Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer

Now Sir Keir Starmer has his first Labour Party conference as Prime Minister under his belt, the inevitable comparisons with other Labour PMs get under way. There is help in that task in a new short and vividly readable biography of Harold Wilson. The only decent prose writer among the many Cabinet members the last Labour government produced is Alan Johnson.  He is outstanding, whether on politics, on trades unionism, growing up in London or in fiction. 

Now with excellent timing he has produced a new biography of Harold Wilson: Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson (Swift, £16.99). Johnson’s book is far shorter than the lengthy volumes by Ben Pimlott, Nick Thomas-Symonds,  Michael Foot (who wrote a “pictorial” biography of Wilson) or his nephew, Paul Foot, who wrote an anti-Wilson philippic in 1968.

After winning four elections, Wilson retired as Prime Minister when he was 60, two years younger than Sir Keir Starmer. I first stood for Parliament in October 1974, the last election Wilson won, though the seat I fought, Solihull, remained Tory until the Lib Dems won it in 1997. Wilson fans like highlighting the four elections he won. Unlike Tony Blair, however, he never kept Labour in power for longer than six years. Both governments he formed, in 1964 and 1974, ended in Labour losing.

Two-thirds of Alan Johnson’s biography covers the years before Wilson entered Downing Street. There is marvellous social history here about the scholarship boy scout from Yorkshire, where Johnson (a Londoner) was an MP and still lives. 

Starmer has one Cabinet colleague, the lawyer Nick Thomas-Symonds, who has written a full-length Wilson biography. Johnson’s is shorter, but both Labour stalwarts duck the big question: why did Wilson with his Oxford exam-passing brilliance fail to impose a lasting Labour settlement on Britain?

It was Roy Jenkins who liberated Britain from homophobic Tory laws – our wonderful judges sent 57,000 men to prison for being gay until the 1966 Labour government changed the law. He also removed capital punishment and allowed women to control their fertility. Wilson set up the Open University and his government was the first (and so far the only administration) to produce a White Paper on the Arts. Both were worthwhile achievements, but not enough to keep Wilson in power as the 1968 generation turned against him and Wilson could not face down anti-European reactionaries in the trade unions and on the Left of Labour.

Johnson, like other biographers, lauds Wilson staying out of Vietnam – in contrast to Blair and Iraq. Yet the 1968 generation also occupied university campuses and took part in muscular confrontations with the police, especially at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1969.

Wilson may get credit from historians, but the 1968 generation was turned off Labour because he would not openly criticise the US. He also refused to intervene to stop the Turkish invasion and part annexation of Cyprus in 1974, or the white supremacist usurpation of power in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He refused after 1974 to face down the Ulster Unionist Protestant supremacists with their hatred of Catholics in the province.

Blair, by contrast, faced a massive rebellion of 199 Labour MPs in 2003 over his support for intervention in Iraq. Yet he went on to win the next election and gave Labour 13 consecutive years in power, twice as long as Wilson managed.

Wilson was unable to reform the UK economy, as he could never get labour market reform accepted by trade unions. Like Attlee, Wilson had a mono-lingual Oxford and Whitehall background, which meant he could not understand Europe. Like Cameron he won the 1974 election by offering a plebiscite on Europe, but he had all the press, and most of the Tories, on his side. Yet Labour after the 1975 referendum descended into primitive nationalist populist hostility to full European partnership. That is still the position Labour finds itself in today.

Alan Johnson has written a fine page-turning account of Harold Wilson. It could be usefully read by Sir Keir Starmer, but as a guide on what not to do if Labour wants to change Britain rather than gently manage its decline.

Denis MacShane was a Labour MP for 18 years and Minister for Europe under Tony Blair. His latest book is Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 (Biteback).

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