Alan Johnson’s lesson for Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer, the eventual victor, picked Harold Wilson, “because he got the party to unite behind him”. The answer was hardly a ringing endorsement, but it defused a trap for Starmer by picking a leader about whom only the most diehard of Labour members would still have an opinion – while reinforcing his own positioning as the party’s unity candidate.

It was a clever answer, and one that might even be described by Starmer’s critics as a little too clever by half. But it is an answer that Wilson himself might have liked, according to the author of a new biography of the two-time prime minister – who thinks Wilson is a figure who should be better known in the modern Labour Party.

That biographer, Alan Johnson, is no stranger to government himself, having served as work and pensions secretary, education secretary, health secretary, home secretary and shadow chancellor, under Blair, then Gordon Brown, then Ed Miliband. Johnson also held a now little-known role that was also one of Wilson’s first – president of the Board of Trade.

Johnson’s biography of Wilson is a brief and lively one, weighing in at a brisk 33,000 words. But in its rundown of Wilson’s career, achievements and ethos it is clear that Johnson is an admirer of his subject, and believes that Wilson got more done in government than he is perhaps remembered for.

Wilson hugely expanded higher education, opening up university and the professions to the working class, and established the Open University. He reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, making Britain the first major democracy to do so. Housing completions in 1968 totalled 400,000, “a figure never matched before or since”, Johnson notes. 

Wilson’s deft play on the international stage kept British troops out of Vietnam and what was then Rhodesia, but Johnson argues he saved more lives “through the Health and Safety at Work Act”. Compulsory seatbelts and the breathalyser were introduced during his premierships. 

Though it was achieved through bills introduced by backbenchers, capital punishment was ended under Wilson, birching of young offenders was abolished, and homosexuality was decriminalised. Wilson also introduced the race relations act, introduced the crime of inciting racial hatred, and legislated for equal pay for women.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, he remains the only prime minister since the second world war to leave office at a time of his own choosing. With a track record like that, why isn’t Wilson some kind of pin-up hero of the left?

Johnson has thoughts on this, and one of the first he offers is that Wilson was often described as a “slippery bugger”, though in Johnson’s view this was “usually by people he outsmarted”. 

Wilson was a man more concerned with holding his party together and getting things done than he was pushing a particular political vision or getting applause – which is what Johnson emphasises as reasons to admire the man, going as far as to single out “Wilson’s – and I hope Keir Starmer’s, by the way – lack of ideology, and his pragmatism.”

Much of that pragmatism is evident in Wilson’s entry into politics and his rise to power, though he was once associated with Labour’s left flank, even if this was not necessarily ever quite the case.

Wilson was born on the outskirts of Huddersfield – where his statue now stands outside the train station – into a relatively prosperous family whose fortunes rose and fell during his youth, as Wilson’s father lost his job and found other work. 

The ferociously bright Wilson won a scholarship at Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, where he managed to fund his way by winning essay contests and academic awards, before becoming an Oxford don at the age of 21. 

His precociousness continued: during World War II he was drafted into the civil service rather than the army, where despite his young age he was quickly asked to solve the issues plaguing the UK’s coal supply – where disputes between the country’s 2,000 or so mine owners and their workers were threatening the supply of a vital war fuel.

Wilson’s gift with statistics allowed him to demonstrate that miners’ demands for a guaranteed minimum wage (rather than one solely reliant on how much coal was unearthed per shift) would cost little in practice and was eminently affordable, which led Wilson to be promoted and noticed. It also led Wilson to note that on practical grounds, the UK coal sector would operate better in public hands than in its shambolic private state.

By the age of 28, Wilson would retire from the civil service, with an OBE as reward for his efforts. His departure was a result of his decision to stand as an MP, and he was elected at his first try. Before he had even spoken his oath as a parliamentarian, he was appointed as a minister, and by 1947 – aged 31 – was a member of Clement Attlee’s cabinet. 

Wilson’s ascent was so fast that he skipped most of the stages of the climb: he was senior in a Labour government without ever being of its constituent members. He owed little to any factions of the party and had no deep connections with any particular trade unions.

The defining moment of Wilson’s political career before his premiership was his decision to follow Nye Bevan in resigning over the decision to introduce charges for dental care and glasses to fund rearmament for the Korean war. This elevated Wilson into a big beast in the party, and led to him being seen as a Bevanite and a leader of Labour’s left.

But Johnson argues that Wilson’s resignation has been misunderstood. For Wilson, the principle of charging for some NHS services had already been given away – neither he nor Bevan had resigned over charging for prescriptions. 

Wilson resigned, per Johnson, because he knew the UK would not be able to source enough supplies to re-arm, so the new charges would be introduced for nothing. It was a pragmatic resignation more than an ideological one. “It is easy to pillory pragmatism as lack of principle,” he writes, “but it’s equally easy to conclude that principle was behind Wilson’s resignation, and what is beyond doubt is that Wilson was right.”

Johnson says the idea that the ideological leftist Nye Bevan was Wilson’s political mentor is widespread but misunderstood – instead it was the often-underestimated Clement Attlee, whose skilful management of an ideologically divided cabinet (some of whom tried to oust him) created the modern British welfare state.

“It was Attlee who gave Wilson a ministerial job before he’d even stood up in parliament,” he says. “It was Attlee who promoted him to be the youngest cabinet minister, at 31, and it was Mr and Mrs Attlee who were godfather and godmother to Giles, his second child.”

The timing of Johnson’s biography can easily raise eyebrows: a paean of praise to an arch-pragmatist prime minister, arguably easier to admire than to love, who rose rapidly to Labour’s leadership without any deep ties to any of its factions. Is it a message to the Labour Party about Keir Starmer, or an appeal to Keir Starmer on how he should approach his new job?

Johnson insists it is neither. The book is appearing now because the publisher asked him to write it now, and because he could fit writing it in-between two thrillers he has been working on. But he admits that “the parallels are quite striking”.

Wilson was endlessly inscrutable, and consciously so: even his perennial habit of pipe smoking was said to be an affectation developed in part to give himself time to fidget – and so to think. When he wanted to mask himself he could hide in a fog of fumes. 

But Wilson used that inscrutability to outfox his political enemies so that he could change Britain for the better – and had no shortage of things he wanted to get done. It was Wilson, not Blair, who first wanted Labour to become “the natural party of government”, and he did it with one eye on the future. 

It was, after all, Wilson who said Britain needed to be ready for the “white heat” of the technological “revolution”, warning that “nostalgia won’t pay the bills”. It’s a speech Starmer would surely cheerfully reprise, if only he could capture the balance of opportunity and danger so brilliantly put forward in the original.

Johnson’s book has deftly captured its subject, his ruthless pragmatism, and his shiftiness in service of a good cause. Intentional or not, it serves as a call to action – for Labour, as a reminder that its great leaders tend to be its pragmatists. But to Keir Starmer it could serve, too, as a reminder that all of that pragmatism only means something if it delivers.

Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson is published by Swift Press