Thirteen years' pantomime

Christopher Booker Tile Peculiar quality of surrealistic banality surrounding Sir Harold Wilson's valediction—the absurd honours list, followed by howls of 'lies' and 'orchestrated vendetta' at the slightest hint of criticism, the contract With 'Lord Frost' for what the head of Yorkshire TV claims will be 'a television landmark as important and fascinating as Lord Clark's Civilisation,' the frenzied dinner-party speculation that Lady Forkbender is about to marry Lord Weidenfeld —all this has been so entirely typical of the ,s.ranip Wilson has imposed on English public life since the early 'sixties that it can °111Y, once again, prompt reflection on the Sheer enigma of this extraordinary figure. Throughout his reign, as Professor Trevor-Roper pointed out in the Spectator last week, Wilson has been nothing if not consistent. In the week of Hugh Gaitskell's death in January 1963, I recall writing a Private Eye strip-cartoon about 'Harold Willsoon, a very clever little politician. The reason why he is called Willsoon is that, whenever anyone has said "Oh, not even Harold would do a thing like that", you can be absolutely certain that he will soon'. And ever since, his most obvious single trait has been the way in which he has invariably alleged to strain our collective credulity by always doing that one more unbelievable thing—like turning Marcia Williams into Lady Forkbender only weeks after the 'land reclamation' affair: with the added refinement, of course, that no sooner have people reacted with entirely predictable astonishment, than they are blamed for being part of a Plot got up by the Tdry media. Yet the most incredible thing has been the way in which, for all his follies and absurdities, for all the appalling collapse in British self-esteem over which he has presided, Wilson has always managed to trot quietly on, pipe in mouth, unchallengeably the dominant figure of English public life. light to the end, against all the evidence, he has still managed to preserve a kind of g'rucliging respect from the most unlikely r_e°131e---'well, you've got to hand it to him, he is the most brilliant political operator'— almost as if it would simply be more than We could bear to admit the full extent of the disaster he has been.

The thirteen years during which Wilson occupied the centre of the British stage can, ...

believe, be divided into five distinct Phases—each casting its own illumination on the nature of the Wilson riddle. Firstly there were his original triumphant eighteen months of opposition in 1963-4. He had come to power in the Labour Party With little more than a reputation for ruthless deviousness, at a time when, after the

somewhat worthy milksop flavour of the Gaitskell years, those qualities seemed desirable rather than the reverse. Through the summer of Profumo, he stood back from the crumbling ruins of the Macmillan government, carefully cultivating an image of disdainful responsibility. And then, with two masterstrokes, he established the effortless dominance that was to carry him to power a year later.

The first was, with little more than a dazzling lick of paint, to erase all the divisions and squabbles which had racked the Labour Party for years past : without so much as a mention of 'Clause Four' or 'the Bomb', he simply lifted the eyes of the Party to the quite meaningless new dawn of 'the white heat of the technological revolution'. The second was to harness all that profound yearning in the closing days of Macmillan's 'stagnant', Edwardian, grouse-moor Britain for a new age of 'classless', 'Kennedy-style'

'dynamism'. Without any meaningful commitment whatever, in the early months of 1964, he created precisely the right kind of vague, exciting, dynamic image for which so many hungered. In his own revealing words at the time 'the Labour Party is like a vehicle. If you drive at great speed, all the people in it are so exhilarated or so sick that you have no problems'. In 1964, Wilson drove his vehicle so fast that exhilarated intellectuals and journalists crowded onto it without even pausing to glance at the destinationboard—and on 15 October, his love-affair with the news media at its height, Wilson's first brilliant stage was consummated.

Stage two was the realities of office. There later grew up a legend among his disillusioned supporters that, in his first two years, Wilson did live up to that promise of 'dynamism', and was only corrupted by the exigencies of power. But the remarkable thing, looking back to that era, is how totally and instantly he established all the broad outlines. of' the style which was to mark his successive premierships over the next twelve years: the fundamental lack of any broad strategy or solid achievement; the paranoid reflex whereby anything that went wrong had instantly to be blamed on 'the Tory press' or 'the • speculators' or the 'moaning minnies' of the 'cocktail circuit' ; above all, his obsession with the media and his own image.

