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. 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. Yet he has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes, since he delivered neither socialism nor economic success. On arriving at Downing Street in 1964, he promised a new Britain based on the “white heat” of the technological revolution. Yet what he delivered was not, as one critic put it, a socialist vision of “a more just or a more humane society”, but one of “technocratic privilege, high salaries and early coronary thrombosis”.

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds - review by

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?

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. 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. 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. A prime minister is invariably held responsible for catastrophes that – in the fashionable phrase – occur “on his or her watch”. But they rarely receive credit for the successes of their years in office. Wilson’s first administration was one of the great reforming governments in British history. Without the prime minister’s blessing, parliamentary time would never have been found to abolish capital punishment, liberalise the laws on homosexuality, divorce and abortion, or for the first positive action to promote racial equality. We should think of Wilson as the architect of social reform.

Harold Wilson | The Spectator The visionary genius of Harold Wilson | The Spectator

Wilson was also characterised as opportunist for his tergiversations on membership of the European Community – as the EU then was – being against it, from 1961 to 1966; then for it, in the late 1960s; then against it in the early 1970s; then for it again when in office for the second time after 1974. On other matters, too, Wilson seemed slippery – for and against further nationalisation, for and against a British independent deterrent, for and against trade union reform, for and against devaluation of the pound and deflation. He appeared not to care where the train was going so long as he was driving it. 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. Paradoxically, damage to his reputation came about because of his undying loyalty to his private and personal secretary. The index of The Winner lists 68 references to Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender, twice as many as any cabinet minister. I do not know or wish to discover the nature of the Wilson-Williams relationship, though if pressed I would guess that it was not what the prurient press hoped it to be. Yet for some reason she was allowed to behave in a way that did Wilson great damage. The final blow was the “lavender list” – Wilson’s nominees for dissolution honours. It was written on Lady Falkender’s notepaper, and included names of men Wilson barely knew. Somehow it found its way into the newspapers. Admittedly, Wilson is held almost solely responsible for the decisions that prejudiced the prospects of his first government and hastened its ignominious end. There is no doubt that he personally vetoed devaluing the pound in the autumn of 1964. And five years later, even Barbara Castle – his friend and constant champion – accused him of “betrayal”, because he would not support her plans for industrial relations reform. But a flexible interpretation of policies and promises has never excluded a prime minister from the pantheon of great politicians.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. Harold Wilson, photographed in his study at home in Westminster, in 1986. Allan Warren/Wiki Commons. Wilson led his party to victory in four general elections. That, itself, goes some way to justifying Thomas-Symonds’s claim. But much of what might be described as achievements were the result of “preventive action”. Wilson avoided civil wars in Central Africa and Northern Ireland and steadfastly resisted American pressure to send British troops to Vietnam. They are not the sort of successes that attract a place in history. Preventing, or at least postponing, a Labour party split is probably more important to Thomas-Symonds and me than it is to posterity.

Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Hachette UK Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Hachette UK

Wilson’s final years in office, after his fourth election victory, were dominated by the debate on membership of the EEC, leading up to the Referendum. Nowhere was Wilson’s political acumen more evident than in the face of a divided Labour Party masterminding the campaign that led to a resounding “Yes” — something for which, the author argues, Wilson has never been given the credit that he de­­serves. In similar vein, he planned his own resignation, leaving office at a time of his own choosing. 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.” He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. graduating in 2001 before working as a Tutor/Lecturer in Politics at his old college, specialising in twentieth-century British government. Soon his enemies (and his friends) had other grievances. By the late 1940s, Attlee’s government was struggling and exhausted. The 1950 election reduced its majority to five. The young guns were tooling up to fight over the party’s future. In the bitter battle between Gaitskell’s centre-left pragmatists and the missionary socialists led by the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, Wilson chose the side of Bevan. In April 1951 he joined Bevan in resigning, a move that astonished his Cabinet colleagues and hastened the end of Attlee’s government. When, three years later, Bevan – a serial resigner – walked out of the Shadow Cabinet over the creation of a NATO equivalent in southeast Asia, Wilson, who had initially sided with Bevan, broke with him and took his place. 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.

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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. For many on the right of the party, membership of the EEC became a cause to rally around. Edward Heath’s Conservative government successfully negotiated entry, but with the Tories split on the issue, the necessary legislation could only pass with Labour support. Since Wilson had applied for entry on similar terms in 1967, his decision now to oppose it on the grounds that defeating the Tories was ‘the primary purpose of opposition’ caused outrage. Thomas-Symonds’s defence of Wilson’s actions rests on the argument that he needed to maintain party unity. Labour’s official, conference-approved policy was to put the terms of entry to the public at a general election. Until then, Labour MPs were to vote against membership. Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons.

Harold Wilson by Nick Thomas-Symonds | Waterstones

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.