by A. N. Wilson
The Profumo affair had been slightly more than a spectator sport for the American President, as Ambassador Bruce may or may not have been aware. It was through an American businessman, Thomas Corbally, who was a friend of Stephen Ward, that Bruce (and, indeed, Macmillan) had first learnt of Commander Ivanov’s involvement with Christine Keeler.23J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had also heard of Ivanov through an informant code-named Fedora, a KGB officer who had offered to work for the US. The FBI, the CIA and the OSI (Office of Special Investigations) had all taken an obsessive interest in what Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had been up to during their stay at the Hotel Bedford in New York in July 1962 and whether they had–as was rumoured–slept with the President. The Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was interested enough in the possibility to look into it, although it seems inconceivable, had Jack Kennedy slept with Keeler, that she would have kept quiet about it afterwards.24
Inevitably, there were those who resisted the Kennedy cult, especially after the assassination of Bobby in 1968 threatened to turn them not merely into the royal, but also the holy family of America. Whether you see them as gangsters or idealists or both, however, the death of Jack Kennedy was a turning point. Conspiracy theories abound as to the motives and cause of the assassination. As far as Britain was concerned, there was a sense of youth having been violated, and this will undoubtedly have had its effect on the electorate in 1964 when by a narrow margin, and for the first time in thirteen years, Labour won the election. Harold Wilson might not seem with hindsight like the Voice of Youth, but he was the youngest man to date to become Prime Minister in the twentieth century. Labour took 44.1 percent of the poll and 317 seats, the Conservatives 303 seats, and 43.4 percent of the poll; the Liberals with 11.2 percent won 9 seats. The electorate could hardly be said to have been decisive in their rejection of the 14th Earl, nor of what he stood for, but a change had been signalled. One of Home’s ancestors was the Earl of Durham, known as Radical Jack because of his ‘extreme’ espousal of the cause of Chartism and universal suffrage at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The end was now heralded of a Britain which had continued, modified but not radically altered by the reforms of 1832, since the Whig Revolution of 1689.
11
The 14th Mr Wilson
‘Wilson likes to have nonentities about him’, Cecil King once wrote in his diary.1 And you certainly see what he meant, when you consider that, upon taking office in 1964, he made Patrick Gordon Walker the Foreign Secretary (he had even lost his seat, Smethwick, in the General Election and must, even by the undistinguished standards of the period, be seen as one of the dullest holders of that office); or that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer was James Callaghan, a party apparatchik, who never had an idea in his life, and who was so uncertain of his powers that he often went next door to Number 10 to seek the Prime Minister’s advice, often in carpet slippers, and sometimes in tears, late at night, so worrying did he find the task of managing the national economy.2
Seen from a slightly wider perspective, however, King’s judgement will not stand up. Compared with the outgoing party, the new administration was richly filled with colourful personality. What had the Conservative Party to compare with George Brown, Wilson’s rival for the Labour leadership after Gaitskell’s death, and now presiding over the newly created Department of Economic Affairs? Born in Borough, Southwark, Brown had the appearance of a clever bird, instantly amiable, clever, passionate, with large, dark watery eyes and a voice which moved from bass to falsetto especially, a not infrequent occurrence, when he was drunk. A keen womaniser and Anglo-Catholic, not always enthusiasms which go together in a man, Brown was determined to keep the Labour Party on the Gaitskellite straight and narrow, but there was nothing straight or narrow about his approach. His biographer says that in the annals of the civil service there had been nothing like the creation of the DEA since the Middle Ages when ‘Lords of Misrule…furnished with hobby horses, dragons, drums and gongs, were permitted, briefly, to take over the city, as a reminder to the anointed rulers, and the populace, of how thin is the line between order and chaos’.3 Brown was only one of a whole brigade of brightly exaggerated characters who by no stretch of the imagination could be described as nonentities. There was the large, shambolic, bisexual (he had slept with W. H. Auden and had a shaky marital history) figure of Dick Crossman, a representative of the left-wing intellectuals, whom Wilson placed at the Department of Housing and Local Government. With his swept-back hair and Billy Bunter specs he still resembled the firebrand don he had once been. Or there was the red-haired, theatrical figure of Barbara Castle, whose North Country accent and left-wing credentials became more exaggerated as she entered a television studio, someone who was halfway between being a journalist (like her husband, Ted) and an ideologue (like Michael Foot) and whose determination to make a career for herself in politics was manifested in dogged hard work