PROFILE: JAMES HAROLD WILSON A MAN CONVINCED HE IS THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32301, 20 May 1970, Page 16

PROFILE: JAMES HAROLD WILSON A MAN CONVINCED HE IS THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

<Bu

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

Few if any countries house their chief executive as unimpressively as the British do. Number 10 Downing Street is one of an unprepossessing terrace of houses in a side street. Sir Winston Churchill dismissed it as the work of an eighteenth-century jerry-builder. Only the bobby on duty at the door and the knot of sightseers distinguishes the official residence of the British Prime Minister from hundreds .of London houses that have been divided into flats or converted into offices.

But undistinguished and jerry-built though it may be, to James Harold Wilson it is the end of the rainbow.

Since he was a small boy in| short pants and his father took a snapshot of him posed, on the doorstep of Number 10. 1 Harold Wilson’s sights have' been set on Downing Street.) Born in 1916, Harold Wil-) son had to wait until he was! 48 before moving his personal effects into 10 Down-, Ing Street. He has been) there since 1964 and there is not the slightest hint that six years of familiarity have dispelled the old enchantment “An Impeccable Model”

It will not be easy to move him. With the exception of Churchill, no British Prime Minister this century has been so utterly convinced that lie is the right man for the job. No-one can have striven so single-mindedly for the chance to justify his confidence. It is hard to feel human affection for anyone so dedicated. Since becoming Prime Minister Harold Wilson has worked hard at creating a cuddly image for himself, but there is little warmth in the popular attitude towards him —one way or the other. A political commentator described him as “an impeccable model for all ambitious socialists” and like all models, his impeccability is chilling. Horatio Alger or Samuel Smiles would have approved but that is no recommendation nowadays. Meritorious as Harold Wilson’s story is, it is hardly a rags to riches one, in spite of a popular misconception to that effect —perhaps not altogether unjustified. The required socialist image demands an underprivileged childhood, and Harold Wilson was once reported as saying: “At the school I went to in the north more than half the children in my class 1 never had boots and shoes on their feet.” When his native Huddersfield took exception to this, Mr Wilson ex-) plained that he had really) ibeen referring to Liverpool.) :Manchester and Birmingham.! ■ “Every Opportunity” 1 The fact is that the child) Harold had, as they used to) say, “every opportunity”! The spoon in his mouth may not have been sterling but it was certain); good quality) silver plate. In English social terms. Harold Wilson was) born, not into the working class, but into the lace-cur-tain lower middle class. His father was an industrial chemist working on explosives when the future Prime Min-! ister of Great Britain was' born during the First World) ■ War. The family was left-' , inclined, politically conscious ■ and had a well-developed i sense of social responsibility. They were devout Congrei gationalists; father was a • Scout leader, mum. an officer . in the Guides (Girl Scouts), . and his sister was a patrol ! leader in the samt outfit. Does , it need saying that cub scout [ Harold became in time a . King’s Scout, a distinction achieved by few? Even in so dedicated a family Harold stood out. The story is still told of the time 1 in 1923 when seven-year-old ■ Harold, recovering from an ■ appendix operation, was 1 visited in hospital by his ' parents. It was polling day. Harold asked them two questions: Had they brought 1 “Bubbles," his favourite comic paper? And had they yet cast their vote for Mr Snowden and his Socialists? When Herbert and Ethel Wilson admitted that they had not voted yet, Harold shooed them out of the ward, then sank back into his pillows, content at having done his duty by the party. Rise To Eminence

The battered adjective “meteoric” really does describe Wilson’s rise to eminence. A scintillating academic career began—as a good socialist’s should—in a local council school in Huddersfield, moved to a grammar school then, via a scholarship, to Jesus College, Oxford. His record was so impressive (Gladstone Memorial Prize, the Webb Medley Economics Scholarship, firstclass honours in philosophy, politics and economics) that at 21 he was an economics lecturer at New College, Oxford, and a year later Fellow of University College. Wartime experience in the Civil Service (Director of Economics and Statistics at the Fuel Ministry) gave Wilson a taste for government, and he switched from university life into politics, getting into Parliament on the Socialist landslide of 1945.

By 31 he was president of the Board of Trade. He moved his family into a pleasant house in London’s expensive and fashionable Hampstead. As a Cabinet Minister he was now a regular caller at Number 10. This was the lifted hem of paradise. But the obstacles between him and the tenancy were daunting: a phalanx of Socialist olympians, Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, Bevan. Morrison—and the possibility of a Conservative victory. In 1951 the Conservatives did get back into power and the Socialists went into Opposition for 13 years. In a way those 13 years in the wilderness were the making of Harold. Death and advancing age took its toll of the

[Olympians and Wilson f emerged into the front rank 1 )where his encyclopaedic) mind and gift for stinging: | [eloquence— at its best when;! he is in opposition—im-[l [pressed both politicians and < j voters. < Long Opposition Years ’ i They were long years. But ; [that fact worked to Harold i Wilson’s advantage, too. In 1 that time a generation grew i up who would not remember i that their fathers had kicked i out the Socialists because of ' their blind implementation of reforms that were no longer . needed and policies long in- ' validated by events. They I knew only the unadventurous i affluence of the Conservative ; regime. i Harold Wilson had not been politically alive long enough I before the Socialist defeat of i 1951 to have a history that 1 could count against him. His ; was the voice crying in the < wilderness of smug comfort. During 13 years in opposition Harold Wilson had ma- ; tured as a politician. Even 1 his opponents would admit i that few men in British poli- : tics are more sensitive to the 1

swell and shifting of populate feeling. Wilson knew what the people wanted to hear and he told it to them. He would lead them into the technological revolution. Britain would emerge again as a first-class Power, not on the strength of arms and men, but on the genius of her scientists and the skill of her craftsmen. He, the archetypal meritocrat, would usher in the age of meritocracy. The day of the compassionate computer was at hand. They believed him in 1964. And again in 1966 when he went prematurely to the polls for a national vote of confidence—at the most politically auspicious moment, of course. The question is: will they believe him again? With a stroke of the legislative pen he has created a whole new generation of voters by reducing the voting age to 18. But to them he is “old Harold Wilson" who’s always been at Number 10. Will he relish the irony of it if they turn out to be the very ones who send him packing from the 1 house he loves so dearly?