Man for a Season of Decline

Harold Wilson's departure from power closes what historians will probably tag Britain's Wilson Era--a period of painful adjustment to a postEmpire world of narrowing influence and opportunities abroad and unfulfilled expectations at home. As head of government for nearly eight of the past twelve years, Wilson may not have dominated the era, but he was certainly its dominant political figure and symbol, a round, pipe-puffing, wily--some would say shifty--Yorkshireman waging a struggle to hold party and country together.

In 1964, when he first became Prime Minister, Wilson was a man who vowed to plunge Britain into the "white heat of technological revolution" to reverse the country's economic decline. But the industrial revival did not happen, largely because Wilson did not have the vision to attempt any but limited measures that merely continued the postwar "stop-go" cycle of boom, inflation and economic bust. Instead, Wilson's major accomplishment was that he seemed to have persuaded his fellow Britons to recognize at long last that their nation must somehow begin living within its means.

Wilson's hallmark in this enterprise was not glowing political vision but sharp political acumen. It made him the winningest P.M. in British history, with four election victories (1964, 1966 and two in 1974) against one defeat (to the Tories' Edward Heath in 1970). Wilson himself conceded: "I am not doctrinaire, I just want to get on with the job."

Political Houdini. To his critics, he was not so much pragmatist as opportunist, a kind of political Houdini ready to do contortions on any issue to get out of a tight situation. British entry into the Common Market was the prime example. Wilson was for it when he was Prime Minister in 1969, then vigorously opposed it two years later when he was out of office and polls showed Market membership to be unpopular, then reversed himself again in 1975. But his deft handling that year of the referents dum ratifying Market membership ended a long, divisive domestic debate on Britain's link to Europe.

Much of Wilson's acrobatics involved economic policy.

He needed all of his political agility to hold together Labor's warring moderate right and radical left wings. As an old party saw has it, "If you can't ride two horses, you have no business in the circus."

At first, Wilson's posture was relatively orthodox, especially his stubborn three-year struggle to stave off devaluation of that national totem, the pound. After the failure of that costly effort, Wilson more and more found himself locked in a battle with his party's leftists. Turned out of power in 1970, he began tending his frayed ties with the unions and the Labor left as he watched Tory policies lead to a confrontation with the unions that nearly paralyzed the country. In his election campaign of 1974 he promised to restore labor peace with a "social contract" providing for a sharp increase in pensions and food and housing subsidies in return for restraint on wage demands. He won the election but soon learned that restraint was out of the question. Social contract or no, the unions forced up wages. Faced with a 23.4% inflation rate, the highest in Europe, Wilson last year imposed a stringent ceiling on wage hikes; last month he tightened the screws further, announcing a "new industrial strategy" for cutting social services while aiding business growth.

Wilson was frank about his limits of power. To criticism that he was an accommodator rather than a leader, he replied: "Any fool can have a confrontation. You can press at the wrong time and get the wrong answer. Or you can work on people. You've got to have a sense of timing."

Intellectual Allure. The son of a Yorkshire chemist, young Harold was probably drawn to Labor more by the intellectual allure of its pre-war Fabianism than by any burning class consciousness. "I haven't read Marx," he admitted. "I got stuck on that footnote on page 2." He joined the civil service in 1940 to aid the war effort, leaving his post as an economics don at Oxford; three years later, at age 27, he became chief economist in the wartime fuel and power ministry. At 29 he won a seat in Commons, where he has remained for 31 consecutive years--30 of them either as a minister or shadow minister and 13 of them as Labor Party leader.

Plainspoken and totally indifferent to sartorial fashion, Wilson was far removed, from the Tory Britain of clubs and grouse moors. He and his home-loving wife Mary (they have two sons) seldom entertained; they did their holidaying reading whodunits in a cottage in the Scilly Isles, off Land's End. After his third return to office in 1974, Wilson did not even bother to move back to 10 Downing, preferring to stay in his town house a few blocks away.

Wilson often suggested that he never expected to rise to Churchillian heights. "I'm the lesser of two evils," he once said of himself and the Tories. Measured by his own modest standards, he did not do all that badly for his country. While he failed to inspire, he at least proved that Britain was still governable. It was, after all, barely more than a year ago that some British rightists were muttering about fielding private armies to take on the unions, and even the staid London Times was wondering whether this was Britain's "last-chance Parliament." That such talk has now subsided is at least partly due to Harold Wilson.

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