Harold Wilson: The Winner

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His opponents were making the case for temporary, not permanent, economic slack as a means of fighting inflation. Unwisely, Wilson sought a political victory over the Tories by legislating to stop unofficial strikes. He is the author of two acclaimed political biographies: Attlee: A Life in Politics and Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan.

It could be traced to his decision in 1960 to challenge Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership at the time when Gaitskell had promised to “fight and fight again to save the party we love” from the suicide of extremism. Arguably Wilson’s greatest foreign policy achievement was managing to keep British troops out of Vietnam. Edmund Hall, Oxford, before becoming a Lecturer in Politics at the college, specialising in twentieth-century British government.In spite of this, Thomas-Symonds argues, Wilson worked to prevent Labour becoming an explicitly anti-Europe party, leaving the way open for a referendum on EEC membership. In the event, it seems that it wasn’t until after the 1966 election that the board became statutory. He also has a fine eye for the funny, strange details that bring accounts like this to life – from Wilson’s PPS, a former electrician, debugging his room for him on ministerial trips to the Soviet Union, to the then Prime Minister’s insistence on having backbench MP Eric Moonman attend a Downing Street dinner given in honour of NASA’s Apollo 11 crew shortly after the moon landing in 1969.

A bright first edition copy of this political history of Britain written by former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. I do not know or wish to discover the nature of the Wilson-Williams relationship, though if pressed I would guess that it was not what the prurient press hoped it to be.

p. 38: Here we come to a totally avoidable feature of many books that grates on me: unnecessarily imposing modern-day idiom on decades-ago events. Thomas-Symonds, who has had access to material that no other biographer has seen, has found little new evidence to explain away his reputation as a tactician, not a strategist. It should be noted though, that homosexuality was still thought of as something akin to a disease; Roy Jenkins referred to it as a ‘disability’ in one of the Parliamentary debates. Labour’s official, conference-approved policy was to put the terms of entry to the public at a general election. Baroness Angela Smith * HOUSE MAGAZINE * In this account, Wilson's concern for the poor, his disgust at racial intolerance and his belief that the prosperity of Britain would best be protected in a European Common Market are the enduring aims of his political life.

His was the government to decriminalise homosexuality, legalise abortion and abolish capital punishment.

Harold Wilson was a British statesman and leader of the Labour Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice during the 1960s and 1970s. This copy signed by Harold Wilson on the title-page (no other marks or inscriptions) CONDITION: An extremely well preserved almost AS NEW very clean and tight copy (very thin sliver of sunning to spine ends, hint of tanning to leaves) in an almost AS NEW complete Dust Jacket (barely noticeable vertical crease to front inner flap, looks new in its removable transparent protector). By some criteria, one or two of the others might be judged as having more sophisticated or literary writing (though, make no mistake, Thomas-Symonds’ account is an eloquent and highly informed one).

As Jim Tomlinson points out in his piece, this narrative has ‘distorted our understanding of much of post-war British economic history and policy’ (p. The flipside of the memoirs being authentic is that most of the time Thomas-Symonds quotes material that appeared in the Wilson early-1980s manuscript, one can find the same, or nearly the same, quotation in the 1986 published memoirs. James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, PC (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was one of the most prominent British politicians of the 20th century.All the old canards were dredged up and regurgitated to produce a consensus that he had something to hide. Above all, as any one on Scilly would agree, Wilson was a man of the people -- Canon Anthony Phillips * CHURCH TIMES * [Wilson] is the subject of a superb new biography by the distinguished historian and Labour frontbencher Nick Thomas-Symonds. He is the author of two acclaimed political biographies: Attlee: A Life in Politics and Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan . Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain's Prime Minister on two separate occasions. Because Wilson had left office in 1976, and by common agreement among these books, Wilson had faded irretrievably in health by the mid-1980s (see Thomas-Symonds’ p.