Nonetheless, if the biggest criticism of a political biography one can draw is that it tells you more about its subject than its author, it can hardly be viewed as a failure.

Wilson’s hawkishness over the issue ‘plunged the government into a prolonged and needless crisis that turned into arguably one of the most serious in the Labour Party’s history’ (p. This is important in this context since Wilson represents the most paradigmatic centrist in Labour Party terms since 1945’ (p. Wilson was born in 1916, and the book follows him from his childhood in the north of England to his academic success at Oxford, his war years as a civil servant at the National Coal Board, into parliament and up through the ranks to Downing Street.Devaluation in 1964 may well have improved the trade balance (as it did in 1967), but the political cost would have been high, as devaluation tends to bring a ‘substantial blow to working class living standards’ (p. Harold Wilson pulled Labour together with pragmatism – sometimes by soothing, sometimes by the scruff of the neck – and won four times. However, it is the acknowledging and accounting of experiences in my life that can only be explained by the presence and power of our unseen Lord". 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).

Wilson’s attitudes to these reforms were often ambivalent (2); more than one commentator has suggested that he allowed the Sexual Offenses (No. In the summer of 1965, the US provided a rescue package for the pound, which had come under pressure due to shrinking exchange reserves. In public, Wilson professed to smoke a pipe and drink beer; in private he smoked cigars and drank spirits, and when his popularity dropped this ‘fed the claim that he was more style than substance’ (p. First edition of The Governance of Britain by Harold Wilson in the original publisher's cloth binding and unclipped dust wrapper.It was assumed that he made the distinction in the hope of trivialising Bevan’s rebellion and capturing the leadership of the Labour left.