Wilson
At least Wilson was familiar. His February election victory meant he was governing without a Commons majority. He was trying to do so at a time when the economy was still shaking with the effect of the oil price shock, with inflation raging, unemployment rising and the pound under almost constant pressure. Further, the fragile and implausible Social Contract now had to be tested. Almost the first thing Labour did was to settle with the miners for double what Heath had thought possible. The chances of the new government enjoying easy popularity were nil, though at least an Opposition so internally divided between bruised Conservatives, Liberals, Nationalists and Northern Irish Unionists was unlikely to combine often to defeat it.
The new Chancellor, Denis Healey, introduced an emergency Budget a few weeks after the election, followed by another in the autumn, during which he raised income tax to 83 per cent at the top rate, or 98 per cent for unearned income, a level so eyewateringly high it was used against Labour for a generation to come. In the spirit of the Social Contract Healey also increased help for the poorest, with higher pensions and housing and food subsidies. He was trying to deliver for the unions, as Wilson did in abolishing the Conservative employment legislation. For the time being Heath remained as Tory leader, despite some grumbling from the party. He was convinced that before long Wilson would have to call a second election and his chance for revenge would arrive. In October, however, the second election confirmed the earlier verdict, with Labour gaining eighteen seats and a precarious but quite workable overall majority of three.
The fetid atmosphere of Wilson’s new government was like that of the mid-sixties, only more so. Marcia Williams still had him mesmerized. As one young Number Ten aide recalled, her dramatic and sometimes destructive power ‘was not only exercised through her bewitching domination of the prime minister himself. Once launched against any human obstacle or perceived personal enemy, her frenzied tirades were very impressive and virtually ungovernable.’ It was alleged that she would swear and curse like a trooper at Wilson, storm out of dinners and meetings, and threaten him with terrible revenge if he crossed her. Some sources claimed that in Opposition, she had locked all his personal papers in a garage and refused to let him see them. Desperate to write his account of the 1964-70 governments, Wilson had been forced to team up with her brother Tony, break into her garage, and steal them back, although only the three of them would know if this were true. Now, she gave him a new problem when a press furore broke about land deals. The brother, a geologist, had bought slag heaps and quarries and then moved into land speculation, falling in with dodgy Midlands businessmen. There was a forged letter purporting to come from Wilson. There was no evidence that Marcia knew of the deal, but the close connections between Marcia and her brother, and the Prime Minister, began a media frenzy which prefigured many of those directed at the Labour ministers of the nineties and early 2000s. Wilson stood by his inner circle while the attacks rose in intensity, eventually making Williams a peeress, Lady Falkender. This was described by one of Wilson’s biographers as ‘a magnificently arrogant gesture, contemptuous of almost everybody’ and the whole experience broke for ever his once-good relations with the press. The old rumours about links with Russian intelligence and affairs resurfaced and the mood of bitterness and paranoia inside Number Ten was as grim as anything in the equally harassed administrations of John Major and Tony Blair.
In another way, however, Wilson had changed. He interfered far less and seemed less worried by the manoeuvrings of his ministers. He wasn’t planning to stay long. There are many separate records of his private comments about retiring at sixty, after another two years in power. If he had not privately decided finally that he would go in 1976, he certainly acted as if he had. The question of who would succeed him, Jenkins or Callaghan, Healey or even Benn, had become one about the direction of the Labour government, rather than a personal threat to Harold Wilson, so there was less rancour around the cabinet table. Wilson was visibly older and more tired. He seems likely to have known about the early stages of Alzheimer’s, which would wreak a devastating toll on him in retirement. He forgot facts, confused issues and repeated himself. For a man whose memory and wit had been so important, this must have been a grim burden. There is therefore no need to assume that dark forces, some nether world of MI5 plotters and right-wing extremists, finally removed him from power with threats of blackmail and dirty tricks.
Wilson himself was as fascinated as ever by Security Service plotting and had Marcia Williams dig out files on Jeremy Thorpe’s lover, Norman Scott, to try to show that he was being framed by the South African secret service, BOSS. At other times he would suggest Israel’s Mossad were after him. In a famous interview given to two BBC reporters, Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour, after his retirement, he claimed that right-wing officers in the Security Service had been plotting against him. Wilson’s state of mind is vividly evoked by his fantastical language to them: ‘I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ The Cecil King plot of 1967 and later memoirs by a wild MI5 man show that Wilson’s fears were not completely groundless, but this sounds like the raving of a deluded old man.