His opponents were making the case for temporary, not permanent, economic slack as a means of fighting inflation. Jenkins had by then given up on the Labour Party and the foundations of the Social Democratic Party had been laid. However, said sanctions were ineffective, and Wilson’s boast that the collapse of the Smith regime would be a matter of ‘weeks rather than months’ quickly came back to bite him.

Francis Beckett * THE SPECTATOR * Wilson was one of the most remarkable British political figures of the 20th century . Thomas-Symonds, who has had access to material that no other biographer has seen, has found little new evidence to explain away his reputation as a tactician, not a strategist. Here are good lessons to learn from the leader who held together a party riven between right and left. It is divided into three sections: themes, policies, and perspectives, with the section on policies taking up the lion’s share of the book.

James, drove in Hyde Park, gambled in the Groom Porter's lodgings, and thronged the playhouses of London. as well as Clive James’ remark in The Observer (October 21, 1979), “He was *really* terrible,” and the observation in Halliwell’s Television Companion (1987 edition, p. Nice and clean pages but with some foxing marks on the outer edges,light shelf wear on the edges of the pages. A commentary on Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, reviewing accomplishments and failures across a

Turning to industrial policy; when Wilson launched the 1964 general election campaign at the annual meeting of the TUC, he invited the trade unions to participate in a ‘great adventure’; he wanted to ‘harness the goodwill and participation of the trade unions in what he saw as his social-democratic project’ (p. Nevertheless, the Labour Party won a slender majority at the 1964 election and Wilson became prime minister. 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.

Trade unions represented the sectional interests of their members; said members saw their unions as ‘guardians for what they regarded as limited, piecemeal objectives in a competitive labour market’ (p. In the summer of 1965, the US provided a rescue package for the pound, which had come under pressure due to shrinking exchange reserves. Indeed, as the title makes plain, Harold Wilson : The Winnerseeks to do more than correct the record.

Wilson's governments (apart from the period when Roy Jenkins was Chancellor) were no exception and Wilson was only re-elected in 1974 because the Heath government, too, had failed dismally to put the economy right. Thomas-Symonds’ clear admiration for Wilson – for his path through the acrimonious Bevanite/Gaitskellite clashes of the 1950s and for his ability to manage and be in touch with the party (Wilson’s instincts, Thomas-Symonds takes the trouble to cite Michael Foot as noting, were “those of the party rank and file”) – would suggest he at least views himself as decidedly of the (soft) left. Unless you’re a historian of modern Britain, you likely do not think very much about what Wilson did in these instances – but anyone who pays attention to politics knows what Tony Blair did when presented with American pressure to join a foreign war or how David Cameron’s pre-referendum renegotiation of EU membership terms ultimately panned out.Reissued with a new foreword to mark the centenary of Harold Wilson’s birth, Ben Pimlott’s classic biography combines scholarship and observation to illuminate the life and career of one of Britain’s most controversial post-war statesmen.