and toe-curling exhibitionism. She began as Minister for Overseas Development, often a ‘woman’s job’ in British politics, but was determined to make her mark on the domestic scene. Waiting in the wings, and destined to be Wilson’s Home Secretary and Chancellor (though in the first administration only a Minister of Aviation), was the orotund, clever Welshman Roy Jenkins (Woy), whose Balliol bumptiousness and claret-marinaded dinner-party manners made no attempt to conceal high ambition. He had written some well-turned books about Asquith and about Sir Charles Dilke. He had been one of Gaitskell’s closest courtiers, and some of his love affairs, notably with Gaitskell’s mistress Ann Fleming, could be seen as useful career moves. The grandeur of his manner and pomposity of his aristocratic-high-table verbal mannerisms–the lisped ‘r’, the ever-stirring right hand, sometimes to emphasise a debating point, sometimes to feel along a hostess’s thigh, could only have been an act, and anyone with a memory stretching back to his youth could remember his father as a trades unionist, later MP, who had been imprisoned in the General Strike, and Woy as the grammar-school boy from the Welsh Valleys. And what of Colonel George Wigg, whose sly question in the House of Commons had exposed the Profumo scandal, and who liked to feed the Prime Minister with troubling details of the plots against him, even when they did not exist? What of (in those days centrist and anti-left-wing) Anthony Wedgwood Benn, pop-eyed MP for Bristol, whose dinner table in Holland Park, subsidised by a millionaire American wife, provided a useful meeting place for the Prime Minister’s supporters and ‘Kitchen Cabinet’? What about the paunchy figure of the solicitor Arnold Goodman, dubbed by the satirists Lord Goodmanzee, who knew the secrets of all in high places and was fast to become an indispensable adviser to the Prime Minister? What of Wilson’s bright-eyed, tall, toothy secretary, Marcia Williams?
No, Cecil King’s word ‘nonentities’ is the wrong one. Indeed, all these tuppence-coloured puppets in the new toy theatre make the central character, Harold Wilson, seem the nonentity, not his entourage.
The smile which was drawn on to his round face was thin and unscrupulous. Smoking (he was seldom without a pipe) was a habit to which he had become addicted when at Oxford, during tutorials with G. D. H. Cole, the leftist historian of the Labour Party. Wilson, however, was never really socialist, even though it suited him to pose as the ‘candidate of the left’ in his jockeying for position in the party. At Oxford, where he got a first class degree, and taught economics at New College (as a lecturer) and University College (as a research fellow), he was noted as a clever but not as a cultivated or charming man; nor as one, as so many of his contemporaries were, who was in the least drawn to the ideological debates of the times. Jenkins, even as a student, had been an anti-Marxian Social Democrat. When the great schism occurred in the Oxford Labour Club between Marxists and Social Democrats, with the huge majority veering to the extreme left, the Treasurer of the Marxists, Iris Murdoch, wrote a letter about the matter beginning, ‘Comrade Jenkins’, and he wrote back ‘Dear Miss Murdoch’. Denis Healey, later to succeed Jenkins as Shadow Chancellor in 1972, like most clever people at that
time was drawn not merely to the political drama of the age (the Spanish Civil War, the advance of fascism) but also to cultural experiment, eagerly devouring Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Crossman, as befitted a lover of W. H. Auden, thought of himself as a man of letters as well as a politico.
Wilson, who had never befriended any of these future colleagues in his student days, was, in spite of brief membership of the Oxford Labour Club, primarily a Liberal, who worked as the secretary to Lord Beveridge, Master of University College, on the drafting of the famous Beveridge Report, a blueprint for social change and improvement after the war. Whereas those destined to form his Cabinet had gone on, after war service, to move in a social circle in London which included writers, bohemian aristocrats, philosophers and musicians, Wilson had no social circle. This had nothing to do with class, though he liked, with his chippy denunciations of Gaitskell’s Frognal Set, to imply that it had. Healey, Jenkins and the others were no grander than Wilson. He chose to marry a teenage sweetheart and to live a life of petit bourgeois quietness, eating cold pork pie and HP sauce while reading Dorothy L. Sayers detective stories. Arnold Goodman rightly categorised him as a philistine and ‘half-educated’.4 Where others in this new Labour government (which was what made the emergence on to the public scene of Castle, Jenkins, Healey, Crossman, Crosland, Longford et al. so entertaining) had a rounded life, Wilson’s existence had revolved, since undergraduate days, around self-promotion pure and simple. He had met his wife, Gladys Mary Baldwin (no relation of the pre-war Prime Minister), at a tennis club in the Wirral when he was still a schoolboy. She was a shorthand typist at Lever Brothers, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. Dissent was a bond between them, though she distinctly did not share her husband’s political interest, and it was torture to Gladys, who later came to be known as Mary, when her husband entered Number 10.
