Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976, the only Labour leader to win four general elections, the Oxford economics don from Huddersfield with the pipe, the Gannex raincoat and the HP sauce who ended thirteen years of Conservative government in October 1964 with a majority of four and enlarged it to ninety-six in 1966 on the promise of a Britain forged in the white heat of the scientific revolution. The first governments were the Open University, the comprehensive schools, the abolition of hanging, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality and the end of theatre censorship under Roy Jenkins, and the Race Relations Acts, the refusal to send troops to Vietnam while keeping Johnson's friendship. There was the withdrawal from east of Suez, the Rhodesian rebellion of Ian Smith that he said would be over in weeks rather than months and was not. There was the seamen's strike of 1966 that he blamed on a tightly knit group of politically motivated men. There was the devaluation of November 1967, after three years of defending the pound at two dollars eighty, when he told the country that the pound in its pocket had not been devalued. There was the In Place of Strife white paper on the unions of 1969 that his own cabinet killed, and the election of June 1970 that the polls said he would win and Heath won. He was born in Huddersfield in 1916, the son of an industrial chemist, went to Jesus College, Oxford, on a scholarship and took the best first in PPE of his year, was Beveridge's research assistant and a wartime civil servant in the mines department. He entered parliament in 1945 and the cabinet at thirty-one as president of the Board of Trade, the youngest cabinet minister since Pitt, resigned with Bevan in 1951 over health charges. He took the party's leadership in 1963 on Gaitskell's death. The second period, won in February 1974 without a majority and in October with three, was the social contract with the unions, and the inflation of twenty-five per cent. There was the referendum of June 1975 on staying in Europe that he won by two to one after renegotiating the terms and letting his cabinet campaign on both sides, and the Northern Ireland that his 1969 government had sent the army into. There was the resignation of March 1976, on his sixtieth birthday, announced without warning, which the country never quite believed was only tiredness, and the resignation honours list, the lavender list, that gave peerages to businessmen his secretary Marcia Williams had chosen. The MI5 officers who thought him a Soviet agent, which the plot against him of the 1970s was about, were the paranoia of the age and partly his. He was ill with Alzheimer's from the early 1980s, and sat in the Lords as Lord Wilson of Rievaulx. He died in London in May 1995, the prime minister who had kept Britain out of Vietnam and in Europe and had been thanked for neither.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 1995 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
