Harold Wilson: The Winner

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Britain and Disarmament: The UK and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons Arms Control and Programmes, 1956-1975 (Ashgate, 2012). I know beyond doubt that Williams fed Wilson stories about rightwing dissidents in the parliamentary Labour party plotting his downfall.

Inscribed by Wilson to the title page: "For Richard Dalby Harold Wilson", the recipient being the notable bibliophile of that name, and, as with many books from Dalby's library, this one comes with some bonus ephemera tucked into the rear of the book, in this case several leaflets on the subject of the 1974 referendum on Britain's future relationship with Europe, as well as a number of press cuttings. Wilson avoided civil wars in Central Africa and Northern Ireland and steadfastly resisted American pressure to send British troops to Vietnam. The problem was however, that the unions were not particularly interested in being social partners or instruments of government.Most notable among these is Wilson’s approach to American pressure on Britain around the Vietnam war and his renegotiation of Britain’s membership of what was then the European Economic Community. The flipside of the memoirs being authentic is that most of the time Thomas-Symonds quotes material that appeared in the Wilson early-1980s manuscript, one can find the same, or nearly the same, quotation in the 1986 published memoirs. He was the Leader of the Labour Party from 1963 to 1976, and was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1983.

The author does justice, as other biographers have not, to the social legislation of the Wilson era: the decriminalisation of same sex relations, abolition of capital punishment and action against racist discrimination. Wilson’s efforts to deal with the problem of Rhodesia – which oddly occupy only a page or so of Vickers’ survey – were somewhat less successful. But Morgan’s was by no means a bad book and it added value (as Ziegler acknowledged), even though I would list my favorite-to-least-favorite among the books as: Thomas-Symonds, Ziegler, Pimlott, Morgan. 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. It’s not hard to see why reading this book, concerned with electability and using power to advance society rather than sitting in the ideological purity of opposition so often preferred by Labour his achievements are impressive, perhaps the most impressive was keeping the UK out of Vietnam, something his successor as an elected Labour prime minister would have done well to learn from.One of the key turning points (or lack thereof) in the Wilson era was the decision not to devalue the pound upon reaching office in 1964. Wilson was caught between a rock and a hard place over Vietnam: failure to condemn the American action in the country alienated many back-benchers, and Wilson was plagued by anti-Vietnam demonstrations in 1967 and 1968. This collection is a very stimulating contribution to any study of the Wilson years and Labour’s legacy as a political party. At the moment when the announcement was made, in 1976, I was standing to attention on the runway of Sofia’s airport, clutching a sheaf of giant gladioli and listening to the eighth or ninth verse of Bulgaria’s national anthem.

Forging the Anglo-American global defence partnership: Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Washington summit, December 1964.Incidentally, Wilson himself publicly claimed (Liverpool Daily Post, December 17, 1981) that he had recently drafted, and was putting the finishing touches on, the first 50,000 words of his autobiography. 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". Nevertheless, the Labour Party won a slender majority at the 1964 election and Wilson became prime minister.