Leaders: Harold Wilson 1963-76

Harold Wilson (Lord Wilson of Rievaulx) (1916-95)

Harold Wilson's particular approach to politics and government is best understood first through his upbringing. His Northern non-conformist background continued to shine throughout his long career and was clearly reflected in his personal style of life, which remained authentically and commendably provincial and was never seduced by the glitter of the metropolitan establishment into which he moved but of which he never saw himself as a paid-up member. I shall below begin by describing Wilson's upbringing, then his remarkable career as Labour Leader and Prime Minister, and conclude with an attempt to sum up his personality. I hope to catch some of the many aspects of his complex character, including the light as well as the shade on which most London newspaper commentators concentrated in the last twenty years of his working life.

James Harold Wilson (like his longstanding Labour colleague, Leonard James Callaghan, he dropped his first name quite early on) always saw himself as a Yorkshireman. Born in Huddersfield in 1916, his family traced back in the county to the fourteenth century and were, until his grandfather moved close to Manchester, based on Helmsley in the North Riding, close to the Abbey of Rievaulx, from which he later took his peerage title.

His father was an industrial chemist working in the dyestuffs industry. His mother was from a more clearly working class background with strong trade union ties. From when he was one year old his family owned their own homes in respectable middle class districts and they also bought a car when he was seven. So they could be placed as reasonably comfortable lower middle class, with aspirations to upward mobility, though this progress was halted by his father's periodic unemployment in the post-war slump. The Wilsons were a close family. Harold was the favourite child, always performing to please his parents and to show off his cleverness - as he was still doing to his kitchen cabinet family half a century later. He loved his mother best and was in some ways a typical 'mother's boy'. Central to his family background was a strong non-conformism stretching back generations to the Cromwellian civil war. His parents were active Congregationalists and Harold regularly attended church and Sunday school. Even at Oxford, unlike most of his more sophisticated contemporaries, he still went to College chapel and he married the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. He was himself not really strongly religious in the spiritual sense, but he absorbed and reflected the nonconformist values which shaped him. The chapel tradition of Christian good works inspired his early politics. Linked to non-conformism was his devotion to the Boy Scout movement, in which his father was a District Commissioner. Harold joined as a wolf cub aged 8 and rose to be a Kings Scout of which he was always proud. The movement was a strong formative influence on him, giving him solid standards and a belief in self-improvement and clean living. He remained attached to the Scouts even still in the 1950s by when he was already Leader of the Labour Party. Observing him much later, I felt that in a way the party manifesto was his adult version of the Boy Scouts Code, to be learned by heart and obeyed. His education was properly meritocratic. He attended a council elementary school, a Huddersfield secondary school and then the excellent Wirral Grammar School, where he thrived and became Head Boy. He was bright and studious but not considered to be intellectually exceptional. The same was true at Oxford, where he won an exhibition - not an open scholarship - to Jesus , one of the less distinguished colleges, and worked very hard to achieve a good 'first'. He never mixed in any of the glittering Oxford social sets - which included some contemporaries who were later to be Labour colleagues in Parliament and in Government. His eyes were firmly on climbing the career ladder.

Throughout this career rise he remained authentically provincial, non-conformist, lower middle class, always retaining his Yorkshire accent. These characteristics stayed with him through life and when I first worked for him - when he was 58 and towards the end of a distinguished career in high office - he struck me as basically unchanged, with the limitations and more often the virtues of that background. He was brought up and conditioned in the non-conformist work ethic, striving for self-improvement, discipline, orderliness, thrift, respectability and the accompanying respect for educational and professional qualification. In that background there was little sexual liberation, arty culture or social climbing. It was very Gilbert and Sullivan and not Benjamin Britten or Bach. He stuck to those roots and values and it was very much to his credit that he was not seduced by metropolitan glitz. Politics of various kinds was always in his family background. His grandfather was an active National Liberal, his great uncle was Liberal Lord Mayor of Manchester, his uncle was Keir Hardie's agent in the ILP, and his father became a strong Labour supporter. He grew up in the Colne Valley outside Huddersfield, with its radical tradition of non-conformist socialism. Colne Valley had the oldest Constituency Labour Party in Britain and had been won in 1907 by the flamboyant independent socialist Victor Grayson. When Harold was a youth it was held by Philip Snowden the famous first Labour Chancellor and when Ramsay Macdonald formed the first Labour Government his father took him for the famous photograph before the front door of Number Ten. Aged 15, Harold wrote a school essay about introducing his first budget as Chancellor (a prime ambition he never achieved) and was also even then talking of becoming Prime Minister. But he did not commit himself to politics until his academic career was firmly established. At Oxford he occasionally attended the Liberal, and even less often the Labour Club, but he preferred study to juvenile politicking.

