Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
pages 7-9 | 3724 words
Say what you will about Harold
Christopher Hitchens
- Wilson: The Authorised Life by Philip Ziegler
Weidenfeld, 593 pp, £20.00, September 1993, ISBN 0 297 81276 9
Since it can be properly said that nothing in Harold Wilson’s political career became him like the leaving of it, there is some justice in the fact that he is now best-remembered for one photograph and for one action. The photograph shows him next to the Duke of Grafton while assuming his stall at Windsor as a Knight of the Garter, and the action was the compiling (would that be the word?) of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who – oh, dash it, I don’t know – shall we say made money rather than earned it? Anyway, in the photograph Wilson looks like nothing so much as a grinning monkey on a stick, and in the matter of the honours list he achieved the near-impossible feat of discrediting the discredited and making a laughing-stock out of something already rather disagreeably risible. So I suppose that one can spare about ten milliseconds of sympathy for those, suggestively calling themselves ‘revisionist’, who have attempted to sweeten Harold Wilson’s memory. (I mean our memory of him; not his memory of us, which has notoriously faded.)
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 24 · 16 December 1993
From Christopher Price
Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 2 December) asks the question: ‘Would anyone from Pimlott to McKibbin to Howard to Zeigler care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison’ with Attlee’s. I am none of these folk. But from a position of having lived with the Wilson era in the Commons and of agreeing with Hitchens on Wilson’s craven economic, monetary and Vietnam record, his regime had social victories to compare with Attlee’s economic ones.
The reform of abortion, divorce and homosexual law could not have taken place without his prime ministerial support, particularly in the face of primitive, vicious, Calvinist opposition from his Scottish Secretary, Willie Ross, which Wilson, for all his ‘homespun Yorkshire chauvinism’, resisted; and comprehensive education would not be so entrenched as it still astonishingly is without Wilson’s recantation of his foolish ‘over my dead body’ grammar-school utterance and his willing acquiescence in Anthony Crosland’s passionate egalitarian policies. Wilson was at heart pragmatic not ethical; and he left behind him in Britain some solid and enduring social gains.
Christopher Price
London NW5
Vol. 16 No. 1 · 6 January 1994
From Jeff Ewener
It appears that Lord Wilson’s career (LRB, 2 December 1993) owes a great deal more than we had realised to the visionary author of Lifemanship, Mr (as he was then) Stephen Potter. Of course there was no footnote on page two of Capital! One can’t help sharing with his Lordship a gentle smile at the picture of Christopher Hitchens, slamming shut that dusty tome, his vague feeling that he has been obscurely and rather pointlessly got at growing now into an absolute certainty.
But will we ever see his like? A mediocrity who became known for his passionate (!) belief in meritocracy. The plain man’s plain-speaker, damning the consequences, as he cringed his way straight into power with shameless and unhesitating hypocrisy. A man who could lop the raison d’être off Parliamentary socialism, while simultaneously managing to convince some of the more barking members of MI5 that he was a Soviet mole.
Simply put, the man defined his epoch. What politician since has failed to follow his example? Yet what politician since has been able to live up to it?
Jeff Ewener
Toronto
From David Townsend
Christopher Hitchens’s comparisons between Harold Wilson and Attlee were highly selective. Leaving aside time and place – immediate post-war and landslide majority – Attlee made mistakes too. India, for example, can be balanced against the shameful settlement in Palestine. Wilson’s achievements were in encouraging personal freedom and the establishment of rights and opportunities for literally millions of people. Law reforms affecting divorce, homosexuality and abortion lifted a great deal of fear and oppression from hidden minorities; the Chronically Sick and Disabled Person’s Act empowered hundreds of thousands of people to exercise freedoms inconceivable in the Attlee era. The Open University and the Equal Pay Act enriched and enhanced, in particular, the lives of women. The Health and Safety at Work Act protected thousands of workers in the most dangerous industries. Of course this is not the stuff of the barricades to Hitchens, because most of the beneficiaries are beyond his ken and beneath his pen.
David Townsend
Worthing, West Sussex
