Harold Wilson: The Winner

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Pragmatist or traitor? Party politics is often a squalid business and, as Thomas-Symonds says in one of his episodic attempts to put his central character in a kinder light, no amount of hindsight can help one disentangle advantage-seeking from expediency and the laudable desire for party unity. Yet while it’s hard not to detect snobbery among the party-loving, public-school Gaitskellites towards this lower-middle-class, pipe-smoking northerner who cherished his family, holidayed in the Scilly Isles and liked going to the football, none of his contemporaries, whether on the left or the right of the party, quite trusted him. Mention of Harold Wilson usually evokes ribald references to his love of HP sauce and Gannex raincoats, as well as scorn for his disastrous resignation honours, the Lavender List. He is still seen by his critics as a political opportunist. Thomas-Symonds sets out to correct this image, asserting that Wilson can be credited as the creator of “modern Britain”. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Wilson presided over a rare period of Labour dominance, winning four out of the five elections he fought as party leader, though only one – in 1966 – with a working majority.

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This new biography comes with praise from Sir Keir Starmer. It might teach him how to get to Downing Street, but it will not help him decide what to do if he gets there. On 12 February 2021, he was appointed a member of the Privy Council by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and, in that capacity, signed the Accession document for King Charles III. I know beyond doubt that Williams fed Wilson stories about rightwing dissidents in the parliamentary Labour party plotting his downfall. Although much of the scheming was imaginary, the antagonism was real. It could be traced to his decision in 1960 to challenge Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership at the time when Gaitskell had promised to “fight and fight again to save the party we love” from the suicide of extremism. He lost, but in 1963, after Gaitskell’s death, Wilson took the leadership, and a year later led Labour to victory. In Partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields. This series of nine lectures is inspired by the words of Martin Luther during the Reformation. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand. AS BRITAIN suffers her fifth Prime Minister in six years — all from the same party — it is more than ap­­propriate to re-evaluate the Prime Minister who won four of five General Elections, and the only Prime Minister in recent times to serve again after losing office.When he stood down on 16 March 1976, the upwardly mobile Yorkshire lad was the 20th century’s longest-serving prime minister. His resignation came at a time of his own choosing. He had won four general elections, despite coming to power just as the postwar settlement was beginning to collapse, nationally and internationally. As with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who also resigned to respectful applause, it was only after Wilson left power that the critics really got to work. And, as with Baldwin, no one has yet managed to retrieve his reputation. Wilson led his party to victory in four general elections. That, itself, goes some way to justifying Thomas-Symonds’s claim. But much of what might be described as achievements were the result of “preventive action”. Wilson avoided civil wars in Central Africa and Northern Ireland and steadfastly resisted American pressure to send British troops to Vietnam. They are not the sort of successes that attract a place in history. Preventing, or at least postponing, a Labour party split is probably more important to Thomas-Symonds and me than it is to posterity. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds review – a

For Wilson has already been memorialised in two doorstopper volumes by his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, and by the Labour historian, Ben Pimlott. Does Thomas-Symonds have anything to add? Not much, it must be said. There are fewer “secrets” in the archives than many imagine, and this biography, though very well written, should be read as the case for the defence rather than for new discoveries. That said, Thomas-Symonds’ high regard for Wilson is not misplaced. Wilson was prime minister for eight years and won four general elections (in 1964, 1966 and October 1974, although he served as prime minister of a minority government from February 1974). He oversaw the creation of the Open University, his government allowed time for liberal bills in Parliament (most notably on abortion rights and the legalisation of homosexuality), he successfully resisted pressure from the US to send UK troops to Vietnam and he managed to keep the Labour Party together for more than a decade. Not a bad record and one undoubtedly built on his pragmatism and his ability to recognise the strengths in even the most treacherous of colleagues and friends. For all this, Wilson deserves his place on the list of successful Labour leaders alongside Attlee, Tony Blair and maybe even Ramsay MacDonald.

From university days, Wilson aroused suspicion. Top marks in his finals? He found out what the dons marking the papers wanted and gave it to them. This was Wilson’s first problem: he wanted to succeed just a bit too obviously. Old Gaitskellites served in his government but felt no obligation to hide the disdain they felt for a man they regarded as a usurper. Wilson had committed the unforgivable sin of not being Hugh Gaitskell. Thomas-Symonds, free of such prejudices, leaves the reader in no doubt that Harold Wilson was a good prime minister – but hardly a great one. When Bevan and then Gaitskell died prematurely, Wilson was the unchallenged leadership candidate of the left in a party still dominated by the right. Conveniently, however, the right’s leading candidate was George Brown, an erratic and, it proved, unelectable trade unionist. In 1963, aged forty-six, Wilson became party leader. For a brief period, from 1963, when he became Labour leader, to 1966, when he deflated the economy, Wilson inspired a generation, entranced by his insistence that Labour was a “moral crusade”. But disillusionment was rapid. It took 18 years in opposition, from 1979 to 1997, for Labour to recover; and whereas at the end of the 19th century a Liberal leader had proclaimed “We are all socialists now”, by the end of the 20th, Labour under Blair could regain power only by assuring voters that they were none of them socialists now. During the latter years of Wilson’s first period as Prime Minister, his authority was tested by Cabinet col­­leagues and press barons alike. But, as Thomas-Symons points out, Wilson exhibited throughout these testing times extraordinary resili­ence and lightness of touch, even in the gravest situations. Although he survived, his attempt to reform the trade unions failed miserably.

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Yet he has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes, since he delivered neither socialism nor economic success. On arriving at Downing Street in 1964, he promised a new Britain based on the “white heat” of the technological revolution. Yet what he delivered was not, as one critic put it, a socialist vision of “a more just or a more humane society”, but one of “technocratic privilege, high salaries and early coronary thrombosis”. Wilson was also characterised as opportunist for his tergiversations on membership of the European Community – as the EU then was – being against it, from 1961 to 1966; then for it, in the late 1960s; then against it in the early 1970s; then for it again when in office for the second time after 1974. On other matters, too, Wilson seemed slippery – for and against further nationalisation, for and against a British independent deterrent, for and against trade union reform, for and against devaluation of the pound and deflation. He appeared not to care where the train was going so long as he was driving it.He was born in Panteg Hospital and brought up in Blaenavon, where he attended St. Felix R.C. Primary School. He then went to St. Alban’s R.C. High School, Pontypool, at which he later served as a Governor (2007-2015). He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating in 2001 before working as a Tutor/Lecturer in Politics at his old college (2002-2015), specialising in twentieth-century British government. Nevertheless, the author points to the many government reforms that civilised Britain in ways that we now take for granted. Among these were further regulations on racial discrim­­ination, abolition of corporal pun­ishment in prisons, legalising abortion and same-sex relations, reforming divorce laws, and the creation of the Open University. The best defence of Wilson is that he was a child of his time. If you want to know what a man thinks, Napoleon said, look at what the world was like when he was 20. At the age of 24, Wilson became a wartime civil servant. Like others of his generation, including his great opponent, Edward Heath, he had a deep-seated belief, derived from wartime experience, in the power of government. When, in 1954, Sir Raymond Streat, chair of the Cotton Board, was shown Wilson’s plans for reorganising the industry, he was horrified: “He has a fantastic belief in the power of the government and individual ministers to supervise and decide things for the public good. He seemed to have no conception of what is involved in totalitarianism of this sort.”