The short zenith of Harold Wilson

The Yorkshireman was prime minister for nearly eight years and won four general elections, yet his true glory days were only a few years in the mid-1960s

As last words go, they could scarcely be more famous, but this is intended as a short piece to encapsulate a discrete thought that popped into my head. I’m currently reading Alwyn Turner’s brisk and lively Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s, which caused Harold Wilson to ease his way to the forefront of my mind, all stagey pipe and Gannex mac. He is an extraordinary figure, a titan of Labour Party history even if he is not much revered these days: only Sir Tony Blair was more successful electorally, and Wilson represented, like his successor, a changing of the political guard and a major shift in political culture when he became prime minister in 1964. And yet—here is my thesis—his time at the top of the tree was astonishingly short.

Wilson’s early career was that of the brilliant young man. Born in 1916, four months before the Battle of the Somme began, he won a scholarship to the local grammar school in Huddersfield, completed his schooling at Wirral Grammar School for Boys, where he was head boy, and won an open exhibition to Jesus College, Oxford, to read history, but after a year switched to philosophy, politics and economics, a degree course then not much more than a decade old. He was a brilliant undergraduate, regarded by his politics tutor, R.B. McCallum as the best student he had ever taught, and secured a first-class degree with alphas on every paper as well as winning the Gladstone Memorial Prize and the George Webb Medley Prize for economics.

After graduating, aged only 21, he became a lecturer in economics at New College and was then elected a junior research fellow of University College. He was recruited as an assistant by the master of the college, William Beveridge, to work on issues of unemployment and the trade cycle which would eventually bear fruit in 1942 as Social Insurance and Allied Services, a government-commissioned study known to posterity as the Beveridge Report. When the Second World War broke out, Wilson was rejected for military service on the grounds he was a specialist and directed instead to the civil service: although his first post was as a temporary grade three clerk in the Oxford office of the Potato Control Board, within weeks he was spotted by the Ministry of Supply and then headhunted by the Cabinet Office. For a while he was reunited with Beveridge as secretary of the Manpower Requirements Committee, which Beveridge chaired, before being promoted to increasingly senior positions at the Mines Department of the Board of Trade then the new Ministry of Fuel and Power. In January 1945, he was adopted as Labour candidate for Ormskirk, meaning he had to leave the civil service, and he returned to Oxford for a few months, before being elected to the House of Commons in the Labour landslide of July 1945.

Harold Wilson was only 29 when he was first elected, sporting a small moustache to conceal his youth, and he was not destined for the backbenches. When Clement Attlee formed his government, Wilson was appointed to office immediately, as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Works, the department responsible for government property and buildings. Two years later, he was made secretary for overseas trade, a junior position at the Board of Trade dealing with export promotion, but lasted only two and a half months. In September 1947, his ministerial superior, Sir Stafford Cripps, was appointed to the new post of minister of economic affairs, and Wilson, aged 31, succeeded him as president of the Board of Trade and the youngest member of the cabinet since 1806.

He was a successful minister, though regarded as self-important, and was identified increasingly with the Labour Party’s left wing. In April 1951, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, attempting to offset some of the costs of the Korean War, introduced a prescription charge for dental care and spectacles, prompting the resignation of the minister of labour, and founding father of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan. Wilson and the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Supply, John Freeman, joined Bevan in walking out of the government, though former chancellor Hugh Dalton dismissed Wilson as “Nye’s little dog”, purely an acolyte of Bevan.

Ministerial resignation could have been the end of Wilson’s front-line career, especially as Labour lost the general election of October 1951 and went into what turned out to be 13 years of opposition. Far from being Bevan’s terrier, however, Wilson was keen-eyed and cynical opportunist: although he was elected to the National Executive Committee as a Bevanite in 1952, he angered colleagues on the left by taking Bevan’s place when the Welshman resigned from the shadow cabinet in 1954, speaking on his old portfolio of trade. When Attlee retired as party leader at the end of 1955, Wilson backed not his old ally Bevan but Hugh Gaitskell, and was rewarded with the post of shadow chancellor, in which he was an effective critic of the government. Although he challenged Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960, he remained on the front bench, from 1961 acting as shadow foreign secretary. When Gaitskell died unexpectedly in January 1963, Wilson comfortably beat the party’s deputy leader, George Brown, to succeed him.

Wilson’s election as leader of the Labour Party in 1963 was the beginning of his pomp. It is easy to imagine now that he slid seamlessly to a general election win and the premiership in October 1964, being gifted a huge advantage when the genial but aristocratic Sir Alec Douglas-Home replaced Harold Macmillan as prime minister in October 1963; in fact, as I have written before, Home performed much better than many people expected, his straightforward good humour often disarming potential critics, and although Wilson led Labour back to government, it was by a tiny margin of 200,000 votes over the Conservatives nationally, delivering a majority in the House of Commons of just four.

