Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970, and again from 1974 until his retirement in 1976. In that time he won four general elections, making him the most successful ever leader of the Labour Party. His Governments were characterised by a series of progressive social reforms set against a background of challenging economic circumstances. Wilson was a pragmatic politician usually seen as coming from the left of the party when he first emerged from the diverse group of new MPs elected in 1945, although over time, as the political centre shifted, he became more associated with the traditional centre of Labour politics. He is now looked back on as a relatively slight figure, buffeted by external forces which he was never really able to control, rather than the dominant force in British politics that he was for so many decades.

Pimlott’s comprehensive not to say lengthy biography (weighing in at over 730 pages) was originally published in 1992, three years before Wilson’s death. Apart from a foreword by (Professor) Peter Hennessey it has not been updated. This gives the book a dated feel – it ends with Wilson still alive, still occasionally attending the House of Lords, a distant historical anomaly. When Wilson died in 1995 this was an obvious opportunity to update the book, with a postscript at the very least. But it appears Pimlott, who died in 2005, never returned to the work. Over a quarter of a century has passed since Wilson died, and a vast amount of material about his time in office that wasn’t available to Pimlott when this book was originally written is now in the public domain. We now know more about the rumours regarding attempted Soviet influence over Wilson and his Governments. The diaries of many of his associates and contemporaries have now been published, the archives of the former Soviet Union have been released, as have the Cabinet papers from this period. Wilson’s estate must surely have released documents and material from his time in office that would not have been available to Pimlott.

There are many issues about Wilson’s premiership that are left unresolved by the author about which we should know more. What was his real relationship with Marcia Falkender? Was there any foundation to the persistent rumours about Wilson’s premature retirement? Was there anything shady about his regular visits to the Soviet Union? Similarly, the book’s narrative on the EU is glaringly out of date – at one point there is a now sadly ironic reference to the 1975 EU membership referendum settling the “position of Britain within the European Community once and for all”!

The dated feel of the book is helped by the fact that the 60’s and 70’s were (much) closer to the second world war than they are to today. To offer just a couple of examples, in 1974 Wilson assembled his cabinet, and appointed Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams to it. This was the first time that there had ever been a Cabinet with 2 women in it! Later, discussing the resignation of Alec Douglas Home, Pimlott notes:

“Since his departure, with the single exception of Michael Foot, there has been no leader of a major political party who even attended an independent school”.

It must have looked at the time as this was written as if the UK was becoming a more egalitarian society. Since then we have the return of the Old Etonians – privilege has reasserted itself.

Despite these issues there is nevertheless much to be learned about the Labour Party in this book, with many lessons for today’s politicians. For example, the following observation seemed particularly pertinent in the context of the party’s current leadership contest:

“An Opposition Leader in the British system has many tasks: to keep the faith, inspire the troops, maintain unity, give a policy lead. The most important is to win.” (Page 319)

Having spent an inordinate amount of time door-knocking in 2019, I also read the following analysis of the process of electioneering ruefully:

“It is probably true that a disproportionate amount of the time available during an election is still devoted to conversion, at the expense of the priority task of identifying the Labour voters and creating a machine to get them to the poll.” (Extract from Wilson’s report on party organisation, 1955).

Wilson was a masterful manipulator of the different factions and personalities within the party, maintaining his position through a careful understanding of the balance of forces, positioning himself at the eye of the storm. He managed to avoid any serious challenge to his authority despite not having a significant personal following. He also left politics and office at the time of his choosing, a luxury that few Prime Ministers are able to enjoy. His rise within the Party seems in hindsight almost effortless. Not for him the years in the salt-mines of local activism, sitting as a councillor, competing for unwinnable constituencies to eventually be granted an opportunity to contest a safer seat. He emerged from service in Government during the war to gain a seat in Parliament on the crest of the Attlee 1945 landslide. Pimlott surely under-estimates the scale of this success when he says:

