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Rt. Hon. Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton Baron Dalton
Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 27 July 1945 – 13 November 1947
Prime Minister	Clement Attlee
Preceded by	John Anderson
Succeeded by	Stafford Cripps
Born	26 August 1887(1887-08-26) Neath, Wales
Died	13 February 1962 (aged 74)
Political party	Labour

Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton PC , generally known as Hugh Dalton (26 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party politician, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He was implicated in a political scandal involving budget leaks.

He was born in Neath in Wales: his father, Canon John Neale Dalton was chaplain to Queen Victoria and tutor to the future King George V of the United Kingdom. Hugh was educated at Eton College, where he was head of his house but was disappointed not to be elected to "Pop". After leaving school he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where his socialist views earned him three defeats for the Secretaryship of the Cambridge Union (the only office generally then contested) and then the London School of Economics and the Middle Temple. During World War I, he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a Lieutenant on the French and Italian Fronts and later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. He then returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer.

Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the Cambridge by-election, 1922, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the Holland with Boston by-election, 1924, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election.

At the 1929 general election, he was finally elected to the British House of Commons as Labour MP for Bishop Auckland in 1929 and became a junior Foreign Office minister in the second Labour Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931, though he was re-elected in 1935. During the World War II coalition, Winston Churchill appointed him Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940 and he established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive. He became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the Civil Service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary.

Although a Labour politician Dalton was a strong supporter of Churchill during the crisis of May, 1940, when Lord Halifax and other Conservative supporters of appeasement in the war cabinet urged a compromise peace.

After the Labour victory in the 1945 general election, Dalton had been expected to become Foreign Secretary, but instead the job was given to Ernest Bevin. Dalton became Chancellor of the Exchequer and nationalised the Bank of England in 1946. Alongside Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps Dalton was initially seen as one of the "Big Five" of the Labour Government.

During this time Britain, whose overseas investments had been sold to pay for the war (thus losing Britain their income), was suffering severe balance of payments problems to pay for the effort of maintaining a global military presence. The American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes in 1946 was soon exhausted, and by 1947 rationing had to be tightened and the convertibility of the pound suspended. In the atmosphere of crisis Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps intrigued to replace Clement Attlee with Ernest Bevin as Prime Minister; Bevin refused to play along and Attlee bought off Cripps by giving him Morrison's responsibilities for economic planning. Ironically, of the "Big Five" it was to be Dalton who ultimately fell victim to the events of that year.

Dalton was under great strain, suffering psychosomatic boils. Walking into the House of Commons to give the autumn 1947 Budget speech, he made an off-the-cuff remark to a journalist, telling him of some of the tax changes in the budget, which was printed in the early edition of the evening papers before he had completed his speech, and whilst the stock market was still open. This led to his resignation for leaking a Budget secret; he was succeeded by Stafford Cripps. Dalton was further implicated in the allegations that led to the Lynskey tribunal in 1948 but was exonerated.

In 1948 he returned to the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, then became Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1950, renamed as Minister of Local Government and Planning in 1951. He still had the ear of the Prime Minister, and enjoyed promoting the careers of younger men, but was no longer a major political player as he had been until 1947. He left government after the 1951 General Election.

He was also president of the Ramblers' Association from 1948 to 1950 and Master of the Drapers' Company in 1958-59. He was made a life peer as Baron Dalton, of Forest and Friton in the County Palatine of Durham in 1960.

Dalton had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s, but his biographer Ben Pimlott leaves little doubt that Dalton was a repressed homosexual. As a young man he was close to the poet Rupert Brooke, who died of disease during the Gallipoli campaign. In later years he acted as a mentor to various handsome young men (most of them heterosexual) in the Labour Party, including Anthony Crosland, whom he talent-spotted at the Oxford Union in 1946 and whose selection for a winnable seat for the 1950 General Election he helped to arrange, and James Callaghan.

His papers, including his diaries, are held at the London School of Economics.

• Craig, F. W. S. [1969] (1983). British parliamentary election results 1918-1949, 3rd edition, Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. ISBN 0-900178-06-X. 

• Works by Hugh Dalton at Project Gutenberg
• Hugh Dalton's papers at LSE Archives