‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had Wilson not firmly resisted pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam, Kellner and I were both old enough to have fought there. But in 1968 we loftily despised Wilson for twisting and turning to stay out of Vietnam and keep his party together. ‘What are the two worst things about Harold Wilson?’, we asked. ‘His face,’ we replied smugly.
Britain has never quite forgiven Wilson for his cleverness. His reputation suffered a catastrophic decline in the immediate aftermath of his premiership. It was partially rescued by Ben Pimlott in his 1993 biography, though even he saw Wilson as a mere tactician, albeit a very good one.
Nick Thomas-Symonds’s new biography shows us a Wilson we do not know: a visionary, ‘a kind and generous man’, driven by his father’s long periods of unemployment to make a better world. He never forgave himself for asking his father during one such stretch for three shillings and sixpence to buy a scout knife. ‘I can’t just now – you know how things are,’ mumbled the embarrassed parent.
Then we get the Oxford undergraduate, quiet, studious and brilliant, who becomes an Oxford don at 21. He did very little politicking or socialising, and the Bullingdon Club would have called him a girly swot. After that comes the wartime technocrat of something like genius, with a grasp of detail and political reality which took him into politics in 1945 – an MP at 29 and president of the Board of Trade at 31, the youngest cabinet minister of the 20th century.
Finally, we are shown a great reforming prime minister: ‘Had Wilson achieved his ambition of introducing economic planning, he could have stood alongside Attlee.’
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