Non-politics of Harold Wilson
Sir: One is scarcely surprised that your politi- cal commentary of 27 September should deal with Paul Foot's somewhat over-clever Penguin The Politics of Harold Wilson. I say this be- cause his article accords to some degree with your long-sustained, but lately almost expended, campaign to denigrate the Premier whenevr
• possible.
What comes out in The Thoughts of Auberon Waugh' is, to his credit, scarcely one of the 'per- sonalised' attacks you, sir, have so often made in the past. He is, however, quite a bit 'off beam' in some of his comments, even if a lot of what he says underlines my own view that most of what Paul Foot writes is irrelevant in terms of current politics in Britain. I make no profession to know Mr Wilson's 3:1!
mind, while remaining one of his constant ad- mirers. I would think, however, that he has al- ways held the sensible view that politics is the art of the possible, that there never has been, and is not now, any short cut to solving rapidly all Britain's problems, and that the socialism he believes in involves practically applying a system of priorities in carrying out 'the possible.'
None of this seems to me to conflict with the Prime Minister's commonsense approach to the realities facing his government, nor does it im- ply for a moment that he does not adhere to his stated conviction that the Labour party he leads is nothing if it is not a crusade for human betterment.
These overriding considerations seem to me at least to make much of what Paul Foot says, and some of the little that Auberon Waugh writes—even where accurate—an explosion of inapplicable ideas and theories which they seek to prove by means of quotes from Mr Wilson's past utterances. T. C. Skeffington-Lodge Imperial Hotel, North Promenade, Blackpool
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