Wilson greets the Government's call for national sacrifice with a couplet — Britain reaching the top via capital gains and the betting shop — a week before the pay pause proved his point on the nurses.

July 1961, the summer sterling broke. The post-Suez boom had curdled into a payments crisis, and Selwyn Lloyd was days from the 'pay pause' and the 10 per cent regulator that would define the Government's decline. Wilson, the sharpest Commons performer of his generation, had found the seam he would mine all the way to Downing Street: the contrast between boardroom Britain and working Britain, delivered with music-hall timing — the doggerel couplet about capital gains and the betting shop was quoted for years. Almost everything he mocked came to pass: the pay pause fell hardest on nurses and teachers, the 'regulator' raised prices exactly as predicted, and de Gaulle's veto eighteen months later made the Common Market warnings academic. The peroration wishing for 'the voice and leadership of a Cripps' was more prophetic than he knew — within two years Gaitskell was dead and Wilson himself was supplying the leadership, preaching a new Britain forged in the white heat of a different revolution.

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