Almost immediately, in 'Mrs Wilson's Dairy', Richard Ingrams and John Wells brilliantly captured the extraordinary Walter Mitty-like flavour of the Wilson court : the entourage of seedy and mediocre aides and hangers-on, the Wiggs, the Kaufmans, the Alf Richmans; Wilson's own constant seeing of himself in 'image' terms ('I'm not a Kennedy, I'm a Johnson—I fly by the seat of my pants', or the famous occasion later when Wilson somewhat unguardedly observed to Ingrams himself, looking round the crowd of assorted pop singers and footballers at a Downing Street party, 'Jack Kennedy's soirees at the White House had nothing on this'). His arrival at Number 10, in short, was reminiscent of nothing so much as one of those little men who blow their savings on hiring a famous orchestra, so that they can play great conductor for a night. And as Britain stumbled through the first year of Wilson rule, through a welter of half-baked measures, U-turns and headline-seeking gimmickry (the Harold Davies 'peace mission' to Vietnam, the Beatles' MBEs), it should have become cruelly apparent just how empty all that talk of '100 days of dynamic action' had been.

Nevertheless, somehow the 'Wilson myth' remained intact. During the autumn of 1965, in fact, as he entered into 'eyeball to eyeball' confrontation with Ian Smith over Rhodesia Ow Cuba', as he excitedly told one reporter), he seemed even in some eyes to grow in stature. Flying up to Balmoral to consult with the Queen, or gravely informing the nation on one of his many TV appearances that he had the previous evening 'talked on the phone to nineteen Commonwealth Prime Ministers', he seemed to be quite consciously slipping out of the gritty, dynamic, man-of-the-people role of a year before into a new silveryhaired, 'statesman-like' pose (indeed he confirmed this a few months later when he advised the Irish Prime Minister that 'a political leader should try to look, particularly on television, like a family doctor—the kind of man who inspires trust by his appearance, as well as by his soothing words').

The election landslide of March 1966, and the opinion polls which two months later showed him the most popular Prime Minister since records were kept, were the highwater mark. And then, all of a sudden, through the seamen's strike—engineered by that famous lightly-knit group of politically motivated men'—and the great economic crisis of July 1966, the whole edifice collapsed. The Observer mourned 'The Lost Leader' whose 'reputation as a political magician' had vanished overnight. The Walter Mitty Superman was no more. And we

were into the third phase of Wilson's reign, the four long grinding years of the late 'sixties when, as the government stumbled through an almost unbroken series of byelection defeats, from one silly mini-crisis to another ('D Notices', 'In Place of Strife'), the Prime Minister very noticeably withdrew himself from view.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of these years was the almost total lack of achievement of the 1966-70 Labour Government (apart from the invasion of Anguilla, the dive-bombing of the Torrey Canyon, the starving of Biafra and the quite unnecessary pulling down of hundreds of thousands of sound houses to make way for tower blocks). In his almost endearingly Mitty-like memoirs, for instance, Wilson at one point proudly lists the great reforming measures which were announced in the Queen's Speech of 1968. The chief items were: legislation to convert the Post Office from a department of state into a public corporation, and to transfer London Transport to the GLC; an Act to set up the new computerised vehicle licensing centre in the 'Welsh Development Area'; the Decimal Coinage Act ; legislation on 'the composition and power of the House of Lords' ; and a Bill to lower the voting age to eighteen.

It would be hard to conceive a more bankrupt list of mere administrative tinkering,s-the only concrete results of which were'to accelerate inflation by decimalisation, and to subsidise the property developers into filling London with a mass of hideous and largely unnecessary new hotels.

Indeed by 1970 Wilson was at a pretty low ebb. After years of talk about his 'credibility sap', he was probably more widely despised than at any time before or since. He had achieved virtually nothing (except Chancellor Jenkins's rather laborious effort, at the expense of any good economic growth, to bring the balance of payments and the budget into surplus). Even so, he was obviously shattered by his defeat at the June election. For months he looked tired and ill, there were rumours of his resignation. He virtually retired from public life to compile those memoirs, Nixon-like in their relentless self-justification. And over the next three years, he seemed to have lost almost all zest for his onetime favourite role as scourge of the Tories (presumably, like all self-fantasising 'climbers', having once achieved power himself, he no longer saw Heath, as he had once seen Macmillan, as a giant to be toppled, commanding all his adrenalin). By far the most significant development of this fourth phase of his reign was the way his semi-abdication was used by the Labour left as an opportunity virtually to dictatt the Party's new manifesto.

