Harold Wilson: The Winner

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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.

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds | WHSmith

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. 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.

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. Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister on two separate occasions. In total he won four General Elections, spending nearly eight years in Downing Street. Half a century later, he is still unbeaten, Labour’s greatest ever election winner. How did he do it – and at what cost? 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.”

The Guardian Roy Hattersley | The Guardian

Admittedly, Wilson is held almost solely responsible for the decisions that prejudiced the prospects of his first government and hastened its ignominious end. There is no doubt that he personally vetoed devaluing the pound in the autumn of 1964. And five years later, even Barbara Castle – his friend and constant champion – accused him of “betrayal”, because he would not support her plans for industrial relations reform. But a flexible interpretation of policies and promises has never excluded a prime minister from the pantheon of great politicians. 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. 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.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.