by Andy Beckett
Like Ted Heath, he had been born in 1916 to striving, modestly-off parents in an unglamorous English town. Unlike Heath, Wilson came from an England that was northern and industrial: his father Herbert worked for a manufacturer of dyes and explosives just outside Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Herbert was a trained chemist with an interest in politics and ambitions for his son. When Harold was eight, they drove to London together in a motorbike and sidecar and took in the political sights of the capital. They parked in Downing Street, where Ramsay MacDonald was leading the first, short-lived Labour government, and Herbert took out his camera. Harold posed in front of the doorstep, slightly dwarfed by a large flat cap but with a beaky confidence. It was 1924, and his weary return to the same spot in 1974 was a long way off.
During the thirties, he received a less comfortable education in politics and economics. The Depression left his father without work for extended periods. In 1931, Harold closely followed the protracted, prophetic collapse of the second Labour government as it succumbed to a combination of recession, rows over public-spending cuts and terminal splits in the Cabinet. Yet his own course was briskly upward: grammar school, bookishness, Oxford. At university, he acquired a reputation for being self-contained and studious but also good company, a teller of tales, a show-off. His college, Jesus, was small and unselfconscious; Wilson had little to do with the grandstanding student politics that drew in contemporaries like Heath, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. He found the university Labour Club, he wrote to his parents, ‘very petty: squabbling … with other sections of the labour party instead of getting down to something concrete’. He was asked to join the Communist October Club but refused. Instead, he took up with the Liberals. The party was in one of its frequent troughs, and he quickly became its Oxford university treasurer, known for his energy and efficiency rather than his political views. In his last year at Oxford, his involvement in the Liberal Club dwindled, but he did leave university with an aptitude for the more subtle political arts. In his finals, he scored a very good First in politics, philosophy and economics, the same degree as Heath. Wilson showed evidence, one of the examiners noted, of having researched the preferences of the dons who were going to do the marking and of tailoring his essays accordingly.
Wilson loved facts: collecting them, husbanding them, deploying them. After Oxford, his relish for data fitted in with an emerging official enthusiasm for social reform based on large-scale research. Between 1937 and 1941, he worked as an assistant to Sir William Beveridge, the revered social scientist and radical Liberal. Wilson found his boss prickly and exhausting, and turned down the chance to work on his famous ‘Beveridge Report’, which in 1942 set out the basic principles of the post-war welfare state. But working for Beveridge familiarized Wilson with the new British left-of-centre thinking, and gave him contacts and experience. His own interest in party politics was reawakened and he moved to the left. After Beveridge, he joined Whitehall’s expanding bureaucracy and helped push the coal industry the first steps down the path to nationalization. In 1945, he became a Labour MP.
At first, Wilson rose in the party as an eager young technocrat. ‘Socialism’, he wrote in a book he published on coal, ‘is the only means to full efficiency.’ Within weeks of being elected, at the age of twenty-nine, he was appointed to his first government post, as parliamentary secretary to the minister of works. Within less than two years, he was in the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, overseeing a huge, diffuse ministry with a staff of almost 13,000. Wilson quickly showed an adeptness at operating the state machinery – and a shrewd awareness of the good publicity to be had from sometimes switching it off. During 1948 and 1949, with the economy recovering from the war and opposition growing to the continuance of rationing, he presided over a high-profile ‘bonfire’ of government restrictions covering many consumer goods and foreign imports. Wilson retained an enduring belief in state planning to achieve the goals that the free market could not, yet he was also happy to be photographed ripping up a ration book.
In the fifties and early sixties, this ability to face both ways, to appear sometimes to be a politician of the Left and sometimes one of the more populist, pragmatic centre, acquired him enemies in the Labour Party but a growing following among voters. In public, he had his homely pipe and clever eyes, his charm on voters’ doorsteps and his deadliness against debating opponents and hecklers. In private – where he smoked cigars – many Labour colleagues found him able, affable and increasingly plausible as a future prime minister, yet fundamentally untrustworthy. In 1963, after the premature death of the party leader Hugh Gaitskell and over a decade in opposition, Labour MPs chose Wilson as their next leader by a less than overwhelming margin. A year later, a stale, scandal-hit Conservative government narrowly lost the general election and Wilson was prime minister.