His first big step towards public life was when he had the luck to be offered a research post studying unemployment and the trade cycle by Sir William Beveridge, later the author of the epoch-making 'Full Employment in a Free Society' and usually perceived as the father of the Welfare State. Wilson had little affinity with the egotistical old tyrant, but the research confirmed his inclinations towards factual-based central planning and, most importantly, put him visibly on the appropriate public career ladder. He quickly moved into Whitehall with the Economic Section of the Cabinet Office and then again with Beveridge dealing with coal production. His contacts there with the coal industry and the National Union of Miners helped him to get nomination for the safe Labour seat of Ormskirk. In July 1945, aged 29, he was elected and launched onto a remarkable 30 year career in politics and government. His rise within two years to be the youngest Cabinet Minister since 1806 as President of the Board of Trade was meteoric, though almost without political trace. He happened to be, as is so often important in politics, in the right place at the right time, and he rode on the back of his then hero, Stafford Cripps, though in the party and the country few people knew of him.

Over the next sixteen years, twelve of them in opposition, he built a strong base in the party, negotiating a series of political hurdles which revealed his dexterity and flexibility but also created the widespread impression that he was slippery and unprincipled. His resignation with Bevan from the 1951 cabinet was seen as deserting the sinking Labour ship - although he did actually agree with Bevan on giving welfare a higher priority than defence. Wilson quickly played an active part in the left-wing Tribunite media circus of the early 1950s, further alienating the Labour right. But when Bevan resigned from the Shadow Cabinet over German rearmament, Wilson, while agreeing with Bevan on the issue, took the opportunity to take Bevan's place at the top table. He had now offended both the left and the right. After Labour's terrible defeat in 1959, he opposed the Gaitskellite revisionism, especially concerning the abolition of the Clause 4 commitment to wholesale further nationalization (changes which this author actively supported).Wilson was inherently less radical than Gaitskell and the young Turks, Crosland and Jenkins, then surrounding the Labour leader. Also, as a pragmatist, he saw no reason to split the party over a non-issue, since clause 4 was to him just an aspiration with no hope or risk of being implemented. He was emphatically defeated when standing against Gaitskell in the 1960 leadership election. But he was by then established as the clear alternative leader. He had trodden on many sensitive fingers on the way up, but he was by then at the top of the ladder and was comfortably elected Leader after Gaitskell tragically died in 1963.

His standing in the party then was not ideal. He was loathed and mistrusted by the old Gaitskellite right, who never forgave him for stealing their hero's crown. He was mistrusted, though tinged with admiration by his natural constituency in the center. And on the left he was mistrusted for having abandoned them, but they grudgingly supported him because he was the best hope they had. But most had come to respect his political skills. Over the next four years until 1967 Wilson put on a dazzling display of leadership and won over all but the intransigent right to admire him. Wilson quickly improved his previously pedantic public speaking and launched a blitzkrieg against the crumbling Tory Government, cruelly and wittily exposing Macmillan's faded Edwardianism and Home's economic illiteracy. He was surely the most effective opposition leader in post-war Britain. He also conciliated his old Gaitskellite enemies by giving them key positions in the shadow cabinet and by finally coming our firmly against his old accomplices in the unilateralist movement.

