Harold Wilson: The Winner

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He lost, but in 1963, after Gaitskell’s death, Wilson took the leadership, and a year later led Labour to victory. The Diocese of Gloucester is looking for two creative, flexible and holistic thinkers who care passionately about nurturing leaders who will share the good news of Jesus Christ and make disciples in all our varied contexts.

the winner’ Harold Wilson Keir Starmer is looking more like ‘the winner’ Harold Wilson

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”. 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. He was born and brought up in the Welsh Valleys constituency of Torfaen, where he always lived, and which he has represented in Parliament since 2013.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. 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. On arriving at Downing Street in 1964, he promised a new Britain based on the “white heat” of the technological revolution. This excluded him from the Gaitskell set, but they would never have considered him a potential ally anyway. Thomas-Symonds then sets out those issues that all too quickly diminished Wilson’s reputation, especially “his apparent obsession with the activities of the secret services”.

Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Hachette UK Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Hachette UK

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. In spite of this, Thomas-Symonds argues, Wilson worked to prevent Labour becoming an explicitly anti-Europe party, leaving the way open for a referendum on EEC membership. Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister on two separate occasions. 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. Conciliating that unlovely assortment and preserving a balance of forces between Left and Right turned Wilson into a prisoner-leader.Wilson avoided civil wars in Central Africa and Northern Ireland and steadfastly resisted American pressure to send British troops to Vietnam. The author identifies two child­hood experiences that were to influence Wilson’s political life: his Congregationalist background, and the evil of unemployment.

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

Mixing anecdote and fact, Thomas-Symonds paints a vivid picture of the era that is hard to find elsewhere.Sir Keir Starmer QC MP in November 2021 appointed Nick Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade. In 1949, he joined two other young Labour ministers, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, in advising prime minister Clement Attlee on the matter of if and when to devalue sterling.

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

It may be that the energy crisis will be so severe that it will have an equivalent effect on voting behaviour, but the safer assumption would be that if Starmer forms a government, it will be a minority administration relying on other parties not to vote it down.By standing on the Bevanite sidelines, Wilson created a circle of friends and backers without ever needing to be in the trenches of the ideological battlefield. The section on how Wilson handled the 1975 referendum to confirm Britain’s membership of the common market is an excellent, crisp account of how he defended what he saw as the national interest while leading a party that was swinging against Europe. Thomas-Symonds makes the case for Wilson as a different kind of winner from the warrior Blair or the flash-in-the-pan prime ministers who followed him. 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?