The party he had inherited from Gaitskell was alive with talent, rivalries and ideological divisions, with possible prime ministers and barons of Labour factions: James Callaghan and Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle and Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Denis Healey. Wilson’s solution was to turn his leadership into an elaborate balancing act, playing off the different interests against each other, making temporary alliances, switching sides. It was a game he was very good at. From 1966, when it first became clear that his economic strategy was unravelling, there were almost perpetual plots to replace him as leader, most frequently with Jenkins or Callaghan. But he outwitted the plotters. Indeed, Wilson chose to make the game more elaborate still, by being the first prime minister to augment the conventional Cabinet with his own ‘kitchen cabinet’ of powerful and rivalrous advisers, such as Marcia Williams, his long-standing secretary, confidante and self-styled socialist conscience; his abrasive press secretary Joe Haines; and the sharp-elbowed Bernard Donoughue.
Yet however delicious the kitchen cabinet’s manoeuvrings were for the political connoisseur – Donoughue and Haines could barely stand Williams, and vice versa, while she sought to bully Wilson – by the late sixties, and certainly by the seventies, all this jockeying was counterproductive when placed before a wider national audience, as it was frequently and in intricate detail by the national press. Increasingly, Labour under Wilson looked divided, introspective, even a little self-indulgent, at a time when more and more people considered the country in crisis. In the mid-seventies, moreover, unlike in the mid-sixties, Wilson offered no bold solutions to Britain’s apparent decline; nor were his public persona or presentational tricks as fresh and energetic and appealing.
The consequences of all this were apparent at the February 1974 general election. Here the shock of the party’s victory concealed the fact that the result was, in some significant senses, actually a defeat: for all the blunders of the unloved Heath government, the Conservatives had won almost a quarter of a million more votes than Labour. Wilson had been chosen as prime minister by barely 37 per cent of the participating electorate. Perhaps most alarmingly of all for Labour’s future, the proportion of trade unionists voting for the party had plummeted from a steady three quarters in the sixties to little more than half. The defection of the skilled working class to other parties, which would be seen as fatal by politicians and commentators at future general elections, had already started.
However, Wilson in 1974 was no longer that concerned about the long term. ‘For Harold it was about winning the election,’ Donoughue told me when I met him. ‘The defeat in ’70 was such a personal humiliation, he only soldiered on to bury that.’ Sitting on a sofa in the House of Lords, Donoughue suddenly fixed his fidgety blue eyes on mine and made his voice confiding: ‘In 1974 I said to Wilson’ – the surname suggested a less loyal anecdote was coming – ‘“How much leave should I get from the LSE to work for you?” And he said, “Easter 1976.”’
Denis Healey, who was Wilson’s chancellor in the seventies, was even blunter about the returning prime minister’s lack of ambition. ‘In his second term he told many people that he planned only to stay for a few months. He told me in t
he lavatory at No. 10 just before a Cabinet meeting.’ Healey giggled, characteristically delighting in the black comedy. Then, equally characteristically, he looked out of the window of his Sussex study and kicked Wilson’s reputation in the shins. ‘I thought, “About bloody time!” He was a terrible prime minister, actually.’
Wilson’s memoir of running Britain in the seventies has a plain, perfunctory title: Final Term. It is a short book, given the period’s importance and numerous dramas, and its tone alternates between a slightly lazy confidence – ‘In 1974 the Cabinet was richer in previous experience than perhaps any incoming Government this century’ – and a weary flatness – ‘between 22 January and 11 February [1976] I had a number of speeches …’ Quite often, Wilson’s attention does not seem fully on the job of being prime minister. ‘In the week after the 5 March [1976] sterling crisis,’ he writes, ‘I woke each day wondering whether something would occur to force me to postpone my resignation.’
