Harold Wilson: The Winner

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For Nuttall, it is strongly arguable that ‘taken collectively, virtually no other Prime Minister has presided over such an intense and wide-ranging programme of reform in these areas’ (p. Yet while it’s hard not to detect snobbery among the party-loving, public-school Gaitskellites towards this lower-middle-class, pipe-smoking northerner who cherished his family, holidayed in the Scilly Isles and liked going to the football, none of his contemporaries, whether on the left or the right of the party, quite trusted him.

One of the earlier books also noted that when another Wilson claim (of a plot to overthrow his government) was partially corroborated by disclosures associated with the Peter Wright Spycatcher events of the 1980s, one newspaper headline that appeared was "How Wilson Was Proved Wright. Dispatched ROYAL MAIL FIRST CLASS with TRACKING next working day or sooner securely boxed in cardboard. This book by a Shadow Cabinet member paints a more favourable picture of Wilson than those who remember his premierships might have expected. Moreover, his paranoia increased over the years, particularly where the press was concerned – although on more than one occasion he was undoubtedly plotted against by his colleagues, moreoften than not he saw conspiracies that simply weren’t there.

Bush, the contemporary accusation that Wilson was little more than Johnson’s poodle seem way off the mark. Nick Thomas-Symonds lives in Torfaen with his wife Rebecca, his daughters Matilda and Florence, and his son William. Proposals for the setting up of a British Film Authority: Report of the Interim Action Committee on the Film Industry. His opponents were making the case for temporary, not permanent, economic slack as a means of fighting inflation.

Of course, social reforms are always a double-edged sword; the legislation that Wilson’s governments passed in the 1960s ‘liberated millions of people from repressive prejudice and puritan intolerance’, but have also been decried as unleashing ‘an era of licentious behaviour and moral depravity’ (p. One of the key turning points (or lack thereof) in the Wilson era was the decision not to devalue the pound upon reaching office in 1964.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, in his entertaining and assured biography, paints a portrait of a man who embodied all the contradictions of the movement he led -- Daniel Finkelstein * THE TIMES * Very well written . Thomas-Symonds, free of such prejudices, leaves the reader in no doubt that Harold Wilson was a good prime minister – but hardly a great one. I doubt most under forties shown a picture of him would know who he was and that’s a real shame as his influence on todays society is immense.