He was able to sidestep the perennially destructive left-right divisions - which he always derided privately as 'theology' - by basing his policy campaigns on his own genuine non-sectarian beliefs in achieving economic progress through planning and the use of science and technology. He launched his impressive 'white heat of technology' speech at the 1963 Scarborough conference and followed it up with more statements on the theme of a New Britain based on improved technology. These exposed the Tories as amateur and out of date whereas his 'newish' Labour Party was by contrast modern and professional (recent echoes there !). It is easy today to forget the excitement which Wilson then created across the media and the electorate. He was never of course really a radical thinker. His planning approach was rooted in the wartime conditions which he had experienced in Whitehall. His 'socialism' often seemed to me to be a mixture of nonconformism, natural dirigisme, and anti-establishment 'chip-on-the-shoulder'. But in its modern technological dressing, it offered then a kind of 'third way' between the antique Marxist left and the divisively revisionist Gaitskellite right. It was what Wilson genuinely believed in (it was not true as many critics asserted that he did not believe in anything). It also provided him with a reasonably coherent intellectual and political framework on which he could base his Government when he just scraped home in the 1964 election and roared to a landslide victory in 1966.

These years from 1963-67 were Wilson's time of peak triumph. As Prime Minister, he towered above his Government colleagues, few of whom had Cabinet experience, and he often took the lead in their departments' policy areas. He imposed his views on modernizing Britain, inspiring the 1965 National Economic Plan which reflected his commitment to improve Britain's dismal economic performance by central planning and coordinating technological resources. He strove to reform the antiquated Whitehall machine, with new departments and the Fulton Enquiry into the civil service. He created new ministers of economic planning and of technology and appointed a distinguished scientist as education minister. He initiated a dramatic expansion of higher education, created his beloved Open University, and launched the new DHSS. Overseas he began Britain's long overdue withdrawal from East of Suez and also first prepared the way for entry into the European Economic Community.

Perhaps of most lasting significance, he oversaw a remarkable period of social reform which adjusted British laws to the more libertarian values of the 1960s. Between 1965 and 1969, capital punishment, theatre censorship and corporal punishment in prisons were abolished. Britain's primitive laws relating to homosexuality, divorce and abortion (despite his catholic constituency) were liberalized, so individuals were no longer persecuted for their personal behaviour. He strongly supported the first law against racial discrimination. The initial impetus for these changes often lay elsewhere, especially with Roy Jenkins, a great reforming Home Secretary. But it is to Wilson's credit that, against all his non-conformist conditioning, he quickly promoted Jenkins to the Cabinet and then supported his liberal proposals. His Government in 1964-70 both reflected and shaped the changes of moral and social values in post-war Britain and put these more civilized values into a lasting legal context.

Wilson also showed advanced thinking in his support for Barbara Castle's 'In Place of Strife' proposals to reform Britain's neolithic trade unions. But by then in 1969 the gloss had gone from him and he was defeated by the powerful forces of conservatism within the Labour movement and parliamentary party. A series of policy setbacks - the cuts to public services in 1966, the abandonment of the National Plan, the humiliating devaluation of 1967 (from which his credibility never fully recovered), the failure to bring the Rhodesian rebels under control - all these and more served to disappoint the high hopes raised in 1964. The press, which had at first praised him to the skies, now relentlessly vilified him without reference to facts or fairness. His personal poll ratings slumped from 57% in early 1967 to 27% a year later. Labour suffered a string of by-election disasters. In Cabinet and the party, right wing and centrist discontents began moves to replace him by either Callaghan or Jenkins, neither of whom did much to discourage the plots. Wilson retreated into his Number 10 bunker, supported by Marcia Williams and the kitchen cabinet. No modern Prime Minister (except perhaps for Major in 1995-97) has ever been so beleaguered and seemed so forlorn.

Although the economy picked up a little towards the end of his Government, and the polls with it, his electoral defeat in 1970 was rooted in disenchantment: that the great ambitions of 1964 had not been fulfilled. Certainly his key approach to the economy of central planning and interventionism had not worked; in fact it already began to look out of date as the supporters of a free economy gained ground. On kitchen cabinet advice, he personalized the 1970 election into a 'presidential' campaign and so the defeat firmly attached to him. It was the worst setback of Wilson's political career and it devastated his self-confidence. The gloomy days of opposition in 1970-74 continued the bleak days for him. The press always referred to him as yesterday's man, devious and unprincipled, seeking only personal or party advantage. He clung on to the leadership, mainly because the supporters of Callaghan and Jenkins each reluctantly preferred to stay with the apparently doomed incumbent rather than to risk precipitating the accession of the other.