Private Eye began a satirical ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’, which made fun of the very qualities which had made the Wilsons popular with some elements in the electorate, namely their homeliness and Mary’s belief that her parish magazine level doggerel verses were ‘poetry’.
Mary Wilson’s happiest times were spent at Lowenva, a prefabricated bungalow on the Scilly Isles which she had purchased in 1959. They visited the place with their two sons two or three times a year. These holidays, obviously enjoyed by all the family, make a contrast with the breaks which a later Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, enjoyed with his family, in the villas of the rich. But the marriage was not a happy one. There was a third element, ever present, which disrupted the possibility of harmony between Harold and Mary, and this was his desire to lead the party and the country. The embodiment of this ambition, as well as its most eager abetter, was his secretary Marcia. Bernard Donoughue, Wilson’s Press Secretary in the 1970s, wrote, ‘Harold and Marcia’s relationship was one of great intensity and complexity… Its existence mattered to everyone who worked in Number 10 trying to serve the Prime Minister. It inevitably pervaded our lives, sometimes intruding merely as rumbles of distant thunder, sometimes striking centre stage like lightning. It was an influence which clearly met some deep need in Harold and may well have assisted him greatly in his rise to the top of British politics, providing the necessary aggression and jagged edge which was lacking in his own rather soft personality.’5
Inevitably, the relationship gave rise to ribald gossip. Donoughue and his Kitchen Cabinet Colleague Joe Haines had no doubts about the strength of her influence over Wilson, though they remained more puzzled by the means with which she continued to exercise her all-controlling spell. Perhaps none of the three men, neither Wilson, Haines nor Donoughue, in their quest for a secret to explain Marcia’s power, took sufficient account of the obvious, namely her foul temper, a quality in women so disagreeable to men that many will do anything to appease it, in the hope that it will simply go away. Margaret Thatcher, to far greater effect than Marcia Williams, would use this very nasty characteristic to gain supreme mastery over an entire Cabinet. Perhaps Marcia also knew secrets about Harold Wilson’s early dealings in the Soviet Union when he went on supposed trade delegations as a representative of Montague L. Meyer Ltd. ‘Certainly in my hearing’, Donoughue writes, ‘Marcia threatened to “destroy” Wilson, tapping her handbag ominously (though I never saw its contents).’
These, then, were some of the ‘nonentities’ who now controlled Britain.
Those who had voted the Labour Party into power no doubt did so because they wanted a more liberalised society in which the birching of miscreants was no longer permitted, in which capital punishment was abolished, in which the laws governing censorship, of the kind which the Chatterley trial had made farcical, were overthrown, and in which practising homosexual adults could live without the fear of the policeman or, not always the same person, the blackmailer. These liberalisations in the law were effected. More important to the majority of Labour voters was the hope that, with an increase in prosperity, the poorest in society could receive a share of the benefit, not only with improved wages and conditions of work, but also in housing, health care and education. Some of these hopes were realised, but, alas, Harold Wilson as an economics don from Oxford arrived with a whole fleet of economic advisers such as Thomas Balogh, who in 1945 had seriously advised a Labour Party Conference that the dynamism of the Soviet economy would give the USSR ‘an absolute preponderance economically over Western Europe’.6 Thomas Balogh’s fellow Hungarian Nicky Kaldor used to joke that ‘every time he was called by a foreign country to advise what changes should be made in its system of taxation, a revolution followed within a year or two’. Kaldor and Balogh urged upon Wilson, as Roy Harrod had urged upon Macmillan, a broadly Keynesian approach to state borrowing and to inflation. Wilson never wished, any more than did Kaldor and Balogh, to turn the country into a miniature Soviet Union, but their idea that the Soviet programme represented an economic success story underpinned the disaster these men inflicted upon the British economy and explained why such comparatively little progress was made in building up a cleaner, better-housed, or better-educated Britain. The sheer mismanagement of the economy by the economists is one of the tragi-comic stories of the age.
