The Little Spherical Thing
No period of British parliamentary history has been as well and copiously described by those who were there as have the Wilson administrations of 1964-70. Two of the key ministers, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, wrote autobiographies which rank as the finest such books ever. The governments contained three diarists of superb quality and rare descriptive honesty. Richard Crossman blew the lid off cabinet confidentiality. Barbara Castle was the most effective female politician in Labour history. Benn’s diaries are simply unparalleled descriptions of the age. Wilson himself was no great writer. He nevertheless produced a monumental tome on the governments which sets out his side of the story, in wearisome detail. James Callaghan did the same. Two of the best biographies in modern politics, by Ben Pimlott and Philip Ziegler, were devoted to Wilson. Other very fine accounts of the time include biographies of all the key players, as well as a small bookshelf of further memoirs by aides, press officers, lawyers, newspaper-men, diplomats and backbenchers. There is also a large literature devoted to the various theories about whether Wilson was a Soviet spy and whether MI5 agents and assorted extremists really tried to remove him from office. As a result we know more about what individual ministers were thinking and doing, and more about their internal feuds with officials and each other, than is the case for any previous government. Among later ones, only the Thatcher years have been as carefully chronicled, though its diarists were never top-rankers.
Yet the figure bobbing at the centre of this oceanic ebb and flow of words remains strangely obscure. It was said of Stalin during his rise through the Soviet power game that he was a grey blur. Wilson too can seem a grey blur, moving from a stolid lower-middle-class boyhood in Huddersfield, where his main enthusiasms were school learning and the Boy Scouts, through a quiet fact-grinding career at Oxford, winning prizes but keeping well clear of the politically glamorous set, until he became an academic economist and wartime civil servant. In letters and contemporary descriptions he comes over as doughy, cautious, priggish – immensely able but not likeable. Early in his career he was used by others, from Beveridge to Cripps and Dalton, as a superior office-boy, there to gather the figures, marshal the arguments and snib the door each evening. He was old-young, growing a moustache in his twenties in order to look more mature, and living in bulging suits, with his famous pipe. Yet as we have seen he was rarely trusted. An early piece of exaggeration, when he claimed to have gone to school with children too poor to afford shoes, which was untrue and exposed as untrue, gave him a public reputation for slipperiness.
When he resigned with Bevan in 1951, many people saw this as a piece of pure opportunism – he could see Attlee was finished and thought the party would shift to the left. He was disparaged as ‘Nye’s little dog’ but his resignation speech was shrewd enough to leave the door open to a cabinet return. Then, having infuriated the right, he infuriated the left-wing Bevanites by waltzing back into a position very quickly. Later, pressed by the left to stand against Gaitskell, he was overcome with fear. The diarist Crossman recorded: ‘They all bullied Harold and threatened him and pushed at him and tugged at him and the little spherical thing kept twirling round in dismay…’ In Labour’s internal feuds he ratted, then re-ratted, then ratted again. In the early sixties he was a lonely figure at Westminster. The Labour right loathed him; the left merely despised him. Yet his sheer ability with numbers and increasingly with words kept him always in contention. When Gaitskell died suddenly, the left, without Bevan, had no other candidate than Wilson.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister because Harold Macmillan was ill and conspiratorial. Harold Wilson became Labour leader because George Brown was a drunk and not nearly conspiratorial enough. Brown had assumed he would succeed, as Browns do. He was a richly talented working-class man, a lorry-driver’s son from south London who rose through the trade union movement and entered Parliament in the Attlee landslide of 1945. With huge black eyebrows, a round red face, charm and a killer glare, he established himself as a forthright and at times brilliant speaker and an able young minister. He could be famously rude but also delightful and winning, and when Gaitskell died was the obvious person to take over, at least from the point of view of the right and centre of the party. The trouble, as Tony Crosland put it, was that Brown was also ‘a neurotic drunk’. The party’s choice, he went on, was now between ‘a crook and a drunk’. Brown’s drinking was heavy and his personality mercurial. Later, his rants and self-pitying outbursts, his sudden disappearances, heroic sulks and astonishingly regular threats to resign from the Labour government would become legendary. A typical story about him, probably apocryphal, has him attending an official reception in Peru and, very inebriated, approaching a willowy figure in scarlet for a dance. Brown is repulsed and protests grandly that he is Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs; why could he not have a nice dance? The reply comes: for three reasons, Mr Brown. First because you are disgustingly drunk, second because that music is not a dance but our national anthem, and third because I am the cardinal-archbishop of Lima. The story, at least, demonstrates why Brown’s reputation would entertain, as well as appal, the Westminster village. Yet the drunk might well have beaten the crook, had not James Callaghan decided to stand as well. He had been encouraged by Wilson’s team, so splitting the anti-Wilson vote and losing Brown vital momentum. In the end, Wilson won easily, by the votes of 144 Labour MPs to Brown’s 103 – these were the days before trade unions or party activists were allowed a say.
Having won, Wilson’s reputation soared in a way which today seems hard to explain. All his weaving, double-crossing, opportunism and deceptions were now forgiven, or at any rate forgotten. The press hailed him as a youthful master of his craft, a devastatingly witty speaker, man of the hour. Wilson’s speeches had certainly improved immensely and he was an acknowledged maestro of the put-down and witty aside, essential in an age of open meetings and hecklers. He developed an acid line of attack on the easy targets of Macmillan and then Douglas-Home, and was full of vague but inspiring sounding thoughts such as ‘the Labour movement is a crusade or it is nothing’ and ‘we need men with fire in their belly and humanity in their heart’. Yet his political thinking, as distinct from his political tactics, was stodgily conventional. He thought Britain was badly run and old-fashioned but believed more central planning, preferably by grammar school-educated technocrats like himself, would solve the problem. He was hardly young, an old-looking forty-six, whose image was comfortingly respectable. He harped on about preferring beer to champagne, tinned salmon to smoked salmon, HP sauce to any other sauce, and being a quiet, provincial sort. He seemed prudish about sex, still the Methodist Boy Scout at heart, and in many ways out of kilter with the fashionable, risk-taking, youthful Britain all around him. So why did he seem so good?
