Harold Wilson: The Winner

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The enduring social reforms that distinguished Wilson’s first government came largely through the efforts of his home secretary Roy Jenkins. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. While Wilson was a socialist, he was also a centrist, and sought to balance the ‘left and right tendencies.

He held office as Prime Minister for longer than any other Labour leader, and longer than any other premier in peacetime apart from Mrs Thatcher. First, the memoirs contain so much authentic Wilson material that it would be quite a feat for an author to simulate his voice. An interesting series on the discovery and settlement of the Elizabeth Islands off the southern coast of Massachusetts. Thomas-Symonds’ account, like others, is consistent with Wilson becoming vaguer each year from 1976 to 1979. He lost, but in 1963, after Gaitskell’s death, Wilson took the leadership, and a year later led Labour to victory.

Wilson was born in 1916, and the book follows him from his childhood in the north of England to his academic success at Oxford, his war years as a civil servant at the National Coal Board, into parliament and up through the ranks to Downing Street. 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. Some minor tape damage to front, minor scuffing to top and bottom of spine, otherwise very little scuffing or shelfwear.

Thomas-Symonds, however, would like us to see Wilson’s Britain as a different place to Thatcher’s: a modern country, socially liberal, anti-racist and in Europe. A presentation copy of the first edition of this work on the history of government in Britain by the former British Prime Minister.Revisionist hindsight with regards to devaluation also tends to ignore the practical constraints that Wilson was under in 1964: he had a slim majority, a party split on the issue, and furthermore he was under pressure from the Americans not to devalue.

As Andrew Holden put it in a recent work, Wilson’s appointment of Jenkins implied a ‘willing acceptance of what was to come’, given that Jenkins’ views on social reform were well known (p. Like the other books, too, Thomas-Symonds seems to take for granted that seeking incomes policy was worthwhile and necessary in fighting inflation in the 1960s and 1970s.He resumed writing his “Financial Weekly” column (a column that none of the biographies mention) in 1982.