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. 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? 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. 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.” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Waterstones Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Waterstones

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ 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. No one disputes that the Wilson governments did some great things. The trouble is that they are overshadowed by the less admirable. This is the man who first said that a week is a long time in politics. Thomas-Symonds, who has had access to material that no other biographer has seen, has found little new evidence to explain away his reputation as a tactician, not a strategist.Roy Hattersley was minister of defence and minister of state for foreign affairs in Harold Wilson’s government

Harold Wilson Does Keir Starmer want to win? He should learn from Harold Wilson

I know beyond doubt that Williams fed Wilson stories about rightwing dissidents in the parliamentary Labour party plotting his downfall. Although much of the scheming was imaginary, the antagonism was real. It could be traced to his decision in 1960 to challenge Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership at the time when Gaitskell had promised to “fight and fight again to save the party we love” from the suicide of extremism. He lost, but in 1963, after Gaitskell’s death, Wilson took the leadership, and a year later led Labour to victory.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. 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. 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. 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.

Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner The Annual Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner

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. 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. And succeed he did. By 1945 he was an MP and by 1947 a Cabinet minister. But already colleagues were looking at him warily. 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. They claimed that Wilson seemed able to face three ways at once. He insisted he had always believed devaluation to be unavoidable. Perhaps he just didn’t say so. 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 Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as party leader in 1955, the party’s agonising and politically costly divisions appeared to have been settled in favour of the right wing. Wilson concentrated on quietly accruing power within the party, identifying with the left but never totally severing links with the right. This decade saw Wilson at his most attractive. Bevan might have once said of him, ‘All bloody facts. No bloody vision’, but slowly and effectively Wilson began putting forward a prospectus for a modern Britain that avoided old arguments of left and right and was based on planned economic management, a harnessing of new technologies and a cradle-to-grave education system that excluded no one.Nevertheless, the author points to the many government reforms that civilised Britain in ways that we now take for granted. Among these were further regulations on racial discrim­­ination, abolition of corporal pun­ishment in prisons, legalising abortion and same-sex relations, reforming divorce laws, and the creation of the Open University.