How long was harold wilson prime minister

For 13 years he led the Labour Party , winning four general elections and losing one. In he gave up office for all time, to the astonishment of the world. What was wrong? Was he suffering from a grave secret illness? Was some great scandal about to break? Why should a man held in high esteem by his party and who had just celebrated his 60th birthday resign from the prime ministership at an age when Churchill, Eden and Home had yet to form a government?

The speculation was so lively that almost everyone missed the simple truth. It was that Wilson had had enough and did not intend to fight another election. All but a few people missed too the historical significance of his resignation, that it signalled the approaching decline of the kind of demand-managed economy cum welfare state which had begun in , had been maintained by three Tory prime ministers and had been developed by Wilson.

It was left to his successor James Callaghan to tell the party bluntly it was untrue that a government could simply spend its way out of depression and unemployment. The years of consensus between the parties and within them were coming to an end. What did Wilson really think? He had a remarkable gift for equivocation and manoeuvre which he used to hold the party together and to achieve and retain the leadership. There was nothing more to know. He was a brilliant academic but no intellectual.

There were no philosophic depths to probe. He was one of the few university socialists of his generation to escape the tamed and benevolent Marxism of the Left Book Club. He shared the conventional outlook of the revisionist socialists of his generation: a mixed economy, a welfare state, supported on an expanding industrial base, part of it publicly owned, and full employment made possible by Keynesian expansion and trade-union moderation.

It would be one human attribute in the man. Wilson was not cold. Nobody wrote longer or more sympathetic letters to the widows of his colleagues.

Nobody was more deeply concerned about the physically handicapped — he filled No 10 with them every Christmas. It was he who insisted that Jack Ashley should not give up his seat when he lost his hearing and that Susan Masham in her wheelchair should accept a life peerage. Wilson argued that they could set an example and show other handicapped people what they could achieve. But Wilson was reticent. He was a member of the most loving but most undemonstrative of families.

To the end, there remained left-wingers who were suspicious of his politics and right-wingers who were sceptical of his compromises and of his motives.

He was more loyal to his friends than some of them were to him. Of course, many Tories in the south detested his provincial bounce. He was the archetype of the new meritocrats, a stocky man of undistinguished appearance who had been left with a stoop by typhoid, a common man from nowhere but with a mind of uncommon excellence and a prodigious capacity for work.

He had, however, a weakness for boasting and a naive delight in the limelight about his head and the red carpet beneath his feet.

Though he spent six happy years at Oxford, Wilson heard no whisper of those last enchantments. In his style, his tastes, his speech, he remained an unchanged man of the north, his Puritan earnestness graced by the affability of the nonconformist chapel and spiced with a lethal wit.

He married at 24, after six years courtship, Mary Baldwin, daughter of a congregational minister. She gave him two sons and a home in which he could forget about politics. He preserved and cherished his roots. They were good ones. His mother was a schoolteacher and captain of a Girl Guides company.

And Harold had certainly made his way up. Wilson had political ambitions and became candidate for Ormskirk, which he won back for Labour in Before he had seen parliament in action, he found himself parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Works.

Two years later Attlee took him into the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade, a complex department with a bureaucracy 14, strong. In the House of Commons, he made a poor show. Head down in a departmental brief, he would rush through his speeches, dealing nervously with the barbed interruptions of Brendan Bracken and Oliver Lyttelton.

Yet in the department he was most efficient. It suited his Puritan nature. Wilson enthusiastically rationed raw materials and clothes longer than was necessary and manipulated controls to restrict consumption and stimulate exports. Rationing by decree became the new socialist orthodoxy; rationing by the purse was wicked capitalism.

But he made himself a laughing stock by speaking of the bootless children of his youth. What he really said was never established. Some believed that he had claimed to be a barefoot boy himself. For years press and politicians taunted him about barefoot children. Wilson stood for the restrictive, controlling, bureaucratic side of the government. But what was in his mind in the months before his resignation in ?

Labour had been returned the previous year with a small majority and could not last long. Attlee was unwell, Cripps was ill and had had to retire and Ernie Bevin was dying. The top leadership was fading away. Who would take their place? When Gaitskell, at the behest of the Americans, decided to finance a heavy programme of rearmament, was it envy and ambition that motivated Wilson to oppose it? Or was it simply that as a good chief of the Board of Trade he had to warn the cabinet that the programme was impossible and that his own department could not procure all the raw materials needed?

One must remember that, though Wilson was by this time a mature cabinet minister, he was still an inexperienced politician who had been sheltered from the politics of rivalry and ambition by his giant department.

Did he think that soon, when Labour had fought and lost the election, Bevan would replace Attlee as Leader and he, Wilson, would be number two? It was long years in opposition that allowed Wilson to make himself into a politician, a potential leader and a brilliant House of Commons orator and wit. Many people in the party, and Wilson was one of them, stood between the two camps or had a foot in both of them.

