Harold Wilson

• 1. Introduction

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  Harold Wilson was born on the 11th of March 1916 on Warneford Road, in the mill town of Huddersfield, to a family that already breathed politics. His father had once served as Winston Churchill's deputy election agent. When Wilson was just eight years old, a photograph was taken of him standing on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street. When he was ten and the family visited Australia, he turned to his mother on the voyage home and said simply: "I am going to be prime minister." He would say it twice. Wilson is the only Labour leader in British history to have formed governments following four separate general elections. He led Britain through the abolition of the death penalty, the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, and the first referendum in British history on European membership. He resigned suddenly in March 1976, and the full reasons for that departure would take decades to surface. What drove a man of such extraordinary electoral skill to walk away from the office he had predicted for himself at the age of ten? And why does his reputation remain so fiercely disputed more than a quarter-century after his death?

• 2. The Making of a Technocrat

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  Wilson won a scholarship to Royds Hall Grammar School in Huddersfield. His father was made redundant in December 1930 and it took him nearly two years to find work, eventually moving the family to Spital on the Wirral Peninsula. Wilson followed, becoming Head Boy at Wirral Grammar School for Boys before winning a place at Jesus College, Oxford, in 1934. His politics tutor, R. B. McCallum, considered Wilson the best student he had ever taught. Biographer Roy Jenkins compared Wilson's academic results to those of Peel, Gladstone, and Asquith, and to no one else. Jenkins was careful to add a qualification: Wilson lacked originality but was superb at the quick assimilation of knowledge and at presenting it lucidly. Wilson graduated with what his examiners described as an outstanding first class Bachelor of Arts degree, with alphas on every paper. He became a research assistant to William Beveridge, and by 1943 was Director of Economics and Statistics at the Ministry of Fuel and Power. That same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. His passion for data was not abstract: as President of the Board of Trade he drove through the Statistics of Trade Act 1947, which remained the authority governing most British economic statistics for decades. His best-remembered speech as Labour leader, delivered at the party's 1963 annual conference, argued that Britain had to be forged in what he called "the white heat" of scientific and technological revolution. That phrase planted a flag that would define his first years in power.

• 3. Youngest in the Cabinet

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  On the 29th of September 1947, Wilson was appointed President of the Board of Trade at the age of 31, making him the youngest member of a British Cabinet in the twentieth century. His immediate priority was dismantling the tangle of wartime rationing. He called it a "bonfire of controls." In November 1948, Wilson's department removed the need for over 200,000 licences and permits. By March 1949 he promised to remove the need for another 900,000. Historian Henry Irvine argues that Wilson selected and publicised each bonfire with extraordinary care to reach the largest possible audience, so that ordinary people could feel directly that their bread and jam had become free again. The political effect was substantial: it established his reputation as a modernising specialist with both the public and the political elite. But the same period began to erode his standing in the inner circle. When Chancellor Stafford Cripps fell ill in mid-1949 and three young ministers were convened to advise Attlee on financial matters, Douglas Jay wrote of Wilson's role in the devaluation debates that "he changed sides three times within eight days and finished up facing both ways." Wilson was sent to Switzerland to deliver the devaluation letter to Cripps, who had opposed it. The episode left a stain. Hugh Dalton referred to him scornfully as "Nye's dog." In April 1951, Wilson joined Aneurin Bevan and John Freeman in resigning from the government in protest at the introduction of National Health Service charges. He was not yet regarded as a heavyweight.

• 4. The Road to Leadership

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  Wilson coined the phrase "Gnomes of Zurich" to mock Swiss bankers he blamed for selling Britain short by speculating against sterling. His speeches as Shadow Chancellor from 1956 were widely praised for their clarity and wit. In 1955 he had backed Hugh Gaitskell, the right-wing candidate, against Bevan for the Labour leadership, a switch that angered the Bevanites who had been his allies. After Bevan died in July 1960, Wilson launched an opportunistic challenge to Gaitskell's leadership in November of that year. It failed. He challenged George Brown for the deputy leadership in 1962 and lost that too. Scholar Timothy Heppell has examined how Wilson overcame these setbacks. The right wing of Labour was split between Brown and James Callaghan, and Brown proved a poor campaigner who emphasised divisive factors rather than his own credentials. When Gaitskell died in January 1963, Wilson took the lead on the first ballot and gained momentum on the second. He emerged, in Heppell's analysis, as the unity candidate. Asked for a statement on the Profumo scandal that had mortally wounded Harold Macmillan, Wilson reportedly said: "No comment... in glorious Technicolor!" When Alec Douglas-Home noted he was the 14th Earl of Home, Wilson quipped that Douglas-Home was out of touch with ordinary people. Home retorted: "I suppose Mr. Wilson is the fourteenth Mr. Wilson." Labour won the 1964 election with a majority of four seats.