Nevertheless, the folk memories are not wholly inaccurate. At 48, Wilson was the youngest prime minister since the Earl of Rosebery in the 1890s. Unlike his four aristocratic Conservative predecessors (by marriage and pose, in Macmillan’s case), he was self-consciously ordinary, a Northern middle-class non-conformist who retained his Yorkshire accent. He brandished a reassuringly demotic pipe (in private he preferred cigars) and often sported a Gannex raincoat to bolster his everyman image. As well as his academic prowess, he had a sharp wit, a good sense of humour—sometimes subject to catastrophic failure—and was instinctively good at handling the modern media.

The Labour government of 1964 was deliberately transformational. Wilson created five new Whitehall departments: the Department of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Technology, the Ministry of Overseas Development, the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources and the Welsh Office. The first three were especially important, with the DEA intended as a counterweight to the Treasury and responsible for the production of the National Plan which would direct the economy and industry, and MinTech the embodiment of modernity and progress; it exemplified the “scientific revolution” of which Wilson had spoken at the previous year’s party conference in Scarborough, and “the Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution”. The Ministry of Overseas Development, meanwhile, represented a shift in Britain’s relationship with the developing world, as the empire was gradually decolonialised and administration, it was intended, gave way to partnership and assistance.

Although his parliamentary majority was wafer-thin, Wilson was dominant at this stage. Douglas-Home was clearly not an ideal leader of the opposition, by ability, temperament or inclination, and while there was relatively little internal pressure on him, he decided early in 1965 that he would step down after setting up a system of election for his successor. He announced his departure on 22 July, and Edward Heath narrowly beat Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell to the leadership. The very nature of Wilson was undoubtedly a factor in Conservative MPs’ choice of Heath: only a few months younger than the prime minister, Heath was from rather humbler origins in Kent, his father a carpenter and his mother a chambermaid. Like Wilson, he had read PPE at Oxford—Balliol, in his case, where he was also an organ scholar—and although he had only received a second-class degree, this was perhaps compensated for by a very solid war record, serving in the Royal Artillery in north-west Europe and being demobilised as a major and an MBE (Wilson had received a civilian OBE for his work in Whitehall during the Second World War).

It felt as if the Conservatives had attempted to replicate Wilson, but Heath was a very different character. He was stiff and formal, with few close friends and an awkward, ponderous manner, and while Wilson retained his Yorkshire accent, Heath spoke with a sonorous intonation which had no regional identity but was not only artificial but very obviously so. (He was hardly unique in politics at that time in changing his intonation: Margaret Thatcher’s voice changed dramatically over her career, and it was a time when elocution lessons were merely tools of social advancement rather than on some way “phony”.) Although Heath was dedicated and meticulous, he had no sparkle nor any rapport with the electorate, and was powerless to stop Wilson increasing his majority substantially to 98 when he went to the polls again in March 1966.

These were the high days of the 1960s when it seemed as if Wilson could do no wrong. In June 1965 he had cannily associated himself with popular culture and young voters by arranging for the Beatles to be awarded MBEs, and he had the good fortune to be prime minister when England beat West Germany to win the World Cup on 30 July 1966. He had already made Stanley Matthews the first footballer to be knighted, in 1965, and secured the same honour for England manager Alf Ramsey in 1967 and Manchester United boss Matt Busby in 1968; Bobby Moore, who had captained the World Cup-winning England squad, was made an OBE.

Wilson also oversaw a swathe of liberalising social measures. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 formalised an effective moratorium on capital punishment in cases of murder (the last two executions had taken place in August 1964), the Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalised male homosexual acts between men over 21, the Abortion Act 1967 allowed the provision of abortion within certain limits, the Theatres Act 1968 ended censorship of theatrical performances by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the Representation of the People Act 1969 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and the Divorce Reform Act 1969 made it easier for couples to end unsuccessful marriages.

The impetus behind these changes did not come in the main from Wilson, who was a rather staid and conventional figure in some ways. Roy Jenkins as home secretary from 1965 to 1967 made a lot of the running, while the Murder Act, the Sexual Offences Act and the Abortion Act had all begun life as private members’ bills introduced by backbenchers. Nevertheless, none would have succeeded without being granted legislative time and at least tacit government support.

Wilson also deserves substantial credit for the creation of the Open University, now one of the world’s largest educational institutions. He took the vision of sociologist Michael Young, who had pioneered the National Extension College in 1963 and a series of lectures on Anglia Television dubbed the “Dawn University”, and combined it with his own emerging concept of a “University of the Air”. He charged Jennie Lee, minister for the arts and Nye Bevan’s widow, with the project, and in February 1966 she produced a white paper, A University of the Air, which set out the government’s proposals. It was a strikingly revolutionary concept, and in Wilson’s view a critical element of modernisation in terms of Britain’s education as well as socio-economic opportunity and prosperity. The OU came into being in April 1969 when it was awarded a royal charter.