But slowly among wider Labour supporters a grudging respect arose for his durability as one of life's survivors and for his party management skills. This was confirmed in the 1972 crisis over entry to the Common Market. With the party deeply divided, he trimmed back from his earlier position of seeking entry to one of neutrality, belatedly grasping the referendum device to delay the European crunch and leave the decision to the electorate. He lost his deputy leader Jenkins and the hard core of the right. It also confirmed the impression that he would sail with any wind to keep the bulk of the party united and behind him as leader. But it did ensure that he could fight the 1974 election on a reasonably united platform, each side willing to wait for the referendum.

Like most commentators, Wilson thought he would lose the 1974 election. Had he indeed lost, he would have immediately resigned the party leadership and left the political stage at a low point and to very few cheers. In fact he ran a shrewd campaign and squeezed home with less votes but a few more seats than Ted Heath. His pleasure at erasing the bitter memory of defeat in 1970 was visible to those of us campaigning with him. A second modest victory in October appealed to his weakness of boasting about his genuinely remarkable record of winning four elections out of five as party leader.

His final premiership was conducted quite differently from the triumphal days of 1964-66. He kept a distinctly low profile, with none of the earlier circus performance in the spotlight on the high wire. There was a touch of autumnal mellowness about him and - privately committed to retire in 1976 - some of the earlier demons of paranoid suspicions seemed to have left him (at least for colleagues, though not for the security services). He exuded some of Stanley Baldwin's 'quiet life'.

His relations with key colleagues, especially with Callaghan, were more relaxed and he came to be seen by the public and the party as like an old familiar, who had been around Westminster as long as most people could remember, with some characteristic tricks still up his sleeve, but with his faults well known. Above all he seemed essential to holding his fissiparous party together. That objective became his single over-riding political objective: and it was not a dishonorable one. In this unifying role he negotiated the Government into an incomes policy and to remaining in the Common Market without losing the trade unions or the left. The referendum, to Wilson's constant amusement, had secured Britain's membership of the EEC for Jenkins and his pro-marketeers, although Roy had passionately opposed the device, and defeated Benn's anti-marketeers, although Benn had actually invented it.

Wilson resigned in March 1976 at the age of 60, as he had long planned. Ironically he departed at virtually the only time in his leadership when there were no plots among colleagues to remove him., and when there was almost universal, if often passive and unenthusiastic support for his leadership of the party. He had finally convinced the right wing that he was not really a left-winger; the center that , if anything, he was one of them; and the left that, although not really one of them , at least he understood their tribalism.

However, his resignation was clouded by the atmosphere of scandal surrounding his bizarre final honours list, which contained people whose contributions to public life - as opposed to contributions to his political office - were not easy to detect. Some of them were hardly known to Wilson, though close to Lady Falkender. He was puzzled by the public reaction, since he had personally never taken honours seriously, viewing them as just useful tools of patronage, rewards for loyalty or even silencers on the disloyal. But the resulting clamour damaged him, especially as it seemed to confirm longstanding suspicions about the nature of some of the odd business men who had fringed Marcia's entourage. It meant sadly that the final public and media view of Harold Wilson in action was besmirched and did not give credit to the remarkable achievements of his political career.

The furor also reflected the important role in his life, for good or ill, of his personal and political secretary, Marcia Williams\Falkender. She joined him in 1956, shortly before his mother's death and became in a way his 'political wife', having huge influence, even an eerie control over him. The ultimate source of this unusual control was never clear, though to some who worked close to him, he seemed in fear of revenge, even of blackmail. Their intimacy was almost psychic, a shared obsession with politics and political power, which was the very air they breathed. Observers of their early years together noted the positive contributions Marcia certainly made. Wilson had a 'soft' personality, containing what one colleague perceptively described as 'a streak of unwillingness to wound'. That capacity to strike and hurt is essential in a political leader. She provided it. She was the jagged edge compensating for his natural plump complacency. She pierced through the flabby verbiage of most arguments and stabbed the central political point. She was the heart of his influential kitchen cabinet, which met in her room as an escape from the crises in 1964-70. She also took over the practical chores in the Wilson family, who came to depend on her to sort out routine domestic problems. She was also prone to launching furious and almost hysterical attacks on Wilson and those who worked for him, which he seemed at times almost masochistically to enjoy. She screamed and threatened. She slammed doors on him as she walked out on him 'for good this time' - always confident that he would plead for her return. She reprimanded him like a mother and he tried ever to please her. It was touching or pathetic to watch, according to the observer's priorities. What is still unclear is why he put up with so much nonsense.. Marcia's negative contributions increased as his career progressed and by the time this author joined Wilson for the 1974 election and government, the negative side was predominant and almost entirely counter-productive. She demanded constant attention from him regardless of his prime ministerial duties, denounced and demoralized him, and her behaviour was one of the major reasons which Wilson gave to the author for wishing to retire from office. By 1974 Wilson relied for political advice much more on his experienced Press Secretary, Joe Haines, who mirrored many of Wilson's own qualities - practical, puritanical, witty, anti-establishment and steeped in Labour history and politics. Joe was loyal, tough, reliable, sound in judgement, and providing the same jagged edge which Marcia had always offered. In Wilson's final period of government Marcia attended Number 10 much less often: her barbs were still frequently fired towards the Prime Minister, but much more from her smart Marylebone houses than from the office next to the Cabinet room.

When assessing Wilson's character, stature and achievements, I am aware that I did not see him at his earlier best. By late 1973 when I joined him he clearly lacked further ambition and stimulus, with nothing remaining for him to achieve in office and he often complained of boredom. He had become more conservative, less interested in radical reform: he was not just joking when in the October 1974 general election he said to me, with a hint of Stanley Baldwin, that his true personal manifesto was really to offer the British people 'a quiet life'. If he did not always achieve even that modest ambition, it was because his final two years in office were an extremely difficult period in British history. It would have been virtually impossible for any Prime Minister or Government, however talented - and his was certainly an impressive group of individual political colleagues - to shine in the world economic crisis then prevailing, especially if, like Wilson, lacking a parliamentary majority. It was not an accident nor a surprise that no leader of a major Western democracy who had to face the four-fold increase in oil prices in 1973-74, survived in office until the end of the decade. Moreover, Wilson appeared by 1974-76 to be old for his 58-60 years, exhausted by decades of party in-fighting, of pressure closer to home, often unwell, seeing nothing left for him to prove as a politician other than to achieve certain records of 'time in high office' - and knowing that after the second general election of October 1974, he would not stand for office again.

In the decades after his resignation in 1976, Wilson became an almost forgotten figure. In fact his political achievements had been remarkable. He won four out of five general elections. That record must be set against what happened in the twenty years after his retirement, when Labour lost four elections in a row. During the thirteen years of his leadership of Labour, he held the party together, whereas within five years of his retirement, it suffered a major split and almost came third in the subsequent election. As a party leader he exhibited consummate skills in holding together what had become a collection of conflicting minority interests and beliefs. He was equally impressive as chairman of the Cabinet, shrewdly balancing there the main factions within his Government, giving every side and player the opportunity to express a view, always seeking consensus and maintaining unity. He would often dismiss these consensual skills with a self-deprecating grin, quoting James Maxton's saying that 'if you cannot ride three horses at once, you should not be in the circus'. But it was still a remarkable feat of political management.

Towards the end he carefully built a close alliance with his most senior colleague, James Callaghan, burying old jealousies and disagreements, and so created a solid foundation of Cabinet stability at the heart of the Government. It also prepared the way for Callaghan's succession. Their joint conduct of the 1974-75 EEC renegotiations was little short of brilliant, keeping Britain in Europe while preserving unity in the Cabinet and the Labour Party when a majority of party members and MPs were certainly hostile. Some of the contemporary disappointment with his achievements derived from comparisons with the high expectations generated - not least by him - in the heady days of 1963-67, when great future economic growth seemed assured. But I agree with Jim Callaghan's measured words to the emotional Cabinet when Wilson announced his resignation in March 1976: future historians, when they fairly assess the great problems which faced his government, will surely assess him more generously than at present. Such a fair assessment will certainly still concede some of his critics' case. He did not make full and effective use of his long tenure in prime ministerial office. His Governments made too little real impact on British life and, except for the social reforms, they had not enough lasting policy achievements - although when listed as above they were not inconsiderable. Even more wounding is the conclusion reached by many observers and those who worked with him that he lacked deep political principles or policy objectives; that he was almost wholly the brilliant political manager and operator, with too little sense of strategy; that it was because he apparently believed in so little , that he had insufficient real policy commitments and objectives. It is also often alleged that he was solely concerned with achieving and surviving in power, and himself had no personal views on what actually to use that power to achieve in terms of policy. There is evidence to support that view in the narrative above. Marcia once said to me that Wilson was 'not really interested in policies, but sees everything through people. If he likes the people, he supports the policies'. He himself told me that the most enjoyable time of his working career was as a young man in the Cabinet Office. Certainly there was something in him of the Whitehall mandarin, administering rather than initiating policies. This may also explain why he seemed to me to be too little interested in the calibre of his ministers and insufficiently concerned to dispose of the inadequates. Actually he did perceive their differences in quality, but did not seem to care or think that it really made much difference. Perhaps this was again him as the former civil servant, reflecting the Whitehall view that ministers are anyway marginal to most decisions. In fact he was always at home with civil servants, whose values and priorities he shared since his wartime days in Whitehall. In return, they liked his coolness, his rationality, his polite considerateness, and the way he worked hard mastering his briefs and quickly taking decisions.

I do not accept all of the criticism that he was never really interested in policies. Wilson periodically took great interest in particular policies: as with council house sales, Northern Ireland, Rhodesia or incomes policy. He also earlier in his career certainly believed in central planning and utilizing science and technology and expanding education to improve Britain's economic performance He was a genuine modernizer, though he usually saw modernisation within the limited framework of greater efficiency. He did after all create the Policy Unit to provide himself , as well as succeeding Prime Ministers, with policy ideas - and expressed to me great appreciation of its work as well as recommending it to his successor. But it is also true that he was often quite agnostic about policies and political philosophies and I could see why his critics said that he was more of a politician than a statesman. Over time he saw his own role as party manager as being more important than any particular policy or strategy. Harold Wilson's private personality was as mixed and complex as his public persona. He had many positive personal qualities. He could be kind and accessibly humorous, though perhaps not truly warm; there was always a sense of inner coolness and loneliness about him. He was soft , almost feline, and did not like personal confrontation, using the jagged edges of Marcia and Joe to do much of the tough work on his behalf. He loved gossip and the small change of politics, on which we whiled away many happy hours in Number 10 - in a way his 'kitchen cabinet' staff were a substitute for his personal family with which, in my view, like many politicians, he spent too little time. He was also too often attracted to the marginalia of government, preferring to ponder over the appointment of a Bishop than have to resolve the gritty problems of British industry. This made him very human, but sometimes frustrating to work for. He could be too often distracted into trivia, especially when Marcia was putting pressure on him. He had an astonishing capacity for work when he was engaged and his mind, once of Rolls Royce calibre, still in my time showed flashes of quicksilver. He was clever and studious in a practical way. But he was not an intellectual in the true sense, with little interest in theories, concepts or high-flown ideas. He did not follow the High Arts and his cultural pleasures rarely extended beyond Gilbert and Sullivan music or an occasional thriller novel.

What I found particularly attractive was that he had absolutely no side to him, nor any of the pretensions or assumptions of grandeur that sometimes grow in high office. He had no interest in personal wealth or what it might buy and just had simple tastes in most aspects of his life. When the London media referred snootily to his liking for steak and kidney pie and tomato sauce, they were actually touching on one of his most engaging qualities, which no amount of high office corrupted. Indeed, to the end, he remained touchingly and authentically Northern middle-class, middle-brow, provincial in the best sense of the word, and a non-conformist grammar school 'little-Englander'. He had no trace of snobbery, or racism or chauvinism. He instinctively and unthinkingly treated women as equals, with no stain of the awkward and often patronising politically correct feminism which cluttered later generations. He just automatically viewed women as equal to men and advanced them accordingly in his governments as none of his contemporary leaders did in the rest of the political world.

He was astonishingly tolerant of the sins, foibles and human weaknesses of others (though he did express mild distaste for what he saw as 'metropolitan glitz', in which his Political Secretary increasingly dabbled to his perplexity). He was , for a politician, remarkably forgiving and free of vindictiveness towards political opponents ( though not towards hostile journalists, who had never been through the shared mill of public and parliamentary accountability, and for whom no punishment was too great). He easily forgave past slights and so promoted those he believed best suited to the job regardless of their previous hostility to him. This forgiving nature enabled political wounds and bruises to heal quickly and meant that he did not, as do many politicians, build up over time a significant opposition of bitter enemies, even in their own party, awaiting revenge. Being so forgiving, led some others, sometimes, though not in every case, to forgive him for past wounds which he had inflicted. It may of course have been easy for him to forgive because he usually seemed almost totally to lack passion and could not readily understand those who felt passionately about issues. Confronted by passionate arguments, his hooded eyes would glaze over as he listened and registered, but without any reaction on his face. He usually dismissed those who felt strongly about policy issues - such as Jenkins for, or Benn against the EEC - as too 'theological'. He was impressively immune to stress and rarely lost his temper, always seeming in control.

He often viewed even the biggest crisis with a quiet detachment which I personally envied but could not share. During the first week of the 1974 Government, with the nation's industry still in turmoil as we strove to settle the miners' strike and head off hyper-inflation, Harold invited my wife Carol and me to have drinks with him alone in the study of Number 10 (she had come in for the election victory party which Marcia had cancelled at the last moment without telling anybody because she didn't feel well). He was laughing and joking and described the whole political situation as 'a riot'. He said that 'nobody outside would believe it. It is a total pantomime'. It was impossible not to like him in that mood, with no trace of the dark demons which sometimes took him over. The words 'pantomime and 'circus' often then cropped up in his vocabulary. He saw himself as the pantomime producer or the circus ring-master, running the show and himself having to ride three horses at the same time. It emerged as an attractive and boyish mischievousness which I always found engaging. Yet at other times he took the issues of business very seriously indeed. He had many layers.

Like all human beings (except apparently the hated journalists who so sanctimoniously denounced him) , Wilson had faults. Indeed I saw a huge range of character, between his Rolls Royce best, which was impressive, and his worst, which could descend to the shabby. As Tony Crosland complained to me, he could be seriously boring, especially when repeating his too familiar string of anecdotes about when, as President of the Board of Trade, he negotiated Britain's trade agreements with the Russians in 1947-49. He also boasted too much about the 'career records' which he had achieved. He liked ticking off this list: that he had won more elections than any other twentieth century British leader and that only Gladstone had won as many ever; and in 1974 he was very aware that he needed only two more years in office to become the longest serving Prime Minister since Salisbury, which may be why he set himself to retire in 1976 once he had achieved that record. He also - sadly, in view of his later medical record - boasted about his phenomenal memory, though he did not trust it in my time and had to have even his smallest public statement written out for him. In this boasting, as in his delightful mischievousness, he was like a schoolboy, sometimes engagingly wicked, sometimes the boring 'swot' from the lower fifth. In my mind, I could always see him as a plump boy scout in brown khaki shorts quoting from the Boy Scouts Code.

History will eventually write more favourably of Harold Wilson than hitherto and will respect the remarkable achievements of his political career. His personality was anyway complex, open to accusations of deviousness and included a darkly suspicious side and a willingness to be dragged into shabby trivia which was unworthy of him. As a politician he eschewed dogmatism and showed a limitless flexibility in both pursuing his leadership ambitions and , when leader, in achieving his central aim of holding together a fundamentally divided party. All this left him vulnerable to accusations of being light on serious principles. He above all suffered from an inevitable failure to meet the high hopes of reform which he in particular had raised when entering Number 10.

But he was personally in many ways an engaging man and certainly an authentic product of his provincial background. He enjoyed a remarkably successful political career and in Government achieved much more than he is usually currently given credit for. He will surely be remembered and honoured in the Labour movement as an outstanding leader who held his party together in a way that probably no other contemporary colleague could have achieved for so long. It is a political record of which he could, and all in the Labour movement should, rightly be proud.