• 5. Reform and Constraint

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  Wilson became prime minister at 48, the youngest person to hold that office since Lord Rosebery 70 years earlier. For the first time in British history, his government allocated more money to education than to defence. The Race Relations Act 1965 was the first British legislation to address racial discrimination. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 abolished capital punishment for most offences. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised male homosexuality. The Abortion Act 1967 legalised abortion. The Theatres Act 1968 abolished theatre censorship. The Divorce Reform Act 1969 liberalised divorce. Wilson himself, coming from a provincial non-conformist background, showed no particular personal enthusiasm for much of this agenda. Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary from 1965 to 1967 is most closely associated with it. In education, the proportion of children in comprehensive schools rose from about 10% to over 30% between 1966 and 1970. Public expenditure on education rose as a proportion of GNP from 4.8% in 1964 to 5.9% in 1968, and the number of teachers in training increased by more than a third between 1964 and 1967. The government created the Open University to give adults who had missed out on tertiary education a second chance through part-time study. On housing, 1.3 million new homes were built between 1965 and 1970. Pensions in the five years to 1970 rose by 23% in real terms, and sickness and unemployment benefits by 153% in real terms, largely through the introduction of earnings-related benefits in 1967. The constraint on all of this was the economy: the government inherited a deficit of £800 million on Britain's balance of trade, and it was never far from crisis.

• 6. The Pound and the Price

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  Wilson resisted devaluing the pound through his entire first term until market pressures left no choice. In November 1967, the government devalued sterling by 14%, from $2.80 to $2.40. Wilson was widely criticised for a broadcast soon after in which he assured listeners that the "pound in your pocket" had not lost its value. His reluctance had been rooted in real fears: Labour had devalued sterling in 1949 and he worried the party would be permanently tagged as "the party of devaluation." He also believed devaluation would disproportionately harm low-income Britons with savings. The National Plan produced by the Department of Economic Affairs in 1965 had targeted an annual growth rate of 3.8%. The actual average rate between 1964 and 1970 was 2.2%. The DEA itself was wound up in 1969. Between 1964 and 1966, average unemployment stood at 1.6%. Between 1966 and 1970 it averaged 2.5%. Unemployment stood at around 400,000 when Wilson took office and at 582,000 when he lost the election in June 1970. When he called that 1970 election, the opinion polls had predicted a Labour win; one poll taken six days before polling day showed a 12.4% Labour lead. The Conservatives under Heath won. The Times correspondent George Clark wrote afterward that the contest would be remembered as the occasion when British voters hurled the findings of the polls back into the faces of the pollsters. Labour's vote share fell to its lowest since 1935.

• 7. Second Term, Sudden Exit

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  Wilson returned to Downing Street on the 4th of March 1974, leading a minority Labour government after a hung parliament. He secured a three-seat majority in a second election on the 10th of October 1974. The economy he inherited was battered by global recession and stagflation; inflation peaked at 26% in 1975. His chancellor Denis Healey raised the top rate of income tax to 83%, and combined with a 15% surcharge on unearned income, the marginal rate could reach 98%. In 1974, as many as 750,000 people were liable to pay the top rate. The government negotiated a social contract with the Trades Union Congress to hold down pay rises voluntarily, and inflation fell to single figures by 1978. The most constitutionally novel act of his second term was the referendum on European Community membership, held on the 5th of June 1975. Cabinet members were allowed to campaign on either side. The electorate voted by a near two-to-one majority to remain. On the 16th of March 1976, Wilson resigned, with the resignation taking effect on the 5th of April. He claimed he had always planned to leave at 60 and was physically and mentally exhausted. His doctor had detected what would later be diagnosed as colon cancer. Wilson had privately told a close adviser in 1974: "I have been around this racetrack so often that I cannot generate any more enthusiasm for jumping any more hurdles." By 1976, he may already have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. His Resignation Honours list caused lasting damage to his reputation; it became known as the "Lavender List" after the suggestion that the first draft had been written by his political secretary Marcia Williams on lavender notepaper. Roy Jenkins described the list as disfigured by peerages and knighthoods given to adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to Wilson nor to the Labour Party. Lord Kagan, the inventor of Wilson's preferred Gannex raincoat, was later imprisoned for fraud.

• 8. Memory and Decline

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  Wilson was buried at St Mary's Old Church on the Isles of Scilly, on the 6th of June 1995. His epitaph reads Tempus Imperator Rerum: Time the Commander of Things. After leaving office, he had chaired the Committee to Review the Functioning of Financial Institutions, which reported in June 1980. He appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special at Christmas 1978, referring to Eric Morecambe throughout as 'Morry-camby', the mispronunciation Ed Sullivan had made when the pair had appeared on his American television show. He appeared on the show again in 1980. Advancing Alzheimer's-related dementia made it difficult for him to earn income writing books or giving speeches. His former press secretary Joe Haines said Wilson never had much money of his own and his pension as an ex-prime minister was a comparatively small sum. Wilson eventually attempted to sell his personal papers to McMaster University in Canada for £212,500 to fund his health care. The arrangement was considered unsuitable by the government, and in 1991 it was arranged that anonymous donors would fund the Bodleian Library at Oxford to purchase the papers, keeping them in the United Kingdom while allowing the proceeds to establish a trust fund for Wilson and his wife. Wilson died of colon cancer and Alzheimer's disease on the 23rd of May 1995, aged 79. His memorial service at Westminster Abbey on the 13th of July 1995 was attended by Charles, Prince of Wales, and by former prime ministers Edward Heath, James Callaghan, and Margaret Thatcher. Prime Minister John Major called Wilson a "complex man, certainly, a clever man, a sensitive man" who had "earned a secure place" in Britain's history. In April 2024, Wilson's former press secretary Joe Haines revealed that Wilson had had an affair with Haines' deputy Janet Hewlett-Davies during his final two years in office. Former adviser Bernard Donoughue said the relationship had provided "a little sunshine at sunset" for a man who was increasingly paranoid about the security services and possibly already in the early stages of dementia.