I doubt most under forties shown a picture of him would know who he was and that’s a real shame as his influence on todays society is immense. N ick Thomas-Symonds’ new biography of Harold Wilson is titled The Winner, which should give you a fair idea of the author’s thoughts about Labour’s third Prime Minister. Yet his publicly projected image of being ‘a kindly, informal man, with not too many airs and graces, had such purchase because it was largely true’ (p. At the moment when the announcement was made, in 1976, I was standing to attention on the runway of Sofia’s airport, clutching a sheaf of giant gladioli and listening to the eighth or ninth verse of Bulgaria’s national anthem.

But he chose to point out that he was opposed to the whole drift of the government’s economic policy, “not just the levy on teeth and spectacles”. He is the author of two acclaimed political biographies: Attlee: A Life in Politics and Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan . Other examples are the author using “full-throated” for vigorous in describing remarks made in 1938 (p. Morgan clearly did not like Wilson and let that feeling permeate the book, rather than stating his position squarely at the outset. p. 190: It seems that the current Chancellor (Maudling), rather than (as stated here) Selwyn Lloyd, would be the figure on whom Wilson would have been focusing his criticisms at this point.Thomas-Symonds’ clear admiration for Wilson – for his path through the acrimonious Bevanite/Gaitskellite clashes of the 1950s and for his ability to manage and be in touch with the party (Wilson’s instincts, Thomas-Symonds takes the trouble to cite Michael Foot as noting, were “those of the party rank and file”) – would suggest he at least views himself as decidedly of the (soft) left. One tends to see Pimlott being described as the most celebrated volume and Ziegler’s book as having been overshadowed by the prior appearance of Pimlott’s biography. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘One of the 20th century’s great personalities’: Harold Wilson in 1963.

As a proponent of social egalitarianism, Wilson was generally opposed to ‘discrimination and the unjust treatment of disadvantaged sections of society’, and it was this inclination that probably led him to acquiesced to the reforms put forward by Jenkins (p. Hindsight says he should have done so, but he was fearful of the consequences for a party whose reputation was already scarred by two previous devaluations, in 1931 and 1949. Green hardback(gilt lettering to the spine,two small nicks/tears inside the front cover) with Dj(a couple of nicks,creases and scratch on the Dj cover),both in VGC. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Thomas-Symonds, in detailing Wilson’s handling of a variety of events, would seem to draw implicit comparison with later politicians fumbling their handling of similar situations.The other comparison I’d make with the other books is that, in common with these and many other studies of UK government in the 1960s and 1970s, the Thomas-Symonds account largely takes for granted the validity of the premises on which UK economic policy operated, even though modern economic analysis largely eschews those premises. Being an “Oxford don” at 21 is an achievement but is not all that unusual, despite much press coverage of Wilson that (incorrectly) implied that a don position was tantamount to a full professorship. There is some space, one feels, between the politics Thomas-Symonds admires, and the politics we have seen him practice. He was a moderniser, but also a traditionalist: while on important levels, Wilson ‘represented Labour’s attachment to and accommodation of modernity at its most powerful, he simultaneously exemplified crucial ways in which the party failed to modernise sufficiently, or keep pace with the social changes of the time’ (p.

Wilson was born in 1916, and the book follows him from his childhood in the north of England to his academic success at Oxford, his war years as a civil servant at the National Coal Board, into parliament and up through the ranks to Downing Street.A Reputation for Parsimony to Uphold': Harold Wilson, Richard Nixon and the Re-Valued 'Special Relationship’1969–1970. So often derided as a shameless opportunist, Wilson here shines through as a quick-witted, silver-tongued master strategist -- Patrick Maguire * THE TIMES 'Books of the Year' * In this riveting and very readable biography, Thomas-Symonds con firms that Wilson's governments created a kinder, fairer, and forward-thinking Britain. These authors mull over the fraught Wilson years and revive a deserved admiration for the man who ushered in an era of radical social reform in difficult times. that this was not the case: in fact, the 1986 memoirs largely amounted to a printed version of a manuscript that Wilson produced in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons.

Abandoning old friends is not, and the real doubts about Wilson’s instinct for loyalty began when he edged away from Aneurin Bevan, one of the authentic heroes of the Labour movement. Thomas-Symonds’ book is a lively account of the life and politics of Wilson, the Yorkshire grammar school boy who won a still unmatched four general elections for Labour in 1964, 1966 and twice in 1974.

Anthony Crosland, among others, argued that the socialist case for higher growth ‘had been sacrificed at the high altar of protecting the parity of sterling’ (p. Reissued with a new foreword to mark the centenary of Harold Wilson’s birth, Ben Pimlott's classic biography combines scholarship and observation to illuminate the life and career of one of Britain's most controversial post-war statesmen. Previously a barrister and academic, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2012 and has been the Member of Parliament for Torfaen since 2015.