The final phase began in March 1974. No one seemed more visibly surprised and bucked up by his sudden return to Number 10 than Wilson himself. Within weeks he was almost back into the swing of his old familiar style. To the seedy and dubious 'land deals' saga, his typical reaction was to envision 'cohorts' of Tory journalists comb ing the country to dig up any untruth which would embarrass him, swiftly followed by the most ludicrous example of his abuse of the honours system since the ennoblement of Lord Brayley.

Much more seriously, however, and worse than any of the faults of the first two Wilson governments, the years of his last two in 1974-6 will almost certainly be looked back on as the time when, thanks almost entirely to Wilson's most characteristic weakness, his invariable wish to avoid immediate trouble at the cost of storing up much worse for the future, Britain was allowed virtually to dig its own economic grave. With the country already reeling from the effects of the 'Barber bubble', rocketing commodity prices and the fourfold rise in the price of oil, 1974-6 will be remembered as the years when, under the appallingly cynical and typically Wilsonian 'Social Contract', wages and government spending were allowed to go through the roof. As other countries took desperate measures to cut back and fight off the crippling effects of the international inflation, Britain alone did nothing. Perhaps the supreme memorial of the whole Wilson style of government was the way in which, in those years, almost any ludicrous pay claim, almost any pressure for new public spending was given way to without a murmur—until finally last spring, as the differential between Britain's rate of inflation and others at last yawned into an unbridgeable gulf, the pound began to collapse. Again, Wilson's response was utterly characteristic. On 23 May he was telling Robin Day that 'to ask for a package that would counter inflation is like a child going round asking Mummy to do something to stop it raining'. Five weeks later, as he ate strawberries and cream at an agricultural show in Warwickshire, he was saying, 'We reject panic solutions'. The following day the pound collapsed to its lowest point ever, and a panicstricken Mr Healey was announcing his 'package to counter inflation'.

It is hardly surprising that many people interpreted Wilson's sudden decision to resign, after all his Mitty-ish talk about wanting to be the longest-serving Prime Minister since Gladstone, in the most cynical light— as simply a recognition that the game was up. Having enjoyed the indulgence of allowing inflation to let rip, and the public sector borrowing requirement to rise to £.12,000 million, Mr Wilson was getting out before the catastrophe.

Such an interpretation, I suggest, does too much credit to his vastly overrated powers of political calculation. The real explanation, I believe, was simply that, deep down, Harold Wilson was bored. After all, in all his thirteen years, he has never given an indication that his ultimate political motivation was anything more than an intense and rather naive kind of egotism. It has long since been obviously pointless to consider his conduct in the familiar terms of honesty, or vision, or executive ability, or a genuine desire to improve the condition Spectator 12 June 1976 of the country, that one might have aPPlied to previous Prime Ministers. He simPlY wanted to be Prime Minister, in the waY that David Frost (a not dissimilar character) wanted to have a chat show on Arnerl" can television, or a poor man might want a Rolls-Royce—and just as that man, having won his toy, eventually finds that it is noth" ing more than just a car, so Wilson, after two years of his second term in office, sigi" denly just decided that he ha'd had enough. As for Wilson's chief legacy, as Hug.h Trevor-Roper suggested last week, it clearly that he trivialised and debased the currency of English political life—from hist abuse of the honours list to his abuse 01 language—in a way that has been true of a° ir other Prime Minister in history. To be fa to him, he did become our dominant polity cal figure at a time when all sorts of othedr factors, from Britain's decline in the wor,.1 to the omnipresence of television, were ma iv ing such a trivialisation probable, if not inevitable. And perhaps the kindest thing that could be said about him was said by Chn,s; terton about Lord Northcliffe in 1927: was the fault of his age, rather than hirnseih that he lived among shadows, fighting la at shadow pantomime'. But Chesterton wetif on to say that 'publicity consists not a„ things, but of their vast shadows throoe upon a wall. To make them so vast,ill. light must be held very low down'. And „air the case of Harold Wilson, there has riev's been a moment's doubt, in the thirteen real,'

since 1963, to who it was that was holn ing the light so low down.