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At the V&A

Jeremy Harding: 50 Years of ‘Private Eye’, 15 December 2011

... fools and villains are the lifeblood of the paper. Every reader has a cherished bubble photo, from Wilson and Biafra through Kissinger in South Africa (HK to Vorster: ‘I’m only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation ...
The Socialist Agenda 
edited by David Lipsey.
Cape, 242 pp., £7.95, January 1981, 0 224 01886 8
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The Future of Socialism 
by Anthony Crosland.
Cape, 368 pp., £8.95, January 1981, 0 224 01888 4
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Politics is for people 
by Shirley Williams.
Allen Lane/Penguin, 230 pp., £8.50, April 1981, 0 7139 1423 8
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... of course, as it is now, but as it used to be in the good old days, before it was corrupted by Harold Wilson and infiltrated by the Militant Tendency. That Labour Party, after all, was the party most of us joined and went into politics to fight for: if it had survived, we would be in it still. It is tempting to assume that what is true of us must also ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
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... this and much else besides comes to a rather abrupt end on the morning of Tuesday, 16 March 1976. Harold Wilson, four times prime minister, an ambitious man who loved politics and was in the pink of health, able not only to endure but to enjoy the physical and mental strain of the highest office in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not ...

Dream Ticket

Peter Shore, 6 October 1983

The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell 1945-1956 
by Philip Williams.
Cape, 720 pp., £25, September 1983, 0 224 01911 2
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... for Attlee’s succession. The Parliamentary Party split at the point of Bevan’s resignation. Harold Wilson and John Freeman resigned with him, but the division was kept within bounds by the need to sustain the Government until Labour’s defeat in the October 1951 General Election. After that, the conflict rapidly increased in momentum: the ...

London Lefties

Paul Foot, 17 September 1987

If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it 
by Ken Livingstone.
Collins, 367 pp., £12, August 1987, 0 00 217770 6
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A Taste of Power: The Politics of Local Economics 
edited by Maureen Mackintosh and Hilary Wainwright.
Verso, 441 pp., £22.95, July 1987, 0 86091 174 8
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... Labour administrations must make a ‘clean break’ with the opportunism and failure of the Wilson-Callaghan era. The new GLC hired numbers of these Bennites to encourage ‘popular activity’ in the interests of the dispossessed. It suddenly became clear that the vast rates which the GLC could levy without much damage to anyone could be used to assist ...

Bevan’s Boy

John Campbell, 20 September 1984

The Making of Neil Kinnock 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 256 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 571 13266 9
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Neil Kinnock: The Path to Leadership 
by G.M.F. Drower.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 297 78467 6
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... Testament prophet from whom the more ambitious and modern-minded of his former supporters, like Wilson and Cross-man, were now anxious to distance themselves. It is a matter for argument whether by 1959 he was mellowing into a position of authority in the party: it took his death the following year to transform him into the maligned hero and inspiration of ...

Top Failure

John Rodgers, 17 September 1981

R.A. Butler: An English Life 
by Patrick Cosgrave.
Quartet, 167 pp., £6.95, April 1981, 0 7043 2258 7
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... as ‘Mr Facing Both Ways’. Many Conservatives, including Churchill, uncompromisingly preferred Harold Macmillan to succeed Eden as Prime Minister and Leader of the Party. Some suspected that Butler had supported the pre-war appeasement policy, though, according to Dr Cosgrave, he tried to exculpate himself by observing that he had only been a junior ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and Thatcher. Sometimes he tells us just a little too much about the journey, how cloudy it was or how sunny, which mode of transport he used, what magazines he bought in W.H. Smith. But the point is well made when he writes: British ...

Über-Tony

Ben Pimlott: Anthony Crosland, 3 September 1998

Crosland’s Future: Opportunity and Outcome 
by David Reisman.
Macmillan, 237 pp., £47.50, October 1997, 0 333 65963 5
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... them ‘desiccated calculating machines’. Attlee regarded theory as stuff and nonsense and Harold Wilson doused his food with HP Sauce to project a plain-man image. It was the people’s dominatrix who caused a turnaround. Pragmatic to the core, she took up philosophers she agreed with and allowed her instincts to be dignified as an ...

Radical Democrats

Ross McKibbin, 7 March 1991

Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 675 pp., £20, September 1990, 0 09 174321 4
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Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980-1990 
by Paul Foot.
Verso, 281 pp., £29.95, November 1990, 0 86091 310 4
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... politics in the 20th century: it is made up of Butskellites, including Macmillan, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath at one stage. It is that grouping that has presided over our decline.’ That remark unquestionably could have been made, and in those words, by Keith Joseph or any other product of a right-wing think-tank. The obsession with ‘decline’ and ...

The Great Percy

C.H. Sisson, 18 November 1982

Stranger and Brother: A Portrait of C.P. Snow 
by Philip Snow.
Macmillan, 206 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 333 32680 6
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... Education and the Post Office. These are modest enough functions which somebody has to carry out. Harold Wilson no doubt saw that he could stop that small hole in his administration to the Government’s advantage, not taking anyone from the Commons and adding to his nominal role someone who brought with him an aura of science, all the more needed ...

High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo

R.W. Johnson, 13 November 1997

Lord Hailsham: A Life 
by Geoffrey Lewis.
Cape, 403 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 224 04252 1
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... Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a hollow sham. But Lewis clearly feels that Hogg is, well, lordly. In a sense this hits the nail on the head, and not just because he ...

Dignity and Impudence

Oliver Whitley, 6 October 1983

A Variety of Lives: A Biography of Sir Hugh Greene 
by Michael Tracey.
Bodley Head, 344 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 370 30026 2
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... other. Without question, the most extraordinary thing in this book is the author’s report that Harold Wilson now says that ‘it never occurred to him that there would be any adverse reaction in the BBC’ to Lord Hill’s move from the Chairmanship of the ITA to the Chairmanship of the BBC: an event described by David Attenborough as like Rommel ...

Seeing it all

Peter Clarke, 12 October 1989

The Time of My life 
by Denis Healey.
Joseph, 512 pp., £17.95, October 1989, 0 7181 3114 2
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... of grandeur about our post-imperial role in Asia and Africa’ which he discerned in Wilson. As Healey writes of the withdrawal from Aden: ‘All alternatives would have been worse.’ Over the British nuclear deterrent, Healey’s approach can be termed either brutally pragmatic or woefully disingenuous: either way, it did him no good in the ...

Labour’s Lost Leader

A.J. Ayer, 22 November 1979

Hugh Gaitskell 
by Philip Williams.
Cape, 1007 pp., £15
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... which this implied, and I believe that Gaitskell was right in thinking that we should. When Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, he gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he never could quite believe that he had achieved the office: at least, that he never felt wholly secure in it. This would not have been true of Hugh Gaitskell. He would have ...

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