31 years since Harold Wilson passed away. I haven't much to say, and I feel rather silly for being emotional about it, but alas. Here was John Major's tribute to him in Hansard:
‘What was Harold Wilson really like? I have formed my judgment. He was a complex man, certainly, a clever man, a sensitive man, a man who could be bruised and hurt and who never wore the armadillo skin of the fictional politician. He was a man of many achievements and, perhaps above all, a very human man who served his country well and honourably and who has earned, by that, a secure place in its history.’
quite possibly the coolest thing ever, credit to politicsprincess on tiktok / @tonyblairwitchproject here and a great oomf on twitter. im obsessed. eeeeek
i'm a big post-war labour nerd, and feel like wilson is a bit of a blindspot for me!! any media reccs to deepen my knowledge? :)
Hi! Absolutely - and honestly Wislon is the post-war Labour rabbit hole to me. He sits neatly at the junction of almost everything: Attlee’s legacy, Bevanism, Gaitskellism, “white heat”, Europe, the militancy and decline of the trade unions, devaluation, Vietnam, Rhodesia, MI5 secrecy, and the slow death of the post-war settlement.
Be warned! Yap to follow! I hope I do not scare you off. If anything, I think you've probably read a great deal of this.
For a first serious book, I would start with Ben Pimlott’s Harold Wilson. It is long, but it is still probably the best one-volume portrait. Peter Hennessy’s foreword to the later edition, written for Wilson's centenary andtalking also of the matters of Europe, the referendum, etc. is also a very good short guide to why Wilson matters: a “supple and serpentine party manager”, with a rare ability to hold together Labour’s parliamentary party, unions, activists, and ideological tribes.
After that, you could read Philip Ziegler’s Wilson: The Authorised Life. Ziegler is a little more compressed and less Labour-obsessed than Pimlott, but useful because he had greater access to Wilson-related papers and gives more attention to foreign affairs and Wilson’s relationships with international statesmen. Ziegler himself says Pimlott deals more fully with internal Labour politics (which interests me moreso), while he concentrates more on foreign affairs and diplomatic relationships - so the two actually pair very well.
I've only recently read Brian Brivati’s Hugh Gaitskell. It is not a Wilson biography, naturally, but it is extremely useful for understanding the world Wilson had to operate in in the 50s on: Frognal, Clause IV, unilateralism, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, and the Labour right’s deep suspicion of him. If Wilson is your blindspot, Gaitskell is often the door into understanding why Wilson seemed so slippery, necessary, and threatening to his own party. I'm in the midst of trying and failing to write an answer on Wislon during the Gaitskell years actually. I think it is the time that made him.
Then I’d go to diaries, because Wilson is best seen through the often irritated eyes of people around him. Richard Crossman’s diaries are indispensable for Wilson’s tactical mind and the atmosphere of Cabinet government. Barbara Castle’s diaries are vivid, sharp, and often wonderfully waspish. I love them, and I love her. Tony Benn’s diaries are essential if you want the left-wing critique from inside the Wilson governments. Benn also has his tapes on Wislon's resignation which are illuminating, and wondrous. Bernard Donoughue’s Prime Minister is very good on the Policy Unit and the later Wilson/Callaghan machine. Ziegler’s bibliographical notes also point readers toward Wilson’s own books, Joe Haines, Marcia Williams/Falkender, Donoughue, and the whole security services plots. I would urge you to steer clear of Joe Haines, I hate him. I cannot describe how much I hate him. A complete and utter shit.
For Wilson in his own voice, try The Labour Government 1964–1970 A Personal Record, Final Term, and The Governance of Britain. They are not neutral, obviously - Wilson is defending Wilson - but that is part of their value. Pimlott describes The Governance of Britain as rushed and patchy but still “the best examination of the functions of the Prime Minister by any former holder of the office”, which is a pretty strong recommendation, I think. The Labour Government 1964–1970 is also a personal favourite of mine, partially because of this:
Every time I read the dedication above I get a little goosebumps and teary-eyed. I think this could be strictly a me-thing.
It is sad that there is not that much, or at least maybe by virtue of where I live and come from I have been unable to find too much surviving audovisual media on Wilson. There is this case of a photo of him right after the 1970 defeat leaning on Mary Wilson's shoulder in their ministerial car. I found it once, but its since been lost by moi. I'll have to look again. Again, this is all ironic, because as Crossman noted, Wilson was “right ahead, far ahead of anybody else, dominating the television every day.”
