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Harold Wilson: the rock 'n' roll prime minister
00:30:32
Former home secretary Alan Johnson reveals how the Labour leader attempted to capture the 1960s zeitgeist
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- [00:02]
Alan Johnson
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- [00:29]
Spencer Mizzen
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Harold Wilson is as central to the story of 60s Britain as the Beatles, Profumo and Miniskirts. Admirers applauded the social reforms he introduced during his tenure as Prime Minister, while his critics accused him of being Machiavellian. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, former Labour politician and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who recently wrote a biography of Wilson, reveals how he rode the wave of the cult of youth sweeping the nation.
- [01:09]
Harold Wilson
You joined the Labour Party back in the early 70s when Harold Wilson was, of course, leader of the party. In fact, he'd already served one stint as Prime Minister and would of course, go on to enter Downing street again. What do you remember of him back then and was he a factor in your decision to join the party?
- [01:33]
Alan Johnson
What do I remember? He was enormously popular. He was the Prime Minister when I left school, he was the Prime Minister when I got married, he was the Prime Minister when I moved with my first wife to our first council home, ironically, in the year when the government provided 400,000 houses, a record that's never been matched before or since. And he brought down the voting age. So the reason I, when I cast my first vote at the 1970 election, ironically, the one that Harold Wilson most expected to win but lost, he won four others. Of course, I cast that vote because he'd brought the voting age down from 21 to 18. Very few countries had done it then. Many followed. So that bit of emancipation was down to Harold Wilson. And I cast my first vote for Labour and for him. So, yeah, he was certainly a kind of avuncular figure when you're that young. And he, to me, was that old. Although, of course he was enormously. I mean, he retired when he was younger than Keir Starmer is now, having just taken over the reins of number 10.
- [02:48]
Harold Wilson
Now, you've described Wilson as being Norovan, is Blackpool Tower and rugby league. How much of a point of difference was his background when he sort of first presented himself as a prospective Prime Minister? To what extent did he represent a change from what had come before?
- [03:08]
Alan Johnson
An enormous change. So he followed Sir Alec Douglas Hume, who was Lord Hume before he renounced his many peerages, he had about six of them in order to sit in the Commons. And Douglas Hume was actually the first Prime Minister born in the 20th century. Harold Wilson was the second, but you'd have never have known it. Douglas Hume was more Edwardian than New Elizabethan and, you know, he was more often seen out on the grouse moors than in a kind of natural circumstances. So Wilson came along. First of all, he was Elizabeth II's fifth prime minister, but the first who wasn't educated at a public school. Secondly, he spoke with a northern accent. Didn't always. If you see old clips of him when he was a Cabinet minister, which he was by the age of 31, as president of the Board of Trade, he's trying to emulate Attlee, I think, with those kind of clipped tones. And it took him a while to decide that actually he wants to go back to being what he is, which is a northern accent. The Gammix raincoat, which was pretty ubiquitous at the time, the pipe. He seemed more natural and he seemed more like the public that he, in a sense, presided over.
- [04:29]
Harold Wilson
Do you think the country was in the 60s, was ready for a figure like this? I mean, were his working class roots, his kind of ordinariness part of his appeal? Was it something that gave him a political advantage at the time?
- [04:43]
Alan Johnson
Yes, definitely. You have to associate Wilson with the 60s, although he was the Prime Minister again, as you pointed out, in the 70s, you associate him with the 60s and he's like, you know, in those Alfred Hitchcock films, you get those little cameos of Hitchcock in the background. Everything that was happening, there's a little cameo of Wilson in the background. Whether it's the Profumo scandal, whether it's the Cuban Missile crisis when he was Shadow Foreign Secretary, whether it was the Beatles, famously, he presented them with their MBE's. Well, a member of the Royal family presented them. But Wilson made sure he was very much up front, so he was involved and very much part of that era when it seemed almost palpable for us living through it, that we were at last becoming a less deferential, less hidebound, less Edwardian kind of society. And whether it was pop music or fashion, London was the epicenter and England was the epicenter. Britain was the epicenter of this cult of youth that was sweeping across the world. And Wilson very much rode that wave.
- [05:53]
Harold Wilson
So was he really happy to embrace that? Did he enjoy being part of this kind of 60s zeitgeist?
- [05:59]
Alan Johnson
Yes, I think he did witness the Beatles. I mean, he was a Merseyside mp. His constituency was on Merseyside and he claimed to be Ringo's constituency mp, which is why he talked his way into presenting them with a Variety Club Award when he was still leader of the Opposition. And of course, it was as Leader of the Opposition that he made probably the most influential conference speech that any party leader has ever made in 1963, which was his Great White Heat of Technology speech. And that was about more than just the need to focus on science and to take advantage of these scientific changes. It was about education. He talked about the apartheid of education in this strange system where you decided a child's Future at age 11 and sent 20% off to good schools and 80% off to lousy schools. He founded the Open University. That was his idea. That was in his 1963 speech, which was why, as I think a commentator on the radio said, he'd moved the Labour party forward 50 years in 50 minutes and in a sense moved the country forward as well.
