Harold Wilson [Paperback]

Pimlott claims his book, offers an ‘unofficial’ or ‘unauthorized’ account of Harold Wilson’s life, where he is not restricted by family pressures on content. While this statement is questionable, Pimlott offers an interesting approach to understanding the life of Wilson, exploring both his political and private lives. Throughout the book runs a number of central themes; Wilson’s vision of socialism, his relationship with the party, and in particular his rivalry with Gaitskell, and whether or not Wilson can be considered a great statesman.
Throughout the book Pimlott questions the extent of Wilson’s socialist credentials. Much is made of Wilson’s trips to Russia and other communist countries, and his praise of their economic planning. An interesting chapter focuses on his relationship, and paranoia, with the American and British secret services. Here, Pimlott describes the fears of many, that Wilson was a communist mole. However, Pimlott argues that despite Wilson’s socialist intentions the political and social climate of the 1960’s and 70’s, did not allow for radical socialist programmes.
Pimlott also draws attention to the ideological tensions with Gaitskell throughout Wilson’s political career, exploring how disagreements developed between the 1949 devaluation crisis to the leadership challenge in 1960, and how this affected his relationship with his party. Pimlott is keen to emphasise much of Wilson’s success lay in meeting the centre ground between the right and left, regarding the Labour leader as a great ‘conciliator’. Pimlott suggests that Wilson was able to unite the party by giving no concessions to his Bevanite friends, and by placing potential rivals such Brown in places of authority so he could keep them in check.
Pimlott succeeds in presenting the life of Wilson in a broad and interesting way by exploring his ancestral past, childhood, and marriage. Chapters describing his interest in the Scouting movement and heritage, do much to help the reader understand the complexities of Wilson’s character. From taking this personal perspective, the reader can begin to understand how Wilson’s political outlook was shaped, and how his experiences manifested themselves in the policy making process. Pimlott credits Wilson’s belief in social equality, especially in education, to the snobbery he felt from others concerning his education at a mixed grammar school and relatively humble background. The reader’s impression of Wilson is therefore more immediate and personable, than the distanced perspective often given in other autobiographies.
To conclude the book Pimlott assesses whether Wilson can be regarded as great statesman. Throughout the book Pimlott emphasises the qualities Wilson had that made him suited to the role, such as handling the media and managing gatherings. However he argues that Wilson was easy to like, but hard to love. He refers to the various commentators over the years that viewed him with a private kindness. However, he questions whether many of them would refer to him as a great Prime Minister. Pimlott himself is critical of Wilson’s failing of to find a role for his part and socialism during his office.
Despite the limitations of the book, in it’s failing to look at Wilson’s life with a 21st Century New Labour perspective, Pimlott provides an interesting and useful account of Wilson’s life and Labour Party politics. His exploration of Wilson’s personal life offers a new perspective on his political career, which is particularly interesting with the growing importance of character in 21st century politics.

With his biography of Hugh Dalton ben Pimlott had already set the benchmark for serious academics writing biographies that are both accessible to a mass readership and valuable texts containing serious primary research and new insgihts. With his biography of the great but flawed Labour leader and Prime Minister he nearly attains the same standard again. Wilson is a compulsive figure, manipulative, over-confident yet paranoid, in the end running out of energy in the job he'd always wanted. Pimlott's biography is masterful in both putting Wilson into his historical context, and showing Wilson's effect on the evolution of the Labuor Party and British government.

Pimlott's chef d'oeuvre on Harold Wilson is something of a disappointment. Despite running to 750 pages (in its hardback version), the former British Prime Minister remains something of an enigma to the reader at the end of the book, albeit that 'enigmatic' is one of the epithets that is most apposite in describing the winner of 4 out of 5 General Elections contested as Leader of the Labour Party. The 'let down' of the book is that it is almost myopically concerned with the internecine power struggles in the upper echelons of the Parliamentary Labour Party between 1950 and the mid-'seventies to the exclusion of analysis of what Labour achieved legislatively from 1964-70 and 1974-76. Some of the landmark social reforms enacted by Wilson's Governments, such as the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of abortion and the decriminalisation of consensual adult male homosexuality, are only given en passant treatment by Pimlott. Treatment of the management of the British Economy under the Wilson Governments is barely more lucid. After reading it one knows more about Wilson than prior to embarking on it, but one is left curiously unsatisfied, and inclined to turn to Wilson's own accounts of his Prime Ministerial carrier for greater enlightenment.