Dalton, Hugh Dalton, Baron, 1887-1962

Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established Special Operations Executive. Later in the war he was President of the Board of Trade. As Chancellor in Clement Attlee's Labour Government, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947 in which much of the 1946 Anglo-American loan was wasted. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he was forced to resign for, seemingly inadvertently, revealing a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions. His biographer Ben Pimlott characterised Dalton as peevish, irascible, given to poor judgment and lacking administrative talent. Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent."