Harold Wilson

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1964-1970, 1974-1976)

• Born: March 11, 1916
• Birthplace: Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England
• Died: May 24, 1995
• Place of death: London, England

As British prime minister, Wilson became the most successful politician of the postwar era, winning four general elections of the five he contested as leader of the Labour Party. In foreign affairs, he was instrumental in mediating a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, and on the domestic scene his handling of the 1975 referendum on Great Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community ended the long and divisive national debate over the issue.

Early Life

Harold Wilson was the son of Herbert Wilson, an industrial chemist, and Ethel Wilson, who had been trained as a teacher. Wilson attended the local grammar school until he was fourteen, when the family moved to Cheshire. Wilson was an outstanding student at his new school, Wirral Grammar, and also a good sportsman, captaining the Rugby football team. In 1934, he won a partial scholarship to Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics. Studious and brilliant, Wilson won a number of prizes and was graduated in 1937 with first-class honors, the highest degree available; his was widely thought to be the best academic performance for fifty years. Then, at the age of twenty-one, he became a lecturer in economics at New College, Oxford, an extraordinary feat for one so young.

When World War II erupted, Wilson joined the civil service. After serving in two minor posts, his reputation as an economist secured for him a position as an economic assistant to the War Cabinet Secretariat. During this time, he married Gladys Mary Baldwin, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. They had first met in 1934.

In 1941, Wilson became chief of the Statistical Department of the Mines Department. A year later, the stocky, pipe-smoking young man, who had grown a mustache to make himself appear older, advanced once more to become director of economics and statistics at the newly established ministry of fuel and power.

Wilson had been considering entering a career in politics, and in 1944, he was adopted as Labour candidate for the Northwest constituency of Ormskirk. In July, 1945, he was elected to Parliament in the landslide Labour victory. He immediately took a junior position in the government, and his dynamism and efficiency ensured that he was soon to rise again. In 1947, he was appointed president of the Board of Trade, a huge department that made up one-tenth of the entire civil service. At the age of thirty-one, he had become the youngest cabinet member of the twentieth century.

Life’s Work

In the general election of 1950, Wilson won the Lancashire seat of Huyton, which he was to represent in Parliament for more than thirty years. Yet his ministerial career as president of the Board of Trade, in which he had traveled widely and proved himself to be a skilled negotiator, was voluntarily cut short in 1951. Following the lead of left-wing minister Aneurin Bevan, Wilson resigned in protest on the introduction of prescription charges in the National Health Service, and the excessive pace of the rearmament program at a time when raw materials were in short supply.

Labour lost the general election of 1951, and Wilson spent three years on the back benches as a rebel against the official Labour leadership. Then, in 1954, he returned to the forefront as a member of the so-called Shadow Cabinet, and in 1956, he became the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, gaining a reputation as a witty and formidable parliamentary performer. In 1960, he unsuccessfully challenged Hugh Gaitskell for the party leadership, and the following year he became shadow foreign secretary and party chair.

When Gaitskell died in 1963, Wilson was elected leader of the party as the person best able to preserve unity between the left- and right-wing factions. In the general election of October, 1964, Wilson campaigned against what he repeatedly called “thirteen years of Tory misrule,” promising that Labour would create a new, dynamic society that would push Great Britain into “the white heat of the technological era.” The election produced an overall majority for Labour of only five seats in the House of Commons, but it was enough to make Wilson prime minister, the youngest since William Pitt the Younger in the nineteenth century.

Wilson had promised, as had U.S. president John F. Kennedy, a hundred days of dynamic activity, and in his first year of office he established himself as a credible, although not especially popular or inspiring, national leader. The new government was faced with a balance-of-payments deficit and a sterling crisis, one of a number that were to trouble it for the next five years. There was also the crisis that culminated in the unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia in November, 1965, after successive British governments had refused to allow the former colony independence unless it made rapid progress toward black majority rule. Wilson himself took a strong stand on the issue, but over the next few years his handling of the crisis did not enhance his reputation.

Eighteen months after the 1964 general election, Wilson called another. Capitalizing on the widespread belief that the government should be given a fair chance to make its policies work, Labour was returned in March, 1966, with a much-increased overall majority. Yet the resulting period of office was not an unqualified success. The Rhodesia problem proved intractable, despite the application of economic sanctions against the rebel regime and Wilson’s statement that they “might bring the rebellion to an end within a matter of weeks” (a remark that was often thrown scornfully back at him as the rebellion dragged on for years).

The years of 1967 and 1968 were especially difficult for Wilson. The worst setbacks were the devaluation of the pound in November, 1967, and the French veto of Great Britain’s attempt to join the European Economic Community. One notable event during this time was the visit of Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin in February, 1967, and the attempt by him and Wilson to spearhead a solution to the Vietnam War. Wilson was later to claim in his memoirs that the plan came near to success, although this was not generally known at the time. The following year, Wilson’s popularity went into a sharp decline. There were calls from within his own party for his resignation, and opinion polls showed the lowest-ever approval rating for a prime minister. In part, this was a result of the Labour government’s failure to stabilize the economy, over which Wilson had assumed personal control. Also, many people disliked what they perceived as Wilson’s deviousness, opportunism, and lack of principle.

