Harold Wilson: The Winner

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Roy Hattersley was minister of defence and minister of state for foreign affairs in Harold Wilson’s government For many on the right of the party, membership of the EEC became a cause to rally around. Edward Heath’s Conservative government successfully negotiated entry, but with the Tories split on the issue, the necessary legislation could only pass with Labour support. Since Wilson had applied for entry on similar terms in 1967, his decision now to oppose it on the grounds that defeating the Tories was ‘the primary purpose of opposition’ caused outrage. Thomas-Symonds’s defence of Wilson’s actions rests on the argument that he needed to maintain party unity. Labour’s official, conference-approved policy was to put the terms of entry to the public at a general election. Until then, Labour MPs were to vote against membership. Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ 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.”

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

Wilson, as Thomas-Symonds says, was an underestimated social reformer who expanded higher education and the social services, and made Britain a more pleasant place to live in through such measures as outlawing race and sex discrimination, equal pay for women, maternity leave, safety at work and, above all, the Open University, of which he was particularly proud. And he kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Yet he failed to achieve his central aim of regenerating the British economy. No doubt Wilson’s hopes were always illusory. For even if, as he believed, harnessing socialism to science could raise the growth rate, that would not happen in the lifetime of a single government. Perhaps indeed there is no rapid way of increasing growth, which depends more upon deep-seated cultural factors than on short-term economic policy. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Wilson’s final years in office, after his fourth election victory, were dominated by the debate on membership of the EEC, leading up to the Referendum. Nowhere was Wilson’s political acumen more evident than in the face of a divided Labour Party masterminding the campaign that led to a resounding “Yes” — something for which, the author argues, Wilson has never been given the credit that he de­­serves. In similar vein, he planned his own resignation, leaving office at a time of his own choosing. 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. 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.Soon his enemies (and his friends) had other grievances. By the late 1940s, Attlee’s government was struggling and exhausted. The 1950 election reduced its majority to five. The young guns were tooling up to fight over the party’s future. In the bitter battle between Gaitskell’s centre-left pragmatists and the missionary socialists led by the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, Wilson chose the side of Bevan. In April 1951 he joined Bevan in resigning, a move that astonished his Cabinet colleagues and hastened the end of Attlee’s government. When, three years later, Bevan – a serial resigner – walked out of the Shadow Cabinet over the creation of a NATO equivalent in southeast Asia, Wilson, who had initially sided with Bevan, broke with him and took his place.

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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. 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.On succeeding Gaitskell, Wilson set about portraying Labour as the party of the future, crucially in his “white heat” speech to the 1963 party conference. Socialism was to be restated “in terms of the scientific revolution”. The subsequent election meant the end of 13 years of Tory rule. Immediately, the Government set about making Britain a more humane society, enacting laws on race relations and abolishing capital punishment. Abandoning old policies can be, and often is, forgiven. Abandoning old friends is not, and the real doubts about Wilson’s instinct for loyalty began when he edged away from Aneurin Bevan, one of the authentic heroes of the Labour movement. Bevan resigned from the Attlee government in protest at what he called the “imposition” of health charges. Wilson resigned shortly afterwards. But he chose to point out that he was opposed to the whole drift of the government’s economic policy, “not just the levy on teeth and spectacles”. It was assumed that he made the distinction in the hope of trivialising Bevan’s rebellion and capturing the leadership of the Labour left. 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”. 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.

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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.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. 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. Can we imagine such a thing as an age of Wilson? Surely the final quarter of the 20th century belongs to Labour’s nemesis, Margaret Thatcher? Thomas-Symonds, however, would like us to see Wilson’s Britain as a different place to Thatcher’s: a modern country, socially liberal, anti-racist and in Europe. He sets out, in short, the credit side of the Wilson balance sheet. W hen Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister, his longtime friend and ally Barbara Castle wrote in her diary, ‘What exactly was Harold up to? More than had met the eye, I have no doubt.’ No one ever thought that Wilson played things straight. In this riveting and very readable biography, Thomas-Symonds con­firms that Wilson’s governments created a kinder, fairer, and forward-thinking Britain. Above all, as any­one on Scilly would agree, Wilson was a man of the people.

Harold Wilson: The Winner - Thomas-Symonds, Nick - AbeBooks Harold Wilson: The Winner - Thomas-Symonds, Nick - AbeBooks

Harold Wilson, photographed in his study at home in Westminster, in 1986. Allan Warren/Wiki Commons. The enduring social reforms that distinguished Wilson’s first government came largely through the efforts of his home secretary Roy Jenkins. These included the abolition of capital punishment and corporal punishment in prisons, the enshrining of the right to abortion, the legalisation of homosexual acts and the ending of censorship (though not before Wilson had personally censored parts of a play based on Private Eye’s satirical version of the diaries of his wife, Mary). There was also anti-discrimination and equal-pay legislation. These things transformed life in Britain, but with few was Wilson closely associated. 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. 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. A prime minister is invariably held responsible for catastrophes that – in the fashionable phrase – occur “on his or her watch”. But they rarely receive credit for the successes of their years in office. Wilson’s first administration was one of the great reforming governments in British history. Without the prime minister’s blessing, parliamentary time would never have been found to abolish capital punishment, liberalise the laws on homosexuality, divorce and abortion, or for the first positive action to promote racial equality. We should think of Wilson as the architect of social reform.

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. Paradoxically, damage to his reputation came about because of his undying loyalty to his private and personal secretary. The index of The Winner lists 68 references to Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender, twice as many as any cabinet minister. I do not know or wish to discover the nature of the Wilson-Williams relationship, though if pressed I would guess that it was not what the prurient press hoped it to be. Yet for some reason she was allowed to behave in a way that did Wilson great damage. The final blow was the “lavender list” – Wilson’s nominees for dissolution honours. It was written on Lady Falkender’s notepaper, and included names of men Wilson barely knew. Somehow it found its way into the newspapers. Further, the Government could be proud of its record on housing, social services, health, and its help for the poorest, promoting equal pay for women and attempting to end the stigma attached to those on state benefits by recognising that the re­­cipients had rights.