- [07:10]
Harold Wilson
So can you tell us a bit about his upbringing, about his background and how did that inform his attitude towards the importance of education and a fair system of education?
- [07:19]
Alan Johnson
Well, he was lower middle class. His father was an industrial chemist and Herbert was a man who lived with a huge regret, which is that he never went to university. He did stay in education until 18, which was a very late age then, but never went to university. Both his children, Harold's sister Marjorie, was seven years older. Unusual for a woman in the 20s to go to university, but Marjorie did and Herbert was determined both his children would and Harold did, but he had to work hard. I mean, two dramatic things happened to him at a crucial age, that is that age when you're just transferring from primary education to secondary education. He passed his 11 plus. But then two dramatic things happened. First of all, he caught typhoid from drinking unpasteurized milk and nearly died. And then his father was made unemployed, which had a huge political influence on him, and stayed unemployed for 18 months, as many men did, whether they were lower middle class, working class or whatever in the 1930s. So that had a dramatic effect on him. And then when his father found work again, it was on the Wirral Peninsula. So they had to move the whole family from Huddersfield to the Wirral and Harold had to change schools and move into a brand new Wirral Grammar School, where he was the only sixth former. So it had an advantage in that it was serendipitous because he then had one to one tuition and all of that suggested disruption to his education. But he managed to get to Oxford, which was Herbert's dream, that he should go to university and then was the outstanding pupil of his generation.
- [08:58]
Harold Wilson
Now how would you describe his political ideology? I mean what was Wilsonism?
- [09:04]
Alan Johnson
There wasn't any Wilsonism. There was Gateskillism. Who was the leader before Harold Wilson? There was certainly Bevanism. Bevan. NI Bevan, who it is said was Wilson's mentor. I think Clem Attlee was more of his mentor. He veered a bit between Liberal and Labour for a long time, but so did the country. This was the period when he was coming into adulthood where the Liberals were declining to Labour's advantage and many people were in the same quandary, working class households. Those that did have the vote generally voted Liberal. Suddenly they were switching to Labour. His father did as well. A great admirer of Gladstone, but then a great admirer of their local mp who happened to be Philip Snowden, the chancellor under Ramsay MacDonald. So he was in that era when he went to Oxford. He couldn't stand the upper class, publicly school educated Marxists. He just couldn't stand this kind of constant debate about political purity. Which is why he was very much against that kind of. The idea that he would even be a fellow traveler with the Communist party, which I mentioned because part of his time in office was dogged by MI5, it was said his paranoia about MI5 watching him because they thought he was a communist and they were watching him. They opened a file on him in 1945 but that wasn't him at all. He was more Methodist. The famous phrase by a former General Secretary of the Labour Party that Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marxism probably. Very true. His father was a non conformist. Harold was as well. Religion was very important to him and the anti religiosity of the Communist party was one thing that would ensure he would never go down that route.
- [10:51]
Harold Wilson
What would you rank then as his greatest achievements as Prime Minister?
- [10:56]
Alan Johnson
Well, it's tough because there were so many and some of his major advances, the credit goes to other people. So for instance, the outlawing of backstreet abortionists so that you could legally abort a child which overnight changed women's lives. That was done through a private member's bill. The Home Secretary was Roy Jenkins. It would never have happened without Wilson. The Prime Minister is always absolutely the person who has to agree to those kind of developments. And as he was in a very Catholic constituency, it would have been tough for Wilson to do it. But he did it, he approved it. And the Other one was legalizing homosexuality. Once again, Jenkins gets the credit, but Wilson was the Prime Minister and he put Jenkins into office. And without Wilson approving it, it would never have happened. I think one of the changes that is not talked about very much, but certainly affected my own childhood, because my father ran off when I was 8, my mother couldn't divorce him. The laws against divorce were positively medieval. A woman couldn't divorce a man. A man could quite easily divorce a woman. And Wilson changed that in his first term of office and said that if a woman had been abandoned for a period of time, then divorce was automatic. It was enormously helpful to my mother and many other women trapped in unhappy marriages. There was all of that and then there was, you know, spades more, because he probably did more right up until the end. People talk about health and safety. He introduced the Health and Safety act and the carnage on factory floors across the country, mainly men being killed in industrial accidents on a scale that was far worse than any war we'd ever been involved in, that changed practically overnight because of the Health and Safety At Work Act. And that was once again Wilsonian reform. So in terms of bread and butter, things that matter to people's lives, that make them happier in their lives, I don't think anyone's done more than Wilson.
