Aubrey Jones was a most unlikely Conservative, a product of the Welsh mining valleys and the interwar London School of Economics, who came briefly to the fore as a minister in the Eden and Macmillan Governments, but was by his own admission happiest in the five years he spent as chairman of the Wilson Government's Prices and Incomes Board. He ended his political career contesting Sutton Coldfield for the Alliance in 1983. He was a man of considerable vision, acutely aware of the changes that technological developments would bring to the nation state, but throughout his career he appeared to lack the driving energy to bring about the changes he wished to further. Not without a certain diffident charm and certainly not without ambition, he remained something of a loner in politics and seemed not altogether effectual as a minister. In a semi-autobiographical account of the roots of Britain's industrial stagnation, he subsequently revealed the difficulties that he had faced because his successor as Minister of Power, Lord Mills, had the ear of Harold Macmillan on the wider industrial agenda, preventing Jones from achieving much that he sought as Minister of Supply. It was because he feared such interference would continue that he refused Macmillan's offer of the Ministry of Works in October 1959, bringing to an end his ministerial career. Sensing in him the pursuit of an undogmatic economic rationality, George Brown plucked him from the backbenches to take charge of the National Board for Prices and Incomes, a body which was to review individual pay settlements and price rises when they were referred to it by the Government. His success in the job led Barbara Castle to appoint him to chair the Commission for Industry and Manpower, which was to take over the functions of the Board and the Monopolies Commission. The necessary legislation fell with the fall of the Wilson Government and Jones, deeply disappointed, returned to the world of business.
He was born in Penydarren on 20 November 1911, the son of a miner, but one who had graduated into the role of a pit deputy or safety officer. Pneumoconiosis prevented him from continuing to work underground and he became a labourer in the local steel works. His last job was the demolition of one of the blast furnaces at the time of Edward VIII's notorious visit to South Wales. "An active man", Jones recalled, "he died of sheer frustration."
Jones had been educated at the Cynfartha Castle secondary school at Merthyr Tydfil, a breeding ground for trade union leaders and socialist politicians. Not Jones, however. Instead he won a scholarship to the LSE where he achieved a first in economics and won the Gladstone Memorial prize and the Gerstenberg postgraduate award. In many ways the LSE between the wars was a bastion of liberal economics, and that may have immunised Jones against the left wing tendencies of his fellow students. After a brief spell with the League of Nations, Jones joined the Times as a sub editor on the foreign desk and from there moved first to the paper's Paris office and then to Berlin. He left for London three days before the outbreak of the Second World War.
His war was spent in military intelligence, first in the War Office and then in the Middle East, where he remained until 1946. He was given leave to fight the 1945 election as the defeated Conservative candidate for SouthEast Essex. He subsequently fought Heywood and Radcliffe at a by-election in February 1946, again unsuccessfully. He returned briefly to The Times, but was then recruited to the Iron and Steel Federation where he learnt much of the relationship between industry and politics. He became its General Director in 1955. However, his continued interest in Conservative politics had led to his entry to the House of Commons as the Member for the Birmingham seat of Hall Green in February 1950, a seat which he held until his acceptance of the chairmanship of the Prices and Incomes Board in 1965. He served a year as PPS to Lord Salter and had a ringside seat when his ministerial chief and Lord Cherwell combined to defeat the Chancellor of the Exchequer's plan to float the pound. Jones rightly saw the origins of what became known as Thatcherism in the policies pursued by Conservative Chancellors like Butler and Thorneycroft in the 1950s.
He was a great admirer of Eden, whom he believed "intuitively grasped a situation and comprehended individuals far better than his successor" and Eden was clearly impressed by Jones, whom he promoted from the backbenches to take over the Ministry of Fuel and Power in December 1955. Jones found this a frustrating job since a separate Board with its own statutory responsibilities ran three of the industries for which he was responsible. The fourth, oil, remained in the private sector. His job was to co-ordinate them, but he had no real power to do so. It was this job that taught him much about the weaknesses of the market since prices, far from offering a guide to action for the future, were to a large extent determined by past errors of judgement, mistaken investment decisions and miscalculations of demand. He fought a successful battle with the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, to preserve the bulk of the investment being made that year in the modernisation of the coal industry, while cutting back the total production aimed at to under 230 million tons. Subsequently he reflected that he ought to have cut it back more, but he was able to appoint Sir James Bowman, like him a believer in a smaller viable industry to chair the NCB.
