Wynne Godley

A CERTAIN ambiguity marked Wynne Godley. Was he at heart an aesthete, happiest making music in beautiful buildings among works of art? Or was he more naturally one of the sophisters, economists and calculators whose rise marked, for Edmund Burke, the passing of the age of chivalry? Was he by temperament a dissenter? Or just a typical scion of the British upper classes, an establishment man who played at being a rebel? Was he a determined pessimist, who took some pleasure in his reputation as the Cassandra of the Fens? Or a convivial, witty friend, who entertained with style and had a taste for gambling? Was he a shy violet, trembling before an audience? Or a controversialist who was hardly publicity-averse?

If the answer to each of these questions is at least partly yes, that may mean no more than that Mr Godley was a man of several talents, many interests and an intelligence to make good use of them. His first love was certainly music, for when he left Oxford, where he read politics, philosophy and economics, he went to the Paris Conservatoire and became a professional oboist. Performing in public, though, filled him with terror, which led him to give up his job as principal oboe in the BBC Welsh Orchestra. He turned to economics instead.

That, anyway, became his profession. But his love of music never left him, and art remained a part of his life to the end, not least through his marriage to Kitty, the daughter of Sir Jacob Epstein. And though Mr Godley's good looks and elongated figure might seem to have been tailor-made for El Greco, El Greco being unavailable, it was Epstein who took him as the model for a huge bronze statue of St Michael that hangs on the outside of Coventry Cathedral, with the devil vanquished at his feet.

In Keynes's footsteps, up to a point

The devilish intricacies of economics Mr Godley seemed to overwhelm just as effortlessly. After a spell in business and a few years at the Treasury, he was enticed to King's College, Cambridge, which 61 years earlier another economist-aesthete, John Maynard Keynes, had joined as a lecturer, writing (with his mother's help) a letter of resignation from the civil service to his boss, a Sir Arthur Godley. This man was to become the first Lord Kilbracken and eventually grandfather of Wynne.

Mr Godley became best known for his outspoken criticisms of Conservative economic policies. In the 1970s he took the view, which he recognised as dissenting, that international trade should be, as he put it, “in some sense, managed” through import controls, adding unpersuasively that this was not really protectionism, since he did not want to reduce imports, merely the propensity to import; and protection should be “as minimally selective as possible”. More creditably, he correctly predicted that the boom generated by the Conservative government under Ted Heath in the 1970s would end in tears. He was also proved largely right in foreseeing the severity of the recession that came later under Margaret Thatcher.

These doleful prophecies, coupled with his very public loathing of monetarism, earned him no friends in government and the grant for his forecasting group at Cambridge was abruptly stopped in 1982. But he was hardly an outcast. Though not properly trained as an economist, he had proved himself as a macroeconomic modeller, and had been made a university professor of applied economics. He had also become a director of the Royal Opera House. By 1992 he was back in favour at the Treasury, joining the panel of independent forecasters known as the “six wise men”.

On the face of it, this was not a turbulent life. Yet Mr Godley said he had a lonely childhood, involving a violent maiden aunt and the “chamber of horrors of a British prep school”. Later, in his 30s, he lived life “through an artificial self” in “a state of dissociation”, which drove him into the clutches of a fiendish psychoanalyst. This in turn blighted his middle years.

His background, though it might misleadingly be called privileged, was mixed up. The first Lord Kilbracken had been a protégé of a Liberal prime minister, Gladstone, but was a Conservative; and the second, Wynne's father Hugh, also a Tory, had been madly in love with Violet Asquith, the daughter of another Liberal prime minister. Hugh separated from Wynne's mother about the time he was born, and was impotent, anti-Semitic and alcoholic. Wynne's mother paraded naked in front of him and would tell him, as a child, of the intense pleasure she got from sexual intercourse. But he reached the age of 17 not knowing that women had vaginas.

He was supremely happy at Oxford, where his tutor was Isaiah Berlin, to whom he said he owed all his higher education. But, he wrote, “Nora [his stepmother] shot herself in the head with a shotgun; my father, his entire fortune squandered, died alone in a hospital where the nurses were unkind to him; my half-sister was committed to a high-security mental institution at Epsom; my mother had a bad stroke and lived out her last six years hemiplegic and helpless, her mind altered. She told her nurses that they were ‘lower-class scum' and complained that I was ‘marrying the daughter of a New York yid'.”

Against a background like this, a little waywardness in the world of macroeconomics seems entirely forgivable.