Book review: the Whitehall 'irregular': Samuel Brittan and the Department of Economic Affairs

The rise and fall of the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) parallels the promised but eventually unfulfilled modernization agenda of Harold Wilson’s government. The diary kept by Samuel Brittan for the fourteen months in which he served as an ‘irregular’ in the DEA provides a unique source for understanding the growth ambitions of the new government. Paul Brighton finds the diaries as a whole, with their excellent introduction and commentary, are inevitably an unintended elegy to an era of lost economic optimism — an optimism that was always built on sand. Inside the Department of Economic Affairs: Samuel Brittan, the Diary of an ‘Irregular’, 1964-6. Roger Middleton (ed). Oxford University Press. April 2012.