Labour control
RICHARD TOYE is impressed by a detailed but accessible new biography of Harold Wilson, who led Labour to a series of general election victories
Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick ThomasSymonds
W&N, 544 pages, £25
As the subtitle of this thorough, readable biography reminds us, Harold Wilson was an electoral asset to the Labour Party he led for 13 years, winning four general elections (albeit three of them by very narrow margins). Nick Thomas-Symonds – currently an opposition frontbencher – has previously written books on Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee. His mission here is to revise Wilson’s reputation upwards, showing the former Labour leader as “a successful strategist, not a lucky tactician”.
Born in Huddersfield during the First World War, the son of an industrial chemist and a former schoolteacher, Wilson was a precocious grammar-school boy who won an Oxford scholarship. Influenced by the socialist intellectual GDH Cole, he began an academic career before putting his skills as a statistician at the disposal of the wartime civil service. Elected to the Commons in 1945, he was immediately appointed a junior minister.
Fellow MP Christopher Mayhew was blown away by his intelligence: “I watched his bulging cranium with anxiety as he talked, expecting the teeming, boiling brain within to burst out at any moment.” When he entered the cabinet in 1947, Wilson was just 31; four years later he resigned, along with Bevan, in protest at the introduction of NHS prescription charges.
Wilson navigated Labour’s treacherous opposition years with skill. Emerging as the natural successor to Hugh Gaitskell upon the latter’s death in 1963, he entered Downing Street the following year. His image was that of a cheery, down-to-earth moderniser, with a penchant for HP Sauce and Coronation Street.
As prime minister, he managed his tiny majority with aplomb. Ironically, though, the wheels came off after he won a landslide in the 1966 election. Economic problems were mainly to blame. After three years trying to stave off devaluation of the pound, ministers were forced to give in; after making one particularly disastrous broadcast, Wilson’s credibility never recovered. Thomas-Symonds makes a good case for those governments’ liberalising record in other areas – notably the abolition of capital punishment, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion – though he acknowledges that much of the credit should go to Wilson’s colleagues.
After defeat by Edward Heath’s Conservatives in 1970, Wilson more or less held his splintering party together, and took it back to power earlier than might have been expected. This book makes the persuasive suggestion that Wilson’s final term (1974–76) should be evaluated more positively than is usually the case. Still, the paranoia and sheer strangeness of the atmosphere at number 10 in those years continue to amaze.
Other major biographies of Wilson are now three decades old, and this new work draws on previously unreleased material. The key exhibit is Wilson’s autobiographical notes, recently deposited with the rest of his papers in Oxford. These are interesting, but ThomasSymonds does not explain how far they differ from the published memoirs.
Overall, this book is fair-minded, balanced and commendably well researched. There are many lessons that politicians of all parties can draw from Wilson’s electioneering and governmental successes – but also from his not-infrequent failures.
Richard Toye is professor of history at the University of Exeter
The paranoia and sheer strangeness of the atmosphere at number 10 during the years of Wilson’s final term as prime minister continue to amaze