Portraits and Miniatures(124)

He is also cavalier with his spelling of proper names, as indeed he is from time to time with syntax. The British Ambassador in Washington was not called Ackland. Lord Grimond does not spell his Christian name Joe, and the exact whereabouts of that great Brussels building, the Balleymont, escapes me.





Harold Wilson



This was a 1992 Observer review of Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins).





Pimlott’s Life of Hugh Dalton, published in 1985, was the most relentlessly penetrating political biography that I can recall. It was in no way a hatchet job. It just turned on the X-ray machine and watched with clinical detachment both the healthy and diseased tissue which was exposed.

It rightly made Pimlott’s reputation. Although he has produced no intermediate full-length biography his subsequent editing of Dalton’s diaries, his various essays and reviews, together with the knowledge that he was working on this major study of Harold Wilson, have given him the status of the foremost Labour biographer. The expectation produced the same frisson of malicious excitement and more charitable apprehension that the news of Francis Bacon being called in to paint a portrait of a vulnerable chairman might, ten years ago, have aroused amongst the directors of a cautious and conventional company.

I therefore approached this book with two questions equally in my mind. First, would it show Pimlott’s reputation to be too high; and second, would it show Wilson’s to have long been too low? On the former point I was quickly reassured. For its first 280 pages (out of 730) I thought this an almost perfectly structured biography. This does not mean that it then (1963, when Wilson became leader of the Labour Party following Gaitskell’s death) goes to pieces. On the contrary, it continues to be fascinating and penetrating in its account of Wilson’s two premierships and of the dispiriting four years that separated them. But there are to my mind (and judging by very high standards) certain faults of construction which appear from this point forward.

Mr Pimlott writes up some issues to an extent that puts them out of proportion. It is not sensible at this stage to give us a 6000-word essay on the details of the Profumo case. This fault reflects itself more seriously in the long penultimate chapter. This is devoted to Wilson’s entanglement with the Security Services and to an analysis of whether this was a factor in his resignation, whether there was anything in the ludicrous allegation that he was a Soviet agent, and what on earth provoked him to blow off to two unknown journalists who produced a sensational book called The Pencourt File and then either to regret what he had done or to lose all interest in the issue. The analysis is done with skill and judgement, but it is none the less an unfortunate wadge to be sitting so near to the end of the book and risks making Pimlott look on a par with the purveyors of sensational investigation, which he most certainly is not.

There are also a few signs of haste towards the end, although some of the unimportant errors of fact come earlier. The few that exist are curiously gratuitous. Very close to a subtle and convincing description of Wilson’s approach to economic planning and the creation of the ill-fated Department of Economic Affairs, Pimlott suddenly informs us (for the second time) that the St Ermin’s Hotel (an old battleground in Labour history) is ‘off the Strand’. It is not. It is behind St James’s Park tube station. It does not matter where it is. However, unnecessary facts, which can have their interest, ought not to be brought in unless you know them. It is as though a great pianist, having gone faultlessly through a most difficult scherzo, suddenly struck a simple chord bang wrong.

These are all fairly minor faults. Pimlott’s reputation survives intact, and is even enhanced. What about Lord Wilson’s? Pimlott’s verdict on him seems to me to be less clear than mine on Pimlott. At the end of the book I was far from certain what he believed, and what he wanted us to believe, about that sure-footed climber to the top of the greasy pole who dominated British politics between Macmillan and Thatcher, and who both won more victories for the Labour Party than any other leader and sowed the seeds of its decline into a party as weak on electability as on a consistent direction of policy.

I do not regard this ambiguity as a biographical fault. It stems from the fact that Pimlott is more anxious to explain than to denounce or to justify. He unravels the complex issues of law and fact like an advocate before a sophisticated supreme tribunal rather than a police court lawyer going for a quick verdict. Thus there is a masterly description of the mixture of scholastic assurance (although within a narrow range of intellectual interest) and social wariness (although cosseted by a small close-knit family of similar tastes and outlook) with which Wilson’s educational career advanced. At his various schools there was a story element of ‘please, teacher, I know the answer’ rather than of the moulding of his mind by easy companionships. At Oxford he flowered into an outstanding academic performer but not into an outstanding University figure. His exact contemporary, Edward Heath, who came from equally quiet beginnings and was less clever, was incomparably better known. Wilson allowed most aspects of Oxford life of the 1930s, from the union   or the Labour Club to excitement with the left-wing poets, or even exploring the then remote continent of Europe, to pass him by. However, he liked his ‘other Oxford’, became a fellow on graduating, was married in his BA gown and in the chapel of Mansfield, the nonconformist college, and would have made his wife happier by settling for life in the city of dreaming spires. Furthermore, Pimlott informs us, he was disappointed when, in 1977, University College (where his fellowship had been) preferred his solicitor, Lord Goodman, to himself as Master.