The nicest Prime Minister
Patrick Cosgrave
He was expert in all the small things. When advising Mr Edward Heath on how to tackle Mr Wilson at Prime Minister's Question Time (a game which never interested Mr Heath very much, and at which he was, to put it mildly, not very good), Mr John Peyton once drew attention to the studied courtesy with which Mr Wilson treated his backbenchers. He remembered each man's name and constituency; he recalled their special interests and referred to them in his almost invariably lengthy replies; and he always looked over his shoulder at them. Trivial and even minute though all these things were they were essential elements (as Mr Peyton, who understands these matters better than any other senior politician saw) in the make-up of the nicest Prime Minister we have had since Baldwin.
To be sure, towards the end there was a tendency to slip. At the last Labour conference, during the Lucullan festivities arranged by IPL, Mr Wilson appeared to confuse Mr Keith Waterhouse with a senior trade union figure, and made to one the little speech about hobbies and interests that should have been made to the other, and vice versa. Throughout his career, however, he has displayed a memory for names, faces and personal concerns equalled only by that very different man, Lord Home. And—with very rare exceptions when he has been over-influenced by the peculiarly harsh personal antagonisms of his personal staff--in nearly all personal dealings he has been the essence of simple straightforwardness.
I propounded the two propositions of the last two paragraphs throughout last Tuesday and, not greatly to my surprise, found them greeted with incomprehension and even anger, especially on the part of Labour MPs. 'What is Harold up to?' was the first reaction of his colleagues, incapable of imagining that the wily Wilson was not using his resignation as part of some devious ploy. And the partisans of Mr Healey, Mr Berm and Mr Jenkins were all convinced that the Prime Minister had behaved with peculiar and special brutality towards their heroes. Even the supporters of Mr Callaghan were at least half-convinced that the reference in the resignation statement to sixty as a suitable age for retirement was a shrewd blow aimed at their sixty-four-year-old candidate.
And--to pile up the evidence against myself—it is fair to say that Mr Wilson has often demonstrated a careful tactical animosity towards some of his senior colleagues. There was a moment, for example, early in the life of the Heath
government when Mr Callaghan was being canvassed as a possible replacement for the beaten Wilson. At the time Mr Callaghan was in hospital for an uncomfortable, but far from serious, prostate operation. Mr Wilson arrived late for lunch with some journalists; expatiated on the problems he had had that morning in standing in for Mr Callaghan in confidential discussions with the Government on Northern Ireland; and made sure to leave the impression that, in his view, the Shadow Home Secretary was at death's door. When, before his resignation from the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, Mr Roy Jenkins was the darling of the media and Mr Wilson their victim he observed, l don't like standing up to my knees in shit while Roy Jenkins rides by on a white charger. I'll have him down in the shit before 1 finish'. When Mr Benn was scheduled to be chairman of the Labour Party conference and looking forward with delight to what seemed a certain personal triumph, Mr Wilson muttered, 'I'll fix him', and did.
But the method of fixing Mr Benn was peculiarly indicative of the way Mr Wilson played the political game. On the Sunday of the conference he discussed affairs with Mr Jack Jones and some of the senior trade union leaders, thus assuring himself of the support of most of the union block votes. And then, while Mr Benn was fumbling about in the chairmanship, he made a great rabble-rousing speech. There was nothing particularly devious about that; nothing, indeed, exceptional in the way of party management. When he used his prerogative as Leader to deny Mr Callaghan opportunities for personal advancement, or when he immured Mr Jenkins in the sepulchre of the Home Office, he was acting defensively, not offensively. Any colleague damaged by Mr Wilson was a colleague who had first encouraged—or even taken part in—moves against him. Self-preservation, rather than self-advancement, was usually the motive for a Wilsonian intrigue.
And even in the direct and bloody political conflict with leaders of the Conservative Party, in the course of which he coined some of the most devastating and hurtful epigrams of recent times (as when he referred to Mr Macmillan, greeting Mr Butler on his return from a trip overseas, as having grasped his colleague warmly—by the throat) there was a curious diffidence. If you watched Mr Wilson carefully in the few seconds following the utterance of one of these savageries you could see a physical recoil from the effect of the words he had spoken. His lower lip would drop, and he would take half a step back from whatever podium he was using.
But he was, nonetheless, a cat. He chuckled for weeks to his intimates about his cleverness in making Mr Jeremy Thorpe a Privy Councillor, thus irritating Mr Heath extremely by the implication that there were two leaders of the opposition. And, in the last days of the Wilson era, he took the greatest pleasure in treating Mr Heath with the utmost courtesy and respect, often wondering aloud how it was that the Conservative Party had failed to recognise the merits of so singular a man. By that time, however, the opposition was used to his little stylistic ploys, and refused to rise to the bait. From being feared he was achieving the status of a character.
The mystery about him was the low esteem in which he was held by his own party. So successful a leader—in electoral terms—would have been feted by the Conservatives, but the view of Mr Wilson held by most of his backbenchers was a derisive one. They recognised, rather grudgingly, that he was the only leader likely to be able to hold their motley ranks together, and they loved it when he savaged the political enemy. But from 1966 onwards they were convinced that he was incurablY frivolous, and wholly without principle and—since to be a Socialist one must be eternally convinced that governments ought to be doing things of a large but often unspecified character—they therefore continually believed that they deserved better.
That there is an element of frivolity in Mr Wilson's make-up nobody—except possibly the storm troopers of his private office, like Lady Falkender and Mr Joe Haines—could doubt. But it was, if I may so express it, a serious frivolity, the product, in his second period of office, of a curious kind of fatalism. No Prime Minister this century had, on entering office, as many ideological and emotional commitments guaranteed to get him into trouble as Mr Wilson had in 1964. From the commitment to an East of Suez policY to the determination to maintain the fixed parity of the pound the albatrosses round his neck were each heavy and damaging. But when, against his own expectations, he became Prime Minister again in 1974 he was intellectually convinced, as he had emotionally suspected, that policies were irrelevant, and that the old true business of a government was to carry on. For this reason he was unmoved, on Tuesday, by genuinely felt criticisms to the effect that it was irresponsible of him to leave office during a sterling crisis. There are, of course. Trollopian times when the only business or government is to exist. It seems unlikely. however, that the historian will judge thttt the Wilson era was one of them; and his final epitaph is therefore likely to suggest that he was a palliator of crisis, not a matt who could solve great problems. He. ls Labour's Baldwin; and he will, like Baldwin, be remembered as a simple man who became an enigma.
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