Wilson was an adept at the art of politics, of persuading individuals or groups within the Labour Party to support him, even if they felt ideologically or temperamentally disinclined to do so. He extended the same mesmeric art over the electorate, and was the first Labour Prime Minister to win three general elections for his party–quite a feat when one considers the palpable mismanagement of national and international affairs his administrations achieved. Part of the Wilson formula was based on his own pleasant personality; for it is one of the paradoxes of political life that some of the most skilful practitioners in the unpleasant tricks of the trade–manipulation, dissimulation, self-assertiveness and a willingness to do down their closest friends and allies–could be combined with a pleasant temperament. Wilson was liked, by electorate and colleagues, for the very simple reason that he was likeable. His cleverness was unthreatening, taking the form of prodigious memory feats, when it came to dates of speeches made by members of the party executive, for example, and a perfect recall of innumerable Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics. By sleight of hand–and this was the other great cause of his success and popularity–he discarded doctrine, indeed never had the smallest interest in it (by contrast with the ideologues of his party to right and left), in favour of a generalised belief in progress, and what in an earlier age had been called the March of Mind. Britain was marching forward to an exciting new classless era in which technology would transform everyone’s lives. There was a hint of truth in this vision, though neither the classnessness which comes with economic liberalism nor the skills of technologists had the Labour Party to thank. Wilson, however, made it seem as if he was the driver of the bandwagon on which he had leapt aboard.
At the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough in 1963, the year before he had taken office, he had drawn the contrast between the class-bound, old-
school-tie Conservative Party and the up-to-the-minute Labour Party, which was on the side of science and technology. Echoing Marx, he said, ‘If there had never been a case for socialism before, automation would have created it. It is a choice between the blind imposition of technological advance, with all that means in terms of unemployment, and the conscious, planned purposive use of scientific progress to provide undreamed of living standards and the possibility of leisure ultimately on an unbelievable scale.’7 In spite of Wilson’s promises, however, of state-owned science-based factories to compete with private enterprise, the truth is that technological expertise and scientific cleverness do inevitably lead to a reduction in the workforce, and nearly all such progress in history has been independent of state subsidy or interference. His claim in that speech that Britain had become a team of Gentlemen in the world of Players who could not compete against the gloriously state-subsidised scientists of the Soviet Union conveniently overlooked the fact that, ever since 1945, there had been a steady brain drain of scientific and technological skill, usually from well-established universities, and the boffins and men in white coats had overwhelmingly chosen not to work in the scientific labs of the Gulag Archipelago but in the United States, where private money and private enterprise paid for infinitely better laboratories than were available in Europe, and gave double the salaries.8
Once he took office, however, Wilson did make good his promise to put state money into higher education on a scale hitherto unprecedented. Wilson imaginatively invented the University of the Air, or the Open University as it came to be known, which enabled grown-ups to restart educational adventures which the intervention of jobs and family had made impossible. For many mature students, especially women who had never had the opportunity to take their studies further before their first pregnancy, the Open University was a gateway to learning which no previous establishment, except perhaps Birkbeck College London (which provides lectures in the evenings for mature students), had provided. Following the counsel of the Robbins Report in 1963, the Labour government provided grants for all students in higher education. There were thirty universities in 1962. By 1968 the number had risen to fifty-six. To the stolid ‘civic’ universities such as Birmingham, Reading, Leeds and Bristol were added the plate-glass powerhouses of modernity such as Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick and Lancaster, all built on greenfield sites, and quickly developing a campus ‘ethos’, a ‘student life’ comparable to the youth culture of France or the United States. This had its political and social consequences as we shall see, very little of which was reflected in the ‘white heat of technology’. As busily as the new government built new places of higher learning–thirty polytechnics were commissioned by the Education and Science Department in 1967–it worked diligently to destroy the solid groundwork of traditional schooling which would have made these new colleges into intellectual powerhouses. The man who commissioned the polytechnics, Antony Crosland, is known to history for one sentence–his ambition to ‘destroy every fucking grammar school in England’. This is not to say that the development of comprehensive schools (about 60 percent of British secondary pupils were educated in them by 1970, and about 90 percent by 1980) was not introduced with the kindliest motives. Whether standards of numeracy, literacy, scientific knowledge or technological skill arose across the nation, and whether there was more chance for the clever children of the economically disadvantaged than in the old system, will remain a matter of debate. It is hard to imagine Roy Jenkins, Roy Hattersley, Margaret Thatcher, Denis Healey, Edward Heath or Harold Wilson himself having been quite as successful as they were had they not been educated in the despised grammar school tradition. But they all supported the comprehensivation of the system, Thatcher as Education Minister, in the hope that the opportunities they had enjoyed would be extended from the 25 or 30 percent of those who attended grammar schools in 1944 to all.9