Harold Wilson

"A week is a long time in politics."

The man with the pipe.

James Harold Wilson (1916-1995) was British Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. He contested five elections- winning four of them.

Born in Huddersfield, Wilson won a scholarship to a local grammar school. However, due to a failiure to get work, his father moved them to Spital, on the Wirral, and he then became the first head boy the school he attended for Sixth Form, and then he went to Oxford. After a brief time as a Liberal, he became a Labour member and was one of the very large class of Labour MPs that arrived in the 1945 landslide, after being a civil servant during World War Two.

In 1947, he got the Cabinet-level job of President of the Board of Trade (now generally known as Business Secretary), but resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1951 in protest over Hugh Gaitskell's shadow budget. In 1960, he tried and failed to remove Gaitskell from the Labour leadership. When Gaitskell suddenly died three years later, Wilson became leader.

Narrowly defeating Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Tories in 1964, he won a landslide in 1966, then lost the 1970 election in a surprise defeat. The hung parliament of February 1974 led to Labour winning most seats but not most votes, Wilson becoming PM and then going to the country again in October. Labour got a majority of 3.

Wilson surprised everyone when he stood down in March 1976. He had Alzheimer's, which became apparent after he left.

Wilson's time in office, the longest Labour Prime Minister until Tony Blair, saw:
 * The decision to devalue the pound in 1967
 * The Vietnam War (Wilson supported the war, but did not provide troops)
 * Decolonisation in general, and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in particular
 * England's World Cup triumph in 1966
 * A failed EEC entry attempt in 1967 (vetoed by France)
 * The abolition of the death penalty
 * Legalising homosexuality and abortion
 * The Representation of the People Act of 1969, which reduced the voting age from 21 to 18
 * A national referendum of membership of the EEC in 1975 (to resolve a split in Labour, where members were allowed to campaign on either side), which led to a vote to stay winning with 67,2%

Wilson was a very good tactician and the first PM to understand the power of television. His precise views on Polaris varied on the audience (he ultimately went ahead with the order) and he was the first Prime Minister to be fully aware of the potentials of media. An attempt at a post-premiership talk show, though, failed- he just wasn't any good. He stayed an MP until 1983, then went to the Lords, but dropped out of public life after 1987.

In his last two years as PM, got paranoid about MI5 plotting a coup and being bugged. It is also rumoured he was a Soviet agent, or at least a 'useful idiot' of the kind Stalin liked.

In fiction:
 * The Beatles' song "Taxman" mentions "Mr. Wilson" and "Mr. Heath" (Harold Wilson and then-opposition leader Edward Heath). A year before the song's release Wilson -- savvy to the mood of the public regarding the band -- had them awarded the M.B.E (Member of the British Empire).
 * Wilson and Heath were made fun of occasionally in Monty Python's Flying Circus, usually as one-off throwaway gags.
 * Wilson is depicted in the HBO film "Longford."
 * He was the first Prime Minister to have a regular parody in Private Eye ("Mrs Wilson's Diary", supposedly his day-to-day routine as told by his wife) and was commonly nicknamed "Wislon", after a typographical error that made him sound like an alien menace.
 * Via trick photography, Wilson (then the PM) appears as one of the celebrities who embrace the craze for the Lancastrian martial art of 'Ecky-Thump' in The Goodies. He knocks out the policeman guarding Number Ten with a black pudding...without ever removing his pipe.
 * He appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in 1978, partially because when writer Eddie Braben was a child in The Forties, Wilson had paid him to hand out campaign leaflets.