‘I think he was bored,’ says Gavyn Davies, then a young Balliol economics graduate who had been hired by Donoughue to work in the Policy Unit, an influential body of Downing Street advisers. ‘Wilson said a couple of times, “I’ve seen all this before.” It was bloody odd – the prime minister was slightly an absentee prime minister.’ In Final Term, Wilson justifies his reduced role with a metaphor that combines his usual wit and canny populism with an old man’s digressiveness and nostalgia:
In the 1964 Government … I had to occupy almost every position on the field, goalkeeper, defence, attack – I had to take the corner-kicks and penalties, administer to the wounded and bring the lemons on at half-time … [In 1974] I explained to the Parliamentary Party soon after the Government was formed … [that] I would be no more than what used to be called a deeplyingcentre-half – I instanced Roberts of the pre-war Arsenal team – concentrating on defence, initiating attacks, distributing the ball and moving up-field only for set-piece occasions (witness, as I had done, Roberts’s famous winning goal in the sixth round of the FA Cup against Huddersfield in 1927) …
For a few former members of Wilson’s seventies administration, all this was simply good delegation. ‘In the Cabinet he was much more calm than in the sixties,’ says Shirley Williams, who had been a fast-rising junior minister in his first government and from 1974 was secretary of state for prices and consumer protection. ‘He left much more to Denis and Jim [Callaghan].’ Both her position and the Policy Unit were innovations of Wilson’s during the seventies – evidence that he had not lapsed into complete passivity – and, as in the sixties, he continued to pioneer the promotion of able women such as herself and Barbara Castle. ‘Before Wilson the inner chambers of political decision-making were almost exclusively male,’ Williams recalled. ‘The seventies Cabinet was still very challenging for a woman, pretty sexist. There was a kind of premier club of moderates in the government, people like Crosland, that I was never invited to join. But Wilson was quite keen on me. He was quite exceptional regarding women.’
Yet most former colleagues are not complimentary. Donoughue told me: ‘Harold was holding it together on the surface, but it was all cracking underneath. I sat in on Cabinet committees when inflation was approaching 20 per cent, but you didn’t feel you could confront Harold with too much …’ – he paused a little showily – ‘… as T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “Man can’t bear too much reality.”’ Joel Barnett, who was chief secretary to the Treasury, mentions in his memoirs ‘a favourite phrase of Harold Wilson’s: “A decision deferred is a decision made.”’ The journalist Peter Jay, a prominent newspaper and television commentator in the mid-seventies and a long-standing Wilson critic, suggests that the prime minister’s working habits went beyond mere laziness. ‘Ken Stowe, his private secretary, told me that during the last two years he wouldn’t even receive three people in No. 10 without being given a full written text of what he was going to say.’
In Final Term, Wilson recalls that during his last months in office, ‘Paper after paper was telephoning anxious inquiries about stories that I had this or that serious syndrome, most of them terminal … heart disease, one or more strokes, cancer in almost every part of the body, and leukaemia … every known affliction except housemaid’s knee – the one thing I had. One Sunday popular paper had telephoned … about my “stroke”, revealed by a slight limp for a day or two … I had twisted my knee playing golf.’ Yet this account, at the very least, downplays the extent of concern about his health. There had been talk about it before he had even got back into Downing Street, and from the early months of Wilson’s second government that talk became much louder. On 2 July 1974, the head of the National Economic Development Council, Ronald McIntosh
went to the House to see the PM … He was affable, relaxed and chatty and didn’t seem to want to get to the point quickly – but though he may have slowed down I got the impression he was registering everything … There were no signs of the ill health that is talked of so much nowadays …
If, for now, Wilson seemed healthy, he was certainly not looking after himself perfectly. On 21 June, Donoughue records in his own diary: ‘He is drinking more – brandy from midday till late evening, when he is very slow and slurred.’ On 3 July: ‘The PM … went out to lunch with the press and apparently was the worse for drink. This was embarrassingly obvious when the Cabinet committee on Energy met in the late afternoon. He rambled and ministers looked embarrassed.’ There are many such subsequent entries.