And yet… already the mood had soured and Wilson’s dominance had diminished. The National Plan unveiled by George Brown in 1965 had anticipated annual economic growth of 3.8 per cent, but that was never realised, and the average rate over the life of the government was only 2.2 per cent. But in 1967 there was an economic and political crisis as rising oil prices had a serious effect on Britain’s balance of payments and a report by the European Economic Community suggested that sterling could not be sustained as a reserve currency. Rumours that the pound might be devalued saw heavy selling of sterling on the currency markets, and their effect, as is so often the case, was self-fulfilling: on 15 November, Wilson and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jim Callaghan, agreed to devalue sterling from $2.80 to the pound to $2.40. The decision was not due to be announced until 18 November, but Callaghan, speaking in the House of Commons, was unable to deny that devaluation might take place. Sales of sterling rocketed and cost the government £1.5 billion in 24 hours.

Callaghan’s position was impossible, if understandable, and he offered his resignation. Wilson responded by replacing him with Roy Jenkins and moving Callaghan to Jenkins’ place at the Home Office. But the prime minister compounded the crisis with a deeply mendacious television broadcast in which he tried to play down the significance of devaluation.

From now the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.

This was desperate, face-saving stuff, and a prime minister with a brilliant background in economics knew it. In his television response, Edward Heath could hardly miss when he commented mordantly “Having denied 20 times in 37 months that they would ever devalue the pound, they have devalued against all their own arguments”.

Worse was to come that month. The United Kingdom had first applied to join the EEC in 1961, with Edward Heath in charge of the negotiations, but the proposal had been vetoed by President Charles de Gaulle of France in 1963. Wilson had lodged a second application in May 1967, despite deep ambivalence within the Labour Party, and on 27 November, less than a fortnight after devaluation, the same French president gave the same response: Non. De Gaulle argued that “the present Common Market is incompatible with the economy, as it now stands, of Britain”, in areas from agriculture to working practices, also noting a lack of commitment on the United Kingdom’s part.

It had already been a bad year. Despite Wilson’s emphatic general election win 12 months before, in April 1967 the Conservatives swept to victory to gain control of the Greater London Council, with 82 of 100 seats. In July, the UK had clashed with the United States and Australia over its decision to close its military bases in Malaysia and Singapore, and large-scale anti-government riots had taken place in Hong Kong throughout the year, eventually leaving 51 dead. In August, an inquiry had concluded that the National Coal Board was to blame for the deadly collapse of a colliery spoil tip at Aberfan the previous year, which had killed 116 children and 28 adults. In September, Labour had lost by-elections in Cambridge and Walthamstow West to the Conservatives. In October, Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955, had died at the age of 84. In early November, Winifred Ewing of the Scottish National Party had unexpectedly won the Hamilton by-election, and, at the end of that month, British forces had withdrawn from Aden after 128 years.

I think there’s an argument that little of substance would go right for Wilson after 1967. In March 1968, George Brown, who had moved from the DEA to the Foreign Office, resigned in pique when Wilson had held a Privy Council meeting without him (Brown had been missing and drunk, and his staff had not known where to find him). Not long afterwards, three more parliamentary seats were lost at by-elections to the Conservatives in Acton, Dudley and Meriden. In October 1968, Wilson met the prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, on board HMS Fearless at Gibraltar to try to resolve the ongoing crisis which had been sparked by Smith’s unilateral declaration of the colony’s independence in 1965, but the talks ended in failure (the last diplomatic ties would be severed in June 1969).

In January 1969, the employment secretary, Barbara Castle, unveiled a white paper on trade union reform entitled In Place of Strife, but it failed to make progress towards legislation because of strong opposition within the government and the trade union movement. It was a severe blow to Wilson’s authority, especially with opposition being led in cabinet by Jim Callaghan, the home secretary. In August 1969, after riots in Londonderry, Newry, Armagh, Crossmaglen, Dungannon, Coalisland and Dungiven, units of the British Army were deployed to Northern Ireland, a commitment (Operation Banner) which would in the end last for nearly 38 years.

In June 1970 came the final indignity: while the opinion polls seemed reassuringly certain that Labour would be re-elected, Wilson lost the general election to Edward Heath. By the time he left office, gross domestic product and household disposable income were both lower than they had been in 1964, and the unemployment rate, while still relatively low, had risen by about half. Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party; although there were rumours of challenges by former navy minister Christopher Mayhew and the fiercely republican West Fife MP Willie Hamilton, the truth was that the parliamentary party’s divided and fissiparous nature was protecting Wilson by scotching the chances of any credible alternative. Former home secretary and chancellor Roy Jenkins would never overcome the opposition of the Left, while potential candidates like Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he still was until 1973) had no support on the Right.