- [13:00]
Harold Wilson
Now, despite all of this, he's carried around a reputation as being something of a schemer, hasn't he? Kind of having a Machiavellian quality to him. Where did his accusations come from and are they at all justified?
- [13:14]
Alan Johnson
They're justified in the sense of what he did. I mean, you only have to look at the deal he did with Enoch Powell in the gentleman's toilet of the no voting lobby in the House of Commons, which was the only place they could meet without attracting any attention. And Powell agreed with Wilson that he would come out and tell his supporters to vote Labour. Powell, of course, being a committed Conservative, although he's on the road to being an Ulster Unionist. So there's that. There's the way he won the referendum on the European Union. Unlike David Cameron, who lost a referendum, the first ever plebiscite in this country, and the way he dealt with his party, who were against Europe overwhelmingly, he eventually, and rather reluctantly came to think that going into Europe was crucial for our economy and the way he handled that. But the accusations that he was Machiavellian, which is actually not a bad insult, Machiavelli was a great politician or a political advisor, they really come from people who he just outsmarted. He was very clever. Sometimes too clever, sometimes he knew he was clever and showed off a bit, I guess not with any malice. He was the most un pompous Prime Minister and the most unpretentious that anyone has. I mean anyone I spoke to, even his political enemies said that. But he was clever and he knew he was clever and that cleverness showed and I think that's where some of that comes from, although there are other bits of it. Near the end of his career the Lavender list became a great so called Lavender list which was the peerages he handed out.
- [14:48]
Harold Wilson
Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit more about that and sort of what that did to his reputation?
- [14:52]
Alan Johnson
Well, I will because this brings in Marcia and you can't look at Harold without Marcia. So in 1956 he appointed Marcia Williams to be not just his personal secretary but his political secretary. Really unusual for a woman to be given such a huge job. There are only about 20 women out of 650 in Parliament and there were various innuendos over the years about whether they were having an affair or not. I deal with that in the book. But what is absolutely definite is she was a crucial influence on him and a crucial part of his success. He trusted her judgment, he took advice from her that he wouldn't take from anybody else. And when he resigned we have this strange thing called a Prime Ministerial resignation honours list. And Wilson made his list 10 names. It was his press secretary, Joe Haynes, who's still alive, who said he is the only source for this, that that list was written on Marcia's lavender notepaper. So it got called the Lavender List. The approbation that he faced was it wasn't Harold's List, it was Marcia's list that Harold Wilson had been dictated to by his political secretary as to who he should put in the House of Lords. Marcia denied it vehemently and there's a biography of her out now. There's many biographies of Wilson. There's only one of marcia by Linda McDougall. Of course she didn't dictate it. And Harold Wilson also, because he was still an MP at the time, vehemently denied that that was the case. But it stuck and the so called Lavender List has stuck.
- [16:27]
Harold Wilson
How much was his premiership hamstrung by infighting within the Labour Party? Because he wasn't universally popular in the party, was he?
- [16:36]
Alan Johnson
No, nobody was because there were factions and for Harold he was linked with Nye Bevan and the Bevanites were the kind of. I suppose the nearest comparison would be the Benites in the 80s, a group of about 36 who felt that they were, you know, the conscience of socialism. Very much on the Wilson, because he resigned with Nye Bevan over the introduction of fees for glasses and false teeth back in 1951, was classified as being close to Bevan and a Bevernite. That upset the vast majority of Labour MPs who weren't Bevernites, if you like. They were on the right. Those terms are pretty stupid in terms of the Labour Party. Everyone in the Labour Party is on the left, but I suppose on the right of the left would be the way it would be described. So put it simply, the right disliked him because they thought he was on the left and the left disliked him because he eventually made it absolutely clear that he wasn't a bevanite. He didn't go in for the cult of the personality. So there was that. There was also the fact that when it came to Europe, as I've just touched upon, the party had voted at party conference. Ted Heath, the Conservative, took us into Europe but didn't have a referendum, a huge constitutional issue upon which the British people weren't consulted. And the Labour Party conference, after Britain entered the European Union, voted 2 to 1 to come out. The cabinet were 2 to 1 for coming out Wilson's cabinet. He knew that that would be disastrous for Britain. And he, even though there were only at that time eight member states and it was the very early days of Europe, he knew our economy, our trade, our future prosperity depended on us remaining in. And so he took Tony Benn's suggestion of having a referendum. Now, the people who were very pro Europe, like Roy Jenkins, were against him on that because they said, we're already in, we shouldn't be having a referendum. The people who were against Europe said we shouldn't be having a referendum because the party has decided by 2 to 1 that we shouldn't be in, we should come out now. Navigating that was really, really difficult. A political masterpiece was the way he handled it and came through with a united party and a referendum of the British people. That, incidentally, overwhelmingly in every country of the United Kingdom, in every county of Britain, with Mrs. Thatchers, who by then was leader of the opposition, overwhelming support, voted yes. It was a yes. No. It wasn't remain or leave yes. They wanted to be in the European Economic Community, as it was called at the time. So these huge victories of his earned him enemies. And any successful politician is going to have enemies. And Harold had probably fewer than many others, but he had them now, We've.
