Friday, Feb. 22, 1963
The Other Harold
The Labor Party last week chose a new leader to carry its banner against the Tories in Britain's coming general election. The winner: Harold Wilson, 46, a pipe-smoking intellectual with a phenomenal memory, a following of mixed admirers, and a love of political combat.
Wilson's 144-103 victory was a crushing blow to his chief rival, comradely George Brown, 48, a staunch trade unionist and ex-truck driver, who as acting party leader since the death last month of Hugh Gaitskell, had every reason to believe that he would inherit the mantle of leadership. But when the voting began last week, it was George Brown's old friends among Labor's trade unionists who abandoned him first. Some opposed his pro-Common Market views; others among Labor's intellectual center and right flinched at the thought of a working-class, up-from-the-ranks Prime Minister, and preferred to go to the country with an Oxford graduate and economics don like Wilson. Respectability means a lot to the Labor Party.
High Mortality. "No one knows Harold, really," says a friend. But at a press conference last week, jammed with reporters and TV cameras, Wilson set out smoothly and competently to leave the right impression. He regretted the "tragic event" of Gaitskell's death "that created this vacancy." He diplomatically declared that "a great deal of credit must go to George Brown'' for keeping the party together in the interim. Finally, Wrilson stated his three main objectives: "First, to maintain the unity of the party that Hugh Gaitskell handed on; second, to continue those policies worked out under his leadership . . . thirdly, to lead the party to victory in the coming general election."
In the past decade, Labor's strength has been sapped by internal bickering and by the loss of many of its ablest men (Gaitskell, Sir Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan). The feuding has faded, and Labor finds itself in the best shape in years to topple the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. A Gallup poll last week indicated that Labor had a 15 1/2% lead over the Conservatives, the lowest the Tories have been in eleven years in power.
Deepening unemployment and a faltering economy account more for Tory unpopularity than its recent defeat on the Common Market. Macmillan has until fall 1964 to call an election at the time most advantageous to himself. Much will depend on the skill with which Wilson exploits Tory weaknesses and demonstrates Labor's right to govern.
The son of an industrial chemist, James Harold Wilson was born March 11, 1916, in the heart of industrial Yorkshire, and spent his childhood in a hillside village overlooking the factory smoke of the Colne Valley. At the local council school, he won the first of a series of scholarships that eventually carried him to Oxford's Jesus College, where he was a leading member of the debating society and a cross-country runner. Graduating with first class honors, Wilson remained at Oxford as an economics don until the war, ending up in the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Sir William Beveridge employed him as a researcher for his famed Social Insurance report, and called Wilson a "brilliant young man" and "the best economist I've ever had."
In 1945 Wilson stood for office for the first time, and, in the election that threw Winston Churchill out of office, won a Lancashire seat handily by 7,022 votes. Two years later, when Wilson became President of the Board of Trade at 31, he was the youngest Cabinet member since William Pitt.
Littered House. Among his constituents or at his red-brick home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Wilson is affable, easygoing and well-liked. His wife Mary, the daughter of a Baptist minister, writes poetry and is active in her local church; his two sons, Robin. 19, and Giles, 14, litter the house with sports gear and mackintoshes. But in the House of Com mons, the reaction to Wilson is generally one of uneasy suspicion, and he is frequently accused of being "slippery." As the Economist put it last week, "On the big things--defense, the American alliance, East-West, the need to give Labor a twentieth century look--Mr. Wilson has been consistently ambiguous, indeed deliberately and cleverly so. These are the reasons for more than doubt about his leadership.''
Having quit the Labor Cabinet in 1951, along with Firebrand Aneurin Bevan, Wilson has inherited much of Bevan's leftwing support. But in the Cabinet his main administrative achievement was the dismantling of a vast array of controls on Britain's postwar economy. He has always been more pragmatic than doctrinaire--or opportunistic, his enemies say. In a Commons speech last week he declared, "What I am saying may or may not be ideological, but it will get the export orders." With the left safely on his side, Wilson is shrewd enough to know that, as leader, he must now conciliate the party's center and right.
Wilson carried on a mild flirtation with the H-bomb "unilateralists'7 when he challenged Gaitskell for party leadership in 1960, and for a time plumped for neutralism instead of NATO. Last week Wilson reassured everybody that the Labor Party "stands firmly by NATO." And he added, "We should expect to have a very happy relationship" with Washington. In a recent Commons speech he argued that Britain should avoid the needless expense of a separate nuclear deterrent, but nevertheless should have a voice in deciding when the West (i.e., the U.S.) uses its nuclear power: "There must be no annihilation without representation!"
With his ready tongue and sharp mind, Harold Wilson will prove a formidable adversary for Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (he was swiftly dubbed "The Other Harold"). There is hardly an M.P. who has a better grasp of parliamentary procedure or a better knack of turning it to his side's advantage. He has already drawn blood with his slashing attacks on the "vain nuclear posturing" of the Macmillan government. Macmillan's relations with U.S. President John Kennedy, said Wilson, reminded him of a "seedy uncle" receiving homilies from a young and wealthy nephew. Though it may be difficult to discover precisely where Harold Wilson stands, there was little doubt last week about where he intends to come to rest--at 10 Downing Street.
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