“Gaining a seat in the House of Commons is the single most important event in any British political career. Up to this point, all is fantasy, and from the point of view of non-political observers, vanity. After it, anything is possible. For parliament is a tiny talent pool, without much talent in it, from which Governments of several score ministers are drawn. Anybody representing a major political party who enters the Commons, with even a modest amount of vigour and judgment, is likely to achieve prominence sooner or later, if he or she chooses to do so.” (Chapter 6, page 92)

Really – anyone with a modest amount of vigour and judgment? Wilson was selected for a winnable seat (Ormskirk) in the 1945 general election having only been a Labour Party member since just before the war, and apparently having done little of the work traditionally required of candidates. Within weeks if not days he was appointed to a junior rung of Government as a Parliamentary Secretary, and very quickly thereafter was appointed to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade (Pimlott consistently refers to Wilson as “The President” in these chapters).

“At 31, he was the youngest Cabinet minister since Lord Henry Petty in 1806, and the youngest member of the existing Cabinet by a decade.” (105)

He fulfilled a childhood dream very early in life, and more was to come. The focus in this section of the biography is naturally on Wilson’s achievements in the Attlee Government, but I found it surprising that in the chapters on that period there is no mention of the extraordinary achievements of that Government.

Without probably realising it, Pimlott is fascinating when he documents the original debate within the party on whether to join the EU. Even in the early 1960’s this was a divisive issue. Wilson evaded making his position clear, but slowly moved from being against to support joining. The anti-EU lobby within the party and the wider country was sufficient to require him to hold the original referendum on membership in 1975, after Heath had taken the UK into the EU in 1973. At that time the Conservatives were very much the pro-membership party, and Labour was the natural home of the euro-sceptic, to the extent that even Enoch Powell endorsed Labour in the 1974 elections.

The book is surprisingly weak on Wilson’s legacy. That surely is an unavoidable feature of its date of composition. Any discussion of Wilson’s legacy needs to include his success in effectively keeping British troops out of Vietnam in the face of huge American pressure to do so; Pimlott is more ambivalent about Wilson’s role in doing this, suggesting that at the time at least he actually faced more criticism and unpopularity for allowing limited UK involvement in the Far East rather than an outright rejection of American policies. Given Britain’s financial dependence on the US that was never going to happen. Similarly the second half of the 1960’s saw a considerable relaxation of the UK’s laws on homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty, the age of consent, and voting rights for 18+. We now consider these reforms to be some of the defining aspects of Wilson’s time in office. Historians remember the return to violence in Northern Ireland and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in what was then Rhodesia as events that dominated the Government’s foreign policy agenda, but over which it had only very limited control or influence. If there is any judgment on Wilson’s legacy in this novel, it largely appears between the lines – Pimlott hints that the long period of Conservative domination of British politics from 1979 was largely a result of Wilson’s leadership of the party and the divided state in which he left it.

The economic issues that dominated Wilson’s time in office – the balance of payments, the value of the pound, – now are rarely mentioned in political commentary. These issues seemed to obsess the political class and the media at the time. The narrative was focused on the balance of payments for example, with the suggestion that if we imported more than we exported we would eventually become bankrupt, with dramatic social consequences. Is it because we have since then “solved” these issues, or because we have come to think of them differently? Similarly we no longer hear about a threatened “run on the pound” which was such a concern in Wilson’s day. Is the pound so much stronger as a currency, or have the powers of currency speculators to damage the economy been restricted?

From time to time the book is heavy going. Pimlott’s prose can be quite leaden – for example (page 126)

“From 1947, economic policy-making moved from the Lord President’s Committee (under Morrison) to the Economic Policy Committee, which became the most important Ministerial Committee (of which the President of the Board of Trade was not a permanent member) and to a subordinate body, the Production Committee, dealing with industrial matters, whose members included all the main economics ministers.”

This is also a book in which requires any reader to spend a lot of time reading elsewhere – looking up historical figures and events that would have been self-evident and well-known in the early 1990’s, but have now faded from view – George Brown for instance, once a significant political figure, now forgotten. This is not a criticism – it is natural that in 1992 Pimlott would have assumed a certain knowledge of in the average reader, but which are no longer generally understood. This biography is crying out to be up-dated, or perhaps replaced by a newer, more definitive text on Wilson’s life and legacy.