- [19:29]
Harold Wilson
Mentioned the 1970 general election a couple of times already and as you said earlier, Neighbour lost that when many people were expecting him to win. How much did that defeat rock Wilson's confidence?
- [19:42]
Alan Johnson
By all accounts, it knocked the wind out of his sails. He was expecting to win it. We'd had devaluation, huge issue, by the way, in 67, when the pound had been devalued against the dollar. This is something that is difficult to comprehend now that we have floating currencies, but it might just be useful to mention that the devaluation was from $2.80 to the pound, $2.80 to the pound to $2.40. But the devaluation, which was to help Britain's exports and to stop us sucking in ch, had been hugely controversial. But it got round that Jenkins, once again as Chancellor, had brought the economy right back up again. Things were looking very, very good. All the polls suggested they were going to win and they lost. And that knocked the wind out of his sails. But what didn't happen is he didn't resign. I mean, nowadays we're used to a leader loses an election, they've resigned within minutes. Wilson didn't. He stayed at the helm partly because he wanted to redress this. He wanted to come back into 10 Downing street, and that's what he did and won. There were two elections in a year, in 74, and he won them both.
- [20:54]
Harold Wilson
Now, you're right that Britain in the mid-1970s seemed to be a country in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Do you get the impression that by the time he resigned in 1976, Wilson no longer believes he had the remedies to cure the nation's problems?
- [21:14]
Alan Johnson
I think he was very tired and he'd had a long career, an amazingly successful career, you know, as a university don. By the age of 21, as a brilliant civil servant during the war, he was a man who'd assisted Beveridge to bring about those huge changes in our society. He'd done a lot and he was very tired. I think the reason he stood down, age 60, was because he'd promised Mary that's what he'd do. Mary Wilson, his wife, who was very well known, by the way, I mean, her poetry was appreciated by lovers of poetry. Poetry books she published sold about 70,000 copies. Most poetry books are lucky to sell seven copies. She wanted him to be a university don. She thought her life would be in the dreaming spires of universities, particularly Oxford. She didn't like the glare of 10 Downing Street. She hated it absolutely hated it. And so he had promised Mary that he would step down at what was then the Civil Service retirement age, by the way, because Wilson was part civil servant, part boy scout, very much influenced by Baden Powell, part politician. And so he had promised he would do that, but he was tired. And it was a period of absolute upheaval in British life, to the extent that you look at some of the things that were flying about in the 70s, you know, retired colonel, blimps forming their own private armies because they were so frightened that unions were taking over the country. And terrible Labour people were winning general elections, which is not what Labour was supposed to do. Its whole history was losing general elections. So this created a febrile atmosphere. But I don't think that's why he went. And neither did his illness that started just after he stepped down. But it was very sad. Cause this brilliant brain, if you can have a photographic memory, I'm not sure whether it exists, but if it does, he had. It had an amazing brain, an amazing memory. And to see that fade as it did through dementia was a sad end for a great man.
- [23:22]
Harold Wilson
What do you think he'd make of political discourse in 2024?
- [23:27]
Alan Johnson
Well, he'd be closer to it and more in tune with it than many of his predecessors. Anthony Eden, for instance, or Churchill, who died on the hundredth day of Harold Wilson's premiership. And the two got on very well, by the way, in Parliament. And he'd served as a civil servant to the coalition government. They would have been bemused. I don't think Wilson would have been. I think Wilson would have seen, he was younger, of course, those changes in society, the expansion of higher education, comprehensive education, all his causes, and the emancipation of working people, which is something he believed in very much, you know, a less deferential society he would know and recognize and appreciate. So I don't think that much has changed. And so I think Kier could learn an awful lot. I don't think he'll pick up a pipe and start smoking it. I think that's probably gone. I hope we don't see photographs of his knees, because Harold Wilson, on holiday in the Scilly Isles was the first time the British people had been subjected to. To the knees of a Prime minister. Bear before the world. I don't think he'll do all that, but I think he's very much Wilsonian. He's more Wilsonian than probably any other Prime Minister.
- [24:43]
Spencer Mizzen
That was Alan Johnson, a former Labour politician and Member of Parliament. Alan's latest book, Harold Wilson is published by Swift Press, and if you're interested in learning more about some of Britain's other Prime ministers, then we did a whole series on this subject. You can find a link to the first episode in the description of this podcast. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.