In truth, even at 54 when he left Downing Street, Wilson was exhausted and diminished. In the wake of defeat, he partially withdrew from his political duties and busied himself writing what would be published in July 1971 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson as The Labour Government 1964-70: A Personal Record. It was a dauntingly weighty, 800-page apologia but reeked of a leader seeking to get his retaliation in first. Colleagues noticed that his participation in the House of Commons was much less active then when he had been leader of the opposition in 1963-64, and that he seemed to have little new to say. When the House began debating the Queen’s Speech on 2 July 1970, Wilson set out a very low-key approach to opposition in the short term:

Her Majesty’s Opposition will not be tempted to censure and negative opposition for opposition’s sake. That is not good for Parliament. It is not good for democracy. Opposition, no less than Government, must follow a theme consistent, comprehensive, based on priorities, and subject to a single unifying approach, bringing together every aspect of government—foreign affairs, defence, financial, economic, social, industrial policies. We shall wait for each new development of policy, wait watchfully and keenly, but we shall not rush into condemnation for the sake of it.

By the end of 1970, Bob Mellish, the Labour chief whip, was recorded by Tony Benn as predicting that “Harold Wilson would not be leader of the Leader of the Labour Party by the end of 1971”. Richard Marsh, the former transport minister, said that he “takes little part in the business of the House, but embarrasses new members by recounting the brilliant speeches he made years ago”. He seemed like a burnt-out case.

The years of opposition between 1970 and 1974, and then his final two-year stint as prime minister 1974-76, added little to Wilson’s reputation. The scandal over some of the inclusions in his Resignation Honours—the so-called “Lavender List”—saw him depart Downing Street under a cloud, and his public profile faded as he became more seriously afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease. Certainly there were no moments to match the best days of his first premiership.

Being generous, then, there is an argument that Harold Wilson’s peak, his glory days as leader of the Labour Party, ran from February 1963 to November 1967 at a stretch. That is not much more than four and a half years, less than the maximum term of a parliament. His statistics are impressive enough: he contested five general elections in 13 years as party leader and came out ahead in four of them, and was prime minister for nearly eight years in total (the last prime minister since Churchill to serve separate terms in office). And remember that only four Labour leaders have ever won outright parliamentary majorities: Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.

There is no doubt that he was a substantial figure. As impressionists like Mike Yarwood grew in popularity, Wilson’s flat Yorkshire vowels were instantly recognisable and susceptible to mimicry (and Yarwood needed only a pipe to revive the performance some years into the Thatcher government). He changed the way politicians interacted with the media and the extent to which they could use greater, arguably more intrusive coverage to forge a connection with the electorate in a way no-one had done before.

Intellectually, Wilson was formidable. His former wary colleague and occasional opponent (and for two years his deputy leader), Roy Jenkins, wrote a entry for him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. While noting, in characteristically lofty tones, that the former prime minister “lacked originality”, Jenkins argued:

Academically his results put him among prime ministers in the category of Peel, Gladstone, Asquith, and no one else… What he was superb at was the quick assimilation of knowledge, combined with an ability to keep it ordered in his mind and to present it lucidly in a form welcome to his examiners.

Some of this fearsome intellect was undoubtedly directed towards his public image, his hard-hitting speeches and what was for a time his effervescent wit.

For all of that, he seems curiously insubstantial now. In terms of achievements and legacy, it is hard to set him alongside Attlee or Thatcher or Blair, although rather oddly Sir Keir Starmer has cited Wilson as the Labour leader of the last 50 years he admires most (this has prompted comparisons between the two men here and here and here, among others).

Perhaps, in the end, it is the ultimate demonstration of that prime ministerial hazard famously but perhaps apocryphally identified by the other great Harold, Harold Macmillan: “Events, dear boy, events”. Wilson was a man of huge gifts and prodigious energy, who was able to capitalise on Gaitskell’s early death and go from leader of the opposition to prime minister in less than two years. Soon enough, though, circumstances turned against him, sometimes of his making but often not, and arguably more than half of his tenure as Labour leader was spent in decline, from teh devaluation crisis of November 1967 to his eventual resignation in April 1976.

Yet he was prime minister, and for a good long time. Maybe we should remember the stern words of Tom Young, Lord Melbourne’s secretary, in 1834 when William IV asked the Whig leader to form a government but Melbourne found himself reluctant:

Why, damn it all, such a position was never held by any Greek or Roman: and if it only lasts three months, it will be worth while to have been Prime Minister of England!