Harold Wilson: The Winner

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Wilson was a new kind of politician but, in his own way, this media-savvy harbinger of modernity was also a deeply traditional man, whose actions often suggest nothing less than a spiritual mission. N ick Thomas-Symonds’ new biography of Harold Wilson is titled The Winner, which should give you a fair idea of the author’s thoughts about Labour’s third Prime Minister.

Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons. In the bitter battle between Gaitskell’s centre-left pragmatists and the missionary socialists led by the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, Wilson chose the side of Bevan.All the old canards were dredged up and regurgitated to produce a consensus that he had something to hide. An account of the functioning of the British government in the 20th century, published the year Wilson left office for the second time. I found it heavy going when the accent was on the political maneouvering but i enjoyed the second half more than the first.

Labour seems to hate its winners – Wilson won four elections; Blair won three – but is compromise and consensus the vital winning formula? It was only his capacity for political sleight of hand that sometimes made it seem as though it did. In spite of this, Thomas-Symonds argues, Wilson worked to prevent Labour becoming an explicitly anti-Europe party, leaving the way open for a referendum on EEC membership. The author also makes a convincing case for Wilson as quietly feminist, having many trusted women allies whom he did not view as different to the men around then, and as meaningfully interested in racial equality.

Reissued with a new foreword to mark the centenary of Harold Wilson’s birth, Ben Pimlott's classic biography combines scholarship and observation to illuminate the life and career of one of Britain's most controversial post-war statesmen. 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.