In June, 1970, encouraged by favorable opinion polls and local election results, Wilson called a general election, but the government was surprisingly defeated, and the Conservatives, under Edward Heath, took office. The Labour government’s economic record had counted against them, as well as their failure to deal effectively with strikes and inflationary pay awards to the powerful trade unions.

The following year, Wilson found time to write his own lengthy record of his five and a half years in office. As leader of the opposition, he faced heavy criticism for his volte face on the question of British membership of the European Economic Community. When the Conservatives successfully negotiated Great Britain’s entry, Wilson, conforming to a change of opinion within his own party, opposed the move.

In February, 1974, the Conservative government, unable to find a solution to a damaging miners’ strike, called a general election. No party gained an overall majority, but as the leader of the largest party, Wilson was once again invited to form a government. Another election was held in October, in which Labour won a small overall majority. It was Wilson’s fourth general election victory out of five fought as Labour’s leader. He had made a remarkable comeback after the defeat of 1970.

In 1976, at the age of sixty, he surprised almost everyone by announcing his retirement, saying that he feared that he might no longer be able to bring a fresh approach to the problems the country faced. Wilson had served a total of eight years as prime minister, at that time longer than anyone else in peacetime in the twentieth century. On his retirement, he was created a Knight of the Garter, and he continued to serve as a member of Parliament until 1983.

Significance

For thirteen years, Wilson was one of the dominant figures in British politics. He was a brilliant tactician, a pragmatic politician rather than an inspiring leader. His reputation for deviousness was probably caused by nothing more than his necessarily wily approach to the difficult task of placating rival factions in a party that is known for the fierce divisiveness of its internal quarrels. Wilson would often refer to the Labour Party as a “broad church,” and the maintenance of at least a semblance of unity between the far left, which grew rapidly during the 1970’s, and the right-wing social democrats was always one of his highest priorities. A remark he once made gives insight into his strategy: “Any fool can have a confrontation. You can press at the wrong time and get the wrong answer. Or you can work on people. You’ve got to have a sense of timing.” It is significant that after his retirement, divisions within the party grew wider, resulting in a group of right-wing Labour members of Parliament forming the breakaway Social Democratic Party in 1981. It should also be remembered that since Wilson’s retirement, the Labour Party lost several successive general elections.

Although Wilson was unable to reverse fundamentally the decline in Great Britain’s economic fortunes and its diminishing role in world affairs, he did have occasional successes. In foreign affairs, he was instrumental in mediating a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, and on the domestic scene his handling of the 1975 referendum on Great Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community ended the long and divisive national debate over the issue. For much of his ministry, Wilson was faced with a hostile Conservative press, anxious to discredit him. His resilience, and his ability to extricate himself from the most difficult situations, caused him to be known as the Houdini of British politics.

Bibliography

Colman, Jonathan. A “Special Relationship”? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Anglo-American Relations at the Summit, 1964-1968. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2004. Examines the troubled relationship between Wilson and President Johnson. Johnson held Wilson in low esteem and did not support Wilson’s desire that the United States and Britain should maintain a “special relationship.”

Crossman, R. H. S. Diaries of a Cabinet Minister. 3 vols. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975-1977. A journalist, an indefatigable diarist, and a minister in the Labour government of 1964-1970, Crossman gives an outstanding, detailed, and shrewd account of how British politics really works, including a highly critical portrait of Wilson as prime minister.

Howard, Anthony, and Richard West. The Road to Number 10. New York: Macmillan, 1965. In a swiftly moving, highly readable account, modeled on T. H. White’s The Making of the President (1960), two top British political journalists tell the story of the British election campaign of 1964 and the events and issues leading up to it.

Roth, Andrew. Sir Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty. London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977. The format of this uneven and disappointing biography is curious, beginning with chapters on Wilson’s resignation and his controversial honors list, followed by a chronological biography that stops, without explanation, at the 1964 election. The author’s frequent attempts to denigrate his subject are unpleasant and unnecessary, and they spoil some otherwise sound research.

Routledge, Paul. Wilson. London: Haus, 2006. Brief overview of Wilson’s administration. One in a series of books about British prime ministers.

Smith, Leslie. Harold Wilson: The Authentic Portrait. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965. An authorized, largely uncritical biography by a BBC producer, based on taped interviews with Wilson.

Williams, Marcia. Inside Number 10. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972. Wilson’s personal and political secretary since 1956 describes her five and a half years (1964-1970) at the center of British political life. A valuable account, although it says little that Wilson himself has not said in his own record of the period.

Wilson, Harold. The Governance of Britain. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. An inside account, much of it anecdotal, of how British parliamentary democracy works, the first ever written by a prime minister. Analyzes the role of the prime minister from the eighteenth century to the present, and his relations with cabinet, Parliament, and party. Includes a comparison of the British and American systems.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Personal Record: The Labour Government, 1964-70. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. A detailed, week-by-week account of Wilson’s first period in office. Includes details of the secret negotiations in England in 1967 between Wilson and Kosygin to end the Vietnam War.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Purpose and Power: Selected Speeches by Harold Wilson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. A collection of fifteen speeches given during the first year of the Labour government in 1964. Subjects include the economy, Rhodesia, and two tributes to Winston Churchill.