Harold Wilson: The Winner

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Nick Thomas-Symonds avoid this by also understanding the political mood at the time - and, in having access to new material is able to take a broader view. Jenkins had by then given up on the Labour Party and the foundations of the Social Democratic Party had been laid. In a notorious broadcast, Wilson appeared to suggest this made no difference to the ‘pound in your pocket’. With a brilliant mind, sure-footed political moves and a feel for public opinion, he was a survivor who over and over again emerged from desperate crises – even, perhaps, conspiracies – to lead his party to victory.

This copy has been dated, warmly inscribed, and signed ["Dan Hulitt"] by the author on the title page, underneath which his wife, to whom the book is co-dedicated, has also signed ["Gladys F. It could be traced to his decision in 1960 to challenge Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership at the time when Gaitskell had promised to “fight and fight again to save the party we love” from the suicide of extremism. Jeremy Nuttall notes that if we take a more long duree view, then a different picture of the Wilson era emerges: from a ‘long historical view, the most significant and distinctive feature seems less the fluctuating economic crises and policies, the desperate attempts to secure growth, stabilise the pound, or increase real wages … and more the underlying social, educational, and moral changes of the time’ (p. In the summer of 1965, the US provided a rescue package for the pound, which had come under pressure due to shrinking exchange reserves.Trade unions represented the sectional interests of their members; said members saw their unions as ‘guardians for what they regarded as limited, piecemeal objectives in a competitive labour market’ (p. Commenting on the failure of Wilson’s attempts to reform industrial policy, Taylor remarks that although the failure of In Place of Strife was ‘a national tragedy’, the trade unions ‘were always prisoners of their own past and it would be wrong to criticise … at the time they [the union leaders] could not have done [i. Despite the detailed picture painted, the descriptions never quite cohere into a firm image of the man, and he is harder for the reader to picture than many of the vivid characters who surround him, including his unusually powerful political secretary Marcia Williams and the erratic George Brown, who served as Wilson’s Foreign Secretary. Lampoons of the kind collected in this volume represented a relatively novel literary form in Restoration England, but they were to prove enormously popular among the coterie of fashionable folk who frequented the Court, strolled in the galleries of Whitehall and St.

Labour seems to hate its winners – Wilson won four elections; Blair won three – but is compromise and consensus the vital winning formula?Nick Thomas-Symonds was first elected as the Labour MP for his home constituency of Torfaen in May 2015, and was re-elected in June 2017 and again in December 2019. It’s not hard to see why reading this book, concerned with electability and using power to advance society rather than sitting in the ideological purity of opposition so often preferred by Labour his achievements are impressive, perhaps the most impressive was keeping the UK out of Vietnam, something his successor as an elected Labour prime minister would have done well to learn from. Wilson’s attitudes to these reforms were often ambivalent (2); more than one commentator has suggested that he allowed the Sexual Offenses (No. As Jim Tomlinson points out in his piece, this narrative has ‘distorted our understanding of much of post-war British economic history and policy’ (p. Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister on two separate occasions.

W hen Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister, his longtime friend and ally Barbara Castle wrote in her diary, ‘What exactly was Harold up to? However, it is the acknowledging and accounting of experiences in my life that can only be explained by the presence and power of our unseen Lord".But Morgan’s was by no means a bad book and it added value (as Ziegler acknowledged), even though I would list my favorite-to-least-favorite among the books as: Thomas-Symonds, Ziegler, Pimlott, Morgan. Wilson avoided civil wars in Central Africa and Northern Ireland and steadfastly resisted American pressure to send British troops to Vietnam. As Kavanagh notes, Wilson’s period in government was one of the most diarised in modern British political history, and the picture that generally emerged from these productions was of a somewhat devious individual, ‘a Prime Minister associated with tactical manoeuvres, lack of strategy, and short-termism’ (p. as well as Clive James’ remark in The Observer (October 21, 1979), “He was *really* terrible,” and the observation in Halliwell’s Television Companion (1987 edition, p.