Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Wilson was also characterised as opportunist for his tergiversations on membership of the European Community – as the EU then was – being against it, from 1961 to 1966; then for it, in the late 1960s; then against it in the early 1970s; then for it again when in office for the second time after 1974. On other matters, too, Wilson seemed slippery – for and against further nationalisation, for and against a British independent deterrent, for and against trade union reform, for and against devaluation of the pound and deflation. He appeared not to care where the train was going so long as he was driving it. When Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as party leader in 1955, the party’s agonising and politically costly divisions appeared to have been settled in favour of the right wing. Wilson concentrated on quietly accruing power within the party, identifying with the left but never totally severing links with the right. This decade saw Wilson at his most attractive. Bevan might have once said of him, ‘All bloody facts. No bloody vision’, but slowly and effectively Wilson began putting forward a prospectus for a modern Britain that avoided old arguments of left and right and was based on planned economic management, a harnessing of new technologies and a cradle-to-grave education system that excluded no one. Wilson, as Thomas-Symonds says, was an underestimated social reformer who expanded higher education and the social services, and made Britain a more pleasant place to live in through such measures as outlawing race and sex discrimination, equal pay for women, maternity leave, safety at work and, above all, the Open University, of which he was particularly proud. And he kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Yet he failed to achieve his central aim of regenerating the British economy. No doubt Wilson’s hopes were always illusory. For even if, as he believed, harnessing socialism to science could raise the growth rate, that would not happen in the lifetime of a single government. Perhaps indeed there is no rapid way of increasing growth, which depends more upon deep-seated cultural factors than on short-term economic policy.

Harold Wilson: The Winner - Thomas-Symonds, Nick - AbeBooks Harold Wilson: The Winner - Thomas-Symonds, Nick - AbeBooks

No one disputes that the Wilson governments did some great things. The trouble is that they are overshadowed by the less admirable. This is the man who first said that a week is a long time in politics. Thomas-Symonds, who has had access to material that no other biographer has seen, has found little new evidence to explain away his reputation as a tactician, not a strategist. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai

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Soon his enemies (and his friends) had other grievances. By the late 1940s, Attlee’s government was struggling and exhausted. The 1950 election reduced its majority to five. The young guns were tooling up to fight over the party’s future. In the bitter battle between Gaitskell’s centre-left pragmatists and the missionary socialists led by the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, Wilson chose the side of Bevan. In April 1951 he joined Bevan in resigning, a move that astonished his Cabinet colleagues and hastened the end of Attlee’s government. When, three years later, Bevan – a serial resigner – walked out of the Shadow Cabinet over the creation of a NATO equivalent in southeast Asia, Wilson, who had initially sided with Bevan, broke with him and took his place. And succeed he did. By 1945 he was an MP and by 1947 a Cabinet minister. But already colleagues were looking at him warily. In 1949, he joined two other young Labour ministers, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, in advising prime minister Clement Attlee on the matter of if and when to devalue sterling. They claimed that Wilson seemed able to face three ways at once. He insisted he had always believed devaluation to be unavoidable. Perhaps he just didn’t say so. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds review – a

When he stood down on 16 March 1976, the upwardly mobile Yorkshire lad was the 20th century’s longest-serving prime minister. His resignation came at a time of his own choosing. He had won four general elections, despite coming to power just as the postwar settlement was beginning to collapse, nationally and internationally. As with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who also resigned to respectful applause, it was only after Wilson left power that the critics really got to work. And, as with Baldwin, no one has yet managed to retrieve his reputation.For Wilson has already been memorialised in two doorstopper volumes by his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, and by the Labour historian, Ben Pimlott. Does Thomas-Symonds have anything to add? Not much, it must be said. There are fewer “secrets” in the archives than many imagine, and this biography, though very well written, should be read as the case for the defence rather than for new discoveries. The enduring social reforms that distinguished Wilson’s first government came largely through the efforts of his home secretary Roy Jenkins. These included the abolition of capital punishment and corporal punishment in prisons, the enshrining of the right to abortion, the legalisation of homosexual acts and the ending of censorship (though not before Wilson had personally censored parts of a play based on Private Eye’s satirical version of the diaries of his wife, Mary). There was also anti-discrimination and equal-pay legislation. These things transformed life in Britain, but with few was Wilson closely associated. Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister on two separate occasions. In total he won four General Elections, spending nearly eight years in Downing Street. Half a century later, he is still unbeaten, Labour’s greatest ever election winner. How did he do it – and at what cost? Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’