily and economically weak and intellectually parochial during the 1930s and 1940s.
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