For television, look for BBC Parliament’s Harold Wilson Night on Youtube provided by that great archivist, David Boothroyd. You will also find Yesterday’s Men, the 1971 BBC documentary about Wilson’s defeated Labour front bench. It caused a huge row because Wilson and his colleagues felt stitched up; it is useful not just for Wilson, but for seeing how quickly the heroic “white heat” government became, in media terms, yesterday’s news. There's a little bit of a fun little documentay at the end on the final days of H.W. in office as PM you'll find on the tail-end of the attached playlist, as well as the Plot Against Harold Wilson which I'll get to later.
I’d also recommend watching archive interviews and newsreels rather than only documentaries. Wilson’s style is half the point: the pipe, the Yorkshire accent, the little jokes, the pooterish confidence, the sudden flashes of defensiveness. The ITN Archive on YouTube is a goldmine, manna from heaven, etc. I will use out so many metaphors. I just love it. The BFI has, for instance, a short 1976 clip of Wilson “retreating” to St Mary’s after his resignation, which captures the odd mixture of ordinariness, celebrity, exhaustion, and myth around him at the end. On the resignation itself, you will also find the press conference as captured by the ITN Archive.
For the conspiracy/paranoia side, watch The Plot Against Harold Wilson with caution. It is a dramatised documentary, not a clean scholarly account, but it is useful for entering the world of Wilson’s later fears about MI5, press hostility, etc. Pair it with something sober, like MI5’s own short page on the “Wilson Plot”, so you do not end up drowning in spy-melodrama. If you ask me, I'd still tell you that they were out to get my dear Wislon.
Music! Music! Music! There is Mike Yarwood's fantastic in-character song titled just 'Harold' and of course, the Beatles' Taxman which digs at the Wilson government for their "Supertax," which raised the marginal rate of tax on the top income bracket (which only affected a few thousand of the highest-income people in Britain) to 95% (often remarked of as unprecedented, though not entirely.. the National Government did similar rates during the War). You can also find a lot of material by Yarwood overall parodying Wislon, and also his appearance on Morecambe and Wise in 1978's Christmas special. Recall Monty Python also's jokes about the era overall. For the love of God, on the Wilson night watch, avoid the Friday Night Saturday Morning episode. He wasn't as bad an interviewer as it is often written, but it was admittedly painful.
For context, I’d read around him rather than just at him. Try Peter Hennessy’s Never Again for the post-war state, Kenneth O. Morgan’s Labour histories, David Marquand on post-war Labour and social democracy, and something on the 1970s crisis of the British state. Wilson makes most sense when you see him not simply as a “centrist technocrat” or “cynical fixer”, but as a man trying to keep the Attlee settlement alive while modernising it faster than the country, the Treasury, the unions, or his own party could bear. Also, if I may show my admittedly Bennite hand, I beg you to read That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst, the great @coneshotline's dad.
There is also, of course, a documentary that arguably spurred on my Wilson obsession. It is Heath vs Wilson: The 10-Year Duel by the BBC. I cannot reccommend it higher, in fact, I can't write that much on it. You should just watch it.
My suggested order would be: watch Heath vs Wilson, then read Pimlott first, then some archive speeches/interviews, then Ziegler, then Crossman/Castle/Benn (sound like some great upmarket solicitors), then the documentaries. That gives you the sympathetic Wilson, the hostile Wilson, the Cabinet Wilson, the media Wilson, and the paranoid late-Wilson.
The big thing to remember is that Wilson is not boring at all. He only looks grey from a distance. Up close he is one of the strangest and most talented Labour figures of the century: a pipe-smoking moderniser, a left-credentialled moderate, a brilliant Commons operator, a meritocratic technocrat with a conspiratorial mind, and probably the greatest internal party manager Labour ever produced. Check out Since Attlee and Churchill's episode on his resignation also!
P.S. I love the Frederic March pfp. I realise this was all probably a bit daunting, and for that I apologise. I've watched I Married a Witch and Nothing Sacred of March's work, and I loved them. Probably I Married a Witch more. So much so I made this right after I watched it.
Hi oomf, do you have any interest in Wilson cartoons? I have these:
https://cartoongallery.net/index.php?/tags/825-harold_wilson (and then these two that aren't uploaded to the website yet👇)
Hello oomf! Yes, I adore Harold Wilson cartoons. Depictions of him often err towards emphasising his quiff of hair, the pipe, of course, and his eye bags as time went on.
David Low, the famous cartoonist, actually was a member of the same golf club as Wilson and complained early on that he had little to depict in the moustachioed young minister, and often used to scrutinise him as he played to try and develop some kind of cartoon. Eventually, Wilson picked up his pipe - and the rest as they say, is history.
I hadn't seen any of the above cartoons before, or the one in the link but they are priceless! I love them. The first one reminds me, and I assume the dates correspond, to how Wilson (to much ridicule at home) described the fundamentals of the British economy as being robust, and improving whilst on a visit to the US and meeting Ford. Personally, I think he was right, but alas...
