{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018465089440276975, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0075014425851125215, 'mean_word_length': 5.008665511265165, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Review of “The Mind of Thucydides“

(multitude of) characters who appear on the diary pages, a list of key ministers and officials in the DEA, a calendar of events spanning the period of the diary, and an introduction to problems of key official statistical series in the second half of the 1960s. It would be tempting to suggest that the diary is of limited use to scholars because of the very limited time span and the rather introspective tone of a significant part of the material. In 1964, Brittan had published his first detailed, book-length commentary on British economic policymaking, The Treasury under the Tories (Penguin Books). One of his central purposes for joining the DEA was to gather material for a new edition, and the diary text is full of reflections on the 1964 conclusions and assessments, often very pessimistic, of the way that the new Labour government was handling the growth agenda. The editor’s guide to the changes in Brittan’s analysis and text are invaluable. This is, however, a far more exciting resource than one that simply charts the processes by which Brittan’s analysis changed over time. It is a fascinating insight into policymaking at a time of great turbulence. The DEA was established as a counterweight to Treasury power, not least because key Labour ministers and their advisers were convinced that the previous Labour governments of 1945–51 had been derailed by Treasury’s preoccupation with sterling and the balance of payments. As Middleton points out, Brittan became involved in a broad array of policy areas and found his days dominated by a succession of meetings and the preparation of policy drafts for meetings and for ministerial speeches. In some respects, we must treat Brittan as a special case; his prominence as a respected economic and financial journalist made him an invaluable aid in drafting. In that respect, the agenda of the Information Division was bound to be varied. Brittan was also very well networked. His 1964 book was based in large part on informal interviews with key civil servants, and he used his brief time in Whitehall to extend his range of contacts and his database of informed insider comment. As a result, Brittan connected to streams of gossip that provided a continuous commentary on the ups and downs of personalities in political and administrative pecking orders. The other powerful insight from Brittan’s diaries is the faith he and others placed in economics as a positivist science. His diary charts the changing statistics on British economic performance in extraordinary detail. At that time, his vision of the economic system, like those of many contemporaries, was very mechanistic; his faith that the door to faster growth could be opened, albeit by different advisers and through different administrative and political structures, was profound. In that respect, his position contrasts with the more famous published diarists Robert Hall and Alex Cairncross, whose longer experience in government economic service and greater awareness of how data were produced made them more circumspect about how much policymakers as a community really understood the workings of a national economy. However, Brittan’s lack of professional guardedness and his willingness to comment openly on the rumours circulating within Whitehall’s whispering galleries make his diary, despite its brevity, an essential insight into the life of an economist in government in the mid-1960s.