Partly it was a simple matter of class. He might send his children to private schools and live in Hampstead, but Wilson came across as a simple and ordinary man, a breath of fresh air compared to the Old Etonians whose fumbling rule was ending. He was the political equivalent to the men breaking through elsewhere in public life – the tweed-jacketed lecturers of Kingsley Amis novels or David Frost with his nasal vowels on television or Richard Hoggart, the plain-speaking lecturer called at the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial. He lacked deference. His calm impertinence delighted millions. Here, in a world still run by the old lot, was a clever new man who took it for granted that he was better than the old lot. In Frost’s off-the-cuff summation, it was smart Alec against dull Alec. Of course Wilson was not really any kind of outsider in politics. As an old Whitehall hand who had worked in the Cabinet Office and with Beveridge, who had visited Moscow and Washington for complex trade and business talks, he was formidably experienced by the time he took office, simply a different brand of insider. Yet he turned this to his advantage too. Britain had been going through a time of self-doubt, partly because of the seedy revelations of the Profumo affair and fears of moral decay among the old ruling class, but more importantly because of economic decline. Wilson’s propaganda triumph was to bring the two themes together. The country needed to sweep away privilege and cobwebbed aristocracy, and replace it with ruthless and ‘purposive’ modern planning. Faced with the choice between socialists of the far left variety and the capitalist toffs, Wilson found a third way that would have appealed to Tony Blair thirty years later. It sounded unanswerable, exciting, yet vague. It was science.
In his speech to Labour’s 1963 conference, the most famous he ever made, Wilson promised a scientific revolution which would require wholesale social change. ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods…those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and speak in the language of our scientific age.’ It was a time, after Sputnik, when the awesome power of Communist Russian science mesmerized and terrified the West. Wilson said he had studied ‘the formidable Soviet challenge in the education of scientists and technologists and above all, in the ruthless application of scientific techniques in Soviet industry’. As a democrat he rejected their methods but ‘we must use all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people, to ensure Britain’s standing in the world.’ If one replaces the archaic fear of Soviet power and replaces it with the contemporary fear of the rising economies of China and India, then Wilson’s rhetoric, with its emphasis on wasted and under-educated skills, is strikingly similar to the language of New Labour in the twenty-first century.
For Wilson, the real answers were the same ones that the Attlee government had tried. State ownership and state planning would end the inefficiencies of the private system. There would be a huge expansion of university places, new state direction of R&D, even a state-sponsored chemical engineering consortium. He was offering an answer to the stop-go demand management of the Tory years. Instead, Labour would grow the economy through the supply-side reforms of better education and higher investment in science. This was the man who had been in the wartime ministry of mines, plotting the rationalization of the coal industry, who had been President of the Board of Trade in the late forties. It was the vision of an old-fashioned civil service man. But it sidestepped the weary ideological battles inside the Labour Party between right and left, and it sounded modern. From the late seventeenth century, ‘science’ always has done.
The problem Wilson would soon face was how to achieve a successful planned economy in a capitalist world. For all his abuse of them, the Tories had already set out on the same road. In 1962 suitably modern, scientific British businesses, such as Dunlop and Ferranti, were represented at the table alongside trade union leaders and Whitehall mandarins at the first meeting of the National Economic Development Council, or ‘Neddy’. As Labour would also discover, simply talking and making optimistic forecasts was entirely useless. The Tory industrial experience of the early sixties, from the failed attempts to get voluntary agreements on prices and incomes, to the direction of entire industries in order to combat regional unemployment, were there to be learned from. But the tactical fun of teasing a Tory regime to death meant more to Wilson than carefully studying how to be a success in Downing Street.
Wilson’s zigzagging through Labour factions had hardly been glorious but it had made him ruthless. He turned this ruthlessness against the Conservatives, making unfair but funny attacks on Douglas-Home’s inability to understand economics except with matchsticks, and his archaic background as a Fourteenth Earl. (Though the Prime Minister famously hit back by mildly replying that he supposed – when you thought about it – he supposed Mr Wilson was the Fourteenth Mr Wilson.) Wilson’s chutzpah and increasingly self-confident style have been ascribed by many people to his political secretary Marcia Williams. Later she would become a byword for clique and scandal but she was a brilliant and loyal if unpredictable player in Wilson’s inner team. She was described by another member of it, the press secretary Joe Haines, as possessing ‘a brilliant political mind – probably better than any other woman of her generation’. She would rant and rail at Wilson and treated him at times like a naughty schoolboy. Many believed she had had an affair with Wilson. ‘Funny fellow, Wilson,’ said Macmillan. ‘Keeps his mistress at Number Ten. Always kept mine in St John’s Wood.’ By another account, she once confronted Mary Wilson and told her she had had sex with her husband several times years before ‘and it wasn’t satisfactory’. She and he always denied this and would set libel lawyers (successfully) on journalists who repeated such stories. Even so, since Wilson’s death some have gone much further, asserting that the Russians had blackmailed him about Marcia, persuading him to work for them. This seems highly unlikely. The Mitrokhin archive seems to clear him. What can safely be said is that she helped build up his morale, challenged his complacency and, until her apparent bullying became intolerable, probably made him a better politician than he would otherwise have been.