‘I can’t just now – you know how things are,’ mumbled the embarrassed parent. He never forgave himself for asking his father during one such stretch for three shillings and sixpence to buy a scout knife. Nick Thomas-Symonds’s new biography shows us a Wilson we do not know: a visionary, ‘a kind and generous man’, driven by his father’s long periods of unemployment to make a better world. It was partially rescued by Ben Pimlott in his 1993 biography, though even he saw Wilson as a mere tactician, albeit a very good one. His reputation suffered a catastrophic decline in the immediate aftermath of his premiership. ‘His face,’ we replied smugly.īritain has never quite forgiven Wilson for his cleverness. ‘What are the two worst things about Harold Wilson?’, we asked. But in 1968 we loftily despised Wilson for twisting and turning to stay out of Vietnam and keep his party together. Had Wilson not firmly resisted pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam, Kellner and I were both old enough to have fought there. ‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me.
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