Jones's major task in the thirteen months he spent at the department was to deal with the Herbert Report, which had recommended a major restructuring of nationalised electricity. The major thrust of the report was to devolve power to the operating units and to promote a more commercial outlook in the industry. There was to be a separate generating board, but a small central authority was to be retained. Jones had to fight on two fronts, dealing forcibly with a rearguard action from the current Board while convincing the Cabinet that decentralisation was the right course to follow. In this he was greatly helped by having strong backbench support. Given the Government's increasing interest in nuclear power - 1956 was the year of Suez - he argued that the proposed generating board was vital to nuclear development and that it should be accompanied by an even more complete decentralisation to Area Boards than Herbert had proposed, with only a relatively powerless Electricity Council at the centre. Jones introduced legislation along these lines and his successor, despite personal scepticism about the new structure, carried it through. Jones had also identified the managing director of the Atomic Energy Authority's industrial group, Sir Christopher Hinton, as the chairman of the new generating board and the Professor of Industrial Organisation at the LSE, Ronald Edwards, as chairman of the Electricity Council. Mills made the first appointment, but allowed himself to be persuaded that Edwards should begin as deputy chairman to Sir Henry Self, a move soon rectified. Jones's final action in December 1956 was to recommend a trebling of the nuclear programme, but in the face of Treasury doubts, the decision was deferred and it fell to Mills to announce the increased programme. Although Jones was unbelievably prescient about the problems that global warning would cause, he was sceptical also about the possibilities of alternative and remained wedded to the notion that for all its problems, the nuclear was the best "green" option.
In order to make Mills Minister of Power, Macmillan moved Jones to Supply, first having to convince him that such a department was necessary. Instead of a powerful new ministry of materiel to parallel the creation of a powerful Ministry of Defence, Jones found himself, in his own words, "dragged behind the grinding wheels of Mr Sandys' chariot", Sandys being the major architect of Britain's new defence policy. He was not as passive as these words might suggest, developing a scepticism about proposals for the British missile, Blue Streak, and its makers, de Havilland, which was justified when the programme was cancelled in 1960. He was equally sceptical about the RAF's counter, the all-purpose manned aircraft TSR2, believing that it was impossible to develop and manufacture such a complex aircraft in the small numbers envisaged. The same considerations led him to recommend in mid 1957 the reorganisation of the aircraft industry into fewer, financially stronger units, a policy that was remitted to a Cabinet Committee and eventually endorsed, although not implemented until 1960. However, when he tried to prevent the Government from offering support to the Avro 748 and Handley Page Herald, suggesting that if it disagreed, it should support the former, Mills persuaded the Cabinet to overrule him and to support the Herald. That put an Indian order for the Avro 748 in jeopardy and, to Jones's quiet delight, Macmillan took it upon himself to reverse the decision of the Cabinet. Handley Page subsequently went into liquidation. Mills also undermined Jones when he put a scheme for amalgamating Vickers, English Electric and, if possible de Havilland, to the Cabinet. To complete his frustration, a far reaching scheme for translating the department into a Ministry of Technology, sent to the Prime Minister on 30 December 1957, was shelved, and instead Macmillan introduced something very different, a Ministry for Science. It was left to the Wilson Government to create a Ministry of Technology. Jones was not without his successes, preserving the Olympus engine and in June 1959 laying the basis for Anglo-French collaboration over Concorde, but his frustration was such that he refused to continue in government after the 1959 election.
He took up directorships at Guest, Keen and Nettlefold and Courtaulds (where he was the only director to advocate merger with ICI) and in 1964 became the Chairman of Staveley Industries. He also served on the Plowden Committee investigating the Aircraft industry 1965-6. However in February 1965, he was asked to take the chair of the National Board for Prices and Incomes and to do this he gave up his seat in Parliament.
George Brown had handpicked him as someone who wished to bring order into wage bargaining and to establish a reasonable relationship between pay, prices and productivity, and, as Harold Wilson recalled, the Board's "fearless reports" soon commanded "wider and wider respect". In effect Jones saw the role of his Board as a high-powered management consultancy and he came to the conclusion that British management was relatively poor and that the efficiency of British industry would be greatly increased by price control. Barbara Castle, who found him something of an enigma, has written of his austere dedication to the success of the policy and of the radical challenge he offered to the proposition that if devaluation increased prices, distributors' margins should follow suit. They shared a common frustration at the reluctance of Whitehall departments to make enough price references to the Board and at the Treasury's belief that price increases mopped up purchasing power. The New Inflation: the politics of prices and incomes (1973) is a powerful summary of the lessons he drew from his experience, but the failures of the 1970s propelled the Thatcher Governments into power with a very different recipe for Britain's problems.
Edward Heath had earlier terminated the existence of the Prices and Incomes Board and Jones took on the chairmanship of Laporte Industries 1970-72 and of Cornhill Insurance 1971-4, remaining a director until 1981. He became the leading consultant to the Nigerian Public Service Commission 1973-4 and subsequently held a consultancy with the Iranian Government 1974-8. He also served on the international panel seeking to resolve investment disputes 1974-81 and developed his interests in energy policy as President of the Oxford Energy Policy Club 1975-81.
A series of academic connections enabled him to develop his thinking about business and politics and led to the writing of Oil: the missed opportunity (1981) and Britain's Economy: the roots of Stagnation (1985). Increasingly out of sympathy with Conservative economic policy, he joined the Liberal Party in 1981 and unsuccessfully contested the 1983 election as an Alliance candidate. He remained late in life one of the most perceptive and thoughtful exponents of the concept of the developmental state, but his polished and meticulous contributions to seminars seemed out of tune with the way the world was going and his frustration was increasingly evident.