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As 1963 drew to a close, the Evening Standard concluded, ‘1963 has been the Beatles’ year. An examination of the heart of the nation at this moment would reveal the name Beatles engraved upon it.’ By now, politicians of all parties were recognising the importance of mentioning the Beatles. It proved they were modern, democratic and on-the-ball. In February 1964, while the Beatles were away on their first US tour, the Conservative prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home told the annual conference of the Young Conservatives that they were ‘our best exports’. He praised their ‘useful contribution to the balance of payments’, adding, ‘If any country is in deficit with us I only have to say the Beatles are coming … Let me tell you why they have had a success in the United States – it is because they are a band of very natural, very funny, young men.’
Soon politicians were vying with each other to garland the Beatles with superlatives. As the general election loomed, Conservative parliamentary candidates were advised to drop the Beatles into their speeches as often as possible. It was almost as if their name had become a spell, with magical powers to transform the old into the young, and the fuddy-duddy into the with-it.
The Labour Party leader, Harold Wilson, was not to be outdone. A crusader for the modern, the classless and the go-ahead, and a fellow Liverpudlian to boot, he pooh-poohed Douglas-Home’s elderly, aristocratic attempts to appear young and trendy, poking fun at ‘these apostles of a bygone age trying to pretend they are with-it by claiming the Beatles as a Tory secret weapon’. Wilson insisted that the Conservative government ‘would not hesitate, if there were votes in it, to appoint Paul and George, Ringo and John, collectively to Washington to run the embassy’.
Kent Gavin/Stringer
Knowing that the Beatles would be receiving the Variety Club ‘Show Business Personalities of 1963’ award, Wilson telephoned Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, to suggest that ‘as a fellow Merseysider’, he would be the ideal person to make the presentation.
And so it happened that, on 19 March 1964, at a packed luncheon at the Dorchester Hotel, the leader of the opposition delivered a speech in praise of the Beatles.
This is a non-political occasion so I’ll stay non-political. Unless I’m tempted. I said that yesterday, and I was. But there were attempts recently by a certain leader of a certain party – and wild horses wouldn’t drag his name from me – to involve our friends the Beatles in politics. And all I could say, with great sadness as a Merseyside Member of Parliament, which I am, was that whatever other arguments there may be, I must ask, is nothing sacred, when this sort of thing can happen? So to keep out of politics, I just repeat to you what the Times musical correspondent said referring to this music as distinctly indigenous in character, most imaginative and inventive examples, and I’m sure the Times music correspondent spoke for all of us when he said of our friends the Beatles that harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its ‘chains of pandiatonic clusters’ (laughter).
Wilson then bustled about with a proprietorial air as the Beatles came up for their awards.
WILSON: One at a time! There’s yours! And there’s yours!
GEORGE: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Barker, Mr Dobson (laughter), and the press, I’d just like to say it’s very nice indeed, especially to get one each, because we usually have a bit of trouble cutting them in four.
WILSON: (keen to nose in, and to show he knows which Beatle was which) And now Paul.
PAUL: Thank you very much for giving us this silver heart. But I still think you should have given one to good old Mr Wilson.
WILSON: Ringo …
RINGO: Anyone who knows us knows that I’m the one who never speaks, so I’d just like to say thanks a lot.
JOHN: I’d just like to say the same as the others – thanks for the Purple Hearts.
RINGO: Silver! Silver!
JOHN: Sorry about that, Harold! We’d like to sincerely thank you all, and we’ve got to go now because the fella on the film wants us and he says it’s costing him a fortune.
Some weeks later, Edward Heath, recently promoted to President of the Board of Trade, joked that the Beatles were now making so much money that they were ‘propping up the entire national economy’.
Wilson’s Labour Party entered the October 1964 general election under the self-consciously ‘pop’ campaign slogan ‘Let’s Go with Labour’. On polling day the Beatles were filmed for the TV news programme North-East Newsview sitting around a table in a hotel in Stockton-on-Tees, smoking cigarettes and pouring themselves tea from a silver pot. They were, as usual, light-hearted and wisecracking. The only comments to border on the political came from George, who was upset by the demands of the taxman.
Q: Have you in actual fact had time to vote yourselves?
PAUL: No, we missed it actually. We …
JOHN: We were having dinner at the time.
JOHN AND PAUL: (laugh)
Q: I think Paul has aspirations to become prime minister. Have you still got those ideas?
PAUL: No. Not a politician. It’s a hard life, you see. It’s a hard day’s grind.
RINGO: (narrating) … he said, in a merry voice.
PAUL: (to the interviewer) Like a cigarette?
Q: No, I don’t smoke at all. Thank you.
RINGO: They’re [cigarette prices] going up, you know.
GEORGE: We’ll have to give those up soon.
PAUL: We’ll have to give these up.
RINGO: (lights Paul’s cigarette) Aye! None of these luxuries!
JOHN: Don’t tax THEM, Harold.
RINGO: It’s bad enough as it is.
…
Q: During the last few weeks, the Grimond group and the Home group and the Wilson group have been edging you off the papers. Have you been envious of all these groups?
GEORGE AND JOHN: No.
PAUL: No. We sell more records and things than they do.
GEORGE: The situation looks pretty Grimmond, doesn’t it!
BEATLES: (laugh)
RINGO: That’s a good’n.
PAUL: No, you know. Good luck to ’em.
Q: Have any political parties contacted you and said, ‘Would you say publicly you’d vote for us?’
JOHN: Oh, no.
GEORGE: No, ’cuz then the others don’t buy the records.
Harold Wilson led Labour to victory at the election, becoming the youngest prime minister in 150 years. Decades later, another Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, contended that ‘the Beatles helped Labour win in 1964’. As an exceptionally young history undergraduate at Edinburgh University in the late sixties, he had argued with his lecturers that ‘the 1964 and 1966 elections were won on a wave of enthusiasm for change and that no one illustrated this mood better than the Beatles. Without their fame, Harold Wilson might have struggled to popularise his theme: creating a vibrant, dynamic Britain free from the stuffy establishment living in the past … There was no better example of his theme that Britain was changing than the Beatles, who I and millions of other teenagers first followed from 1962 – young, unconventional, from the north, and awash with new energy.’
The president of the United States took more convincing. On the Beatles’ first American tour, at the start of 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s sixteen-year-old daughter Luci pleaded with her father to invite them to the White House.
‘All our country was just peppered with pain,’ she recalled half a century later, ‘and so it occurred to me that, being the daughter of the president of the United States, I might be able to have every adolescent’s dream come true: the Beatles to my house. So I got extremely excited about it and went to my father and asked if we could have the Beatles come. I was dumbfounded by his response. He said that this was the time for our family to be getting down to work. We couldn’t be all about “yeah, yeah, yeah”. He didn’t tell me not to play their records and he didn’t tell me not to dance to them. But he sure as heck said they weren’t coming to the White House. Period. End. Closed subject.’
But by the summer of that year, President Johnson had changed his mind. Like everyone else, he craved their light. Before the Beatles’ second American tour the White House press office put out feelers to Brian Epstein: would they consent to being photographed laying a wreath on President Kennedy’s grave in Washington, alongside President Johnson? On behalf of the Beatles, Epstein politely but firmly declined.