Wilson’s official doctor Joe Stone, who had been his GP since the forties, was also concerned. ‘There were times when my father was a bit worried that Harold Wilson was not in control of himself,’ recalled Stone’s son Richard, also a doctor, who sometimes helped his father treat the Labour leader and took over as Wilson’s GP in 1983. ‘It might have been the alcohol. Harold didn’t drink much when he was younger. But [in the seventies] Dad would come back from being with him, and he’d have had a couple of whiskies. That was not my dad at all – especially when he was driving.’
Lots of politicians drink. In the seventies, when booze pervaded British life, from City of London lunchtimes to the onstage stumbles of bands like The Faces to the pissy terraces of football grounds, politicians almost certainly drank more than they do now. Yet Wilson’s performance was deteriorating. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ Richard Stone told me. ‘Heavy drinking cuts off one layer of your thinking. You lose sharpness, facts, precision. And it’s the sign of someone who’s burning out. In the seventies, Harold knew it was downhill from here.’
During 1975 and 1976, Wilson suffered a host of minor ailments. ‘The toll was being taken,’ writes Haines, a more sympathetic witness than Donoughue. ‘Stomach disorders, returning colds and susceptibility to ’flu all testified to the cumulative effects of physical exhaustion.’ In his diary, Donoughue records additional symptoms: a recurrent ‘racing heart’, problems with concentration, moments of unaccustomed bewilderment and forgetfulness. On 4 December 1975, Donoughue writes, ‘Joe Stone has given him instructions to cut down his work … Joe Stone told Joe [Haines] and me that HW “is not the man he was a few years ago”.’
‘It might have been incipient Alzheimer’s,’ said Richard Stone. ‘In the early stages you lose recent memories. You set out to do something and halfway through you think, “What am I here for?”’ Within a few years of leaving Downing Street, Wilson would be diagnosed with both Alzheimer’s and bowel cancer.
However, the precise state of his health in the mid-seventies will probably never be known for certain. When Stone inherited Wilson’s medical records from his father, ‘There was almost nothing there at all. Dad had tremendous loyalty to his patients. Harold’s medical details were all kept in his head, apart from what dribbled out to me.’ But, as prime minister in the seventies, it is widely agreed that Wilson did spend increasing amounts of time with Joe Stone. Stone accompanied him on foreign trips. He was a frequent visitor to Downing Street. ‘My father h
ad no ambition,’ said Richard. ‘Everyone else round Harold did. My father was a good socialist, and he was a listener.’
Often, the prime minister would simply arrive at the Stone family home in north London in an official car, accompanied only by his driver. The house was a very visible Edwardian semi on a busy corner of the Finchley Road, with six lanes of traffic going right past its front windows. But the house extended back a long way, and Wilson and Joe Stone would retreat to a sitting room at the rear that was shielded from prying eyes by a wall and a fenced garden. ‘Harold would spend an hour, an hour and a half with my dad,’ said Richard. ‘Just go on talking and talking. Drink tea. I’d go upstairs, do my medical studies, come back down, and the prime minister’s still there.’ Part of an afternoon or an evening would slip by, the Finchley Road a distant, lulling drone. The prime minister’s driver would wait outside in the car. Britain’s many mid-seventies problems would await Wilson’s attention. ‘It was an escape’, said Richard Stone, ‘from being PM.’
There was a further reason for his diminishing effectiveness as prime minister. Wilson was convinced that he was being undermined by opponents from outside the familiar world of British politics. Shirley Williams told me:
I remember one day Harold took me into the Cabinet chamber. And he pointed to a beam that ran across the room. And he said, ‘Look.’ I looked up, and there was some sort of peculiar-looking bump. And I said, ‘Yes?’ And he said, ‘That’s a bug. They’re bugging me.’ So I said, ‘Really, Harold?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. They’re listening to everything I say. And they’re determined to get me out.’