In later years, Wilson claimed that he was never a Bevanite, simply a co-belligerent with Bevan sharing a place in the wilderness. But there was more to it than that. That is why he was elected to the constituency section of the National Executive. His status depended not only on his intellect and on his reputation as a minister but on the support of the Left.

When Bevan resigned from the shadow cabinet because of disagreement with the policy on German rearmament, Wilson as runner-up in the last election automatically inherited his place.

He had learnt to show conference as much sport in Tory-bashing as Bevan himself could, though he made the journey to the socialist promised land seem longer and more arduous. Wilson lost nothing of his standing in the party, though he did in the country by hinting that Oliver Poole, the Tory deputy chairman, was somehow connected with a leak in the City about an impending change in the bank rate.

A tribunal of Inquiry showed there was nothing in it and Wilson, humiliated yet defiant, narrowly avoided disaster in a minute speech in the Commons. With his back to the wall he was at his best. Wilson was not a fundamentalist but he argued that the clause represented the central myth of the party, and so should be kept as it was. The conflict was defused, but then moved to defence. Wilson did not differ from Gaitskell on policy but believed that the parliamentary party, while elected on a policy of nuclear defence, could yet not frontally oppose the conference decision.

Gaitskell, thought Wilson, ought to come up with a new policy reconciling the contradictory positions. The party leader was being confrontational again and so, as Wilson put it, in the interests of unity he decided to run against him for the leadership. He knew he would lose, but, he said, he could do no other. This was not merely a moral position. The left, led by Frank Cousins, told him that if he did not run, they would drop him for ever.

Wilson got fewer than half the votes and lost the sympathy of many of his non-left admirers. He had gravitas, and was valiant for truth, the hero in politics. Beside him, Wilson looked a devious anti-hero who had no real friends or followers, who was regarded with suspicion on the Left and dubiety on the right.

Yet when Gaitskell died in January , Wilson headed the first leadership poll with votes. Brown got 88, Callaghan In the second round, with Callaghan eliminated, Wilson got , Brown He never forgot that more than half the party had rejected him on the first round and that he would always have to watch his back.

Aneurin Bevan — politician. Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home — prime minister. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». British politician and Labour prime minister —70; —76 , noted for his tactical skills in maintaining positive government with a very small majority.

He was knighted in and created a life peer in Born in Huddersfield, the son of a works chemist, Wilson was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, where he read economics. During World War II he worked as a civil servant: he was economics assistant to the war cabinet secretariat —41 and then to the mines department —43 , serving finally as director of economics and statistics at the Ministry of Fuel and Power.

In he was elected to parliament and was president of the Board of Trade from to , when he resigned in protest against the proposed introduction of social service cuts.

He was spokesman for economic affairs —59 and then for foreign affairs —63 in the Labour shadow government, succeeding Gaitskell as party leader in having unsuccessfully challenged his leadership in Wilson took Labour to victory, but with a very small majority, in the election of Almost immediately he was faced with the problem of Rhodesia now Zimbabwe , and Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence The government's response was to impose ever harsher economic sanctions.

Wilson achieved a personal triumph in obtaining a greatly increased majority in the election, but the country's economic difficulties demanded unpopular measures, including devaluation of the pound in Wilson's statutory incomes policy was attacked both within the party and by the unions, and proposals for reforms in industrial relations had to be shelved.

His first election victory on 15 October saw him win with a small majority of 4, which increased significantly to 98 after a second General Election on 31 March As Prime Minister from to , his main plan was to modernise.

His government supported backbench MPs in liberalising laws on censorship, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, and he abolished capital punishment. In comparison, his outlook on foreign affairs was less modernising. For example, his approach to the Vietnam War saw him skilfully balance modernist ambitions with Anglo-American interests when, despite repeated American requests, he kept British troops out while still maintaining good relations.

To resolve these 2 interlinked problems, Wilson launched a Defence Review to and created the Department for Economic Affairs, which sought to implement an ambitious National Plan. When sterling crises continued, Wilson was forced to devalue the pound in November Despite his initial hesitation, Wilson recognised the value of membership of the European Economic Community EEC , but his application was unsuccessful.

Believing his popularity had increased, Wilson called a general election on 18 June , but suffered defeat by the Conservative Party under Edward Heath. Wilson held onto the Labour leadership. The next General Election on 28 February resulted in a hung parliament, and he formed a minority government.

He called another election on 10 October at which he secured a small majority of 3. His next 2 years as Prime Minister saw him concentrate heavily on domestic policy, achieving social reforms in education, health, housing, gender equality, price controls, pensions, provisions for disabled people and child poverty. Job creation remained an issue — by , unemployment had reached 1 million.