Harold
Wilson was born in Huddersfield in 1916. He was educated at Oxford
University where he was influenced by his history tutor, G.
D. H. Cole. He
worked as a research assistant under William
Beveridge at the London School of Economics
before becoming a lecturer in economics at Oxford. During
the Second World War he was director of economics
and statistics at the Ministry of Fuel and Power.
Wilson, a member of the Labour Party, was
selected as
the parliamentary candidate for Ormskirk and was elected to the House
of Commons in the 1945 General Election.
Wilson was only 29 but the new prime minister, Clement
Attlee
appointed him as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and
Power. Two years later, Wilson entered the Cabinet as President of
the Board of Trade. He therefore became the youngest minister since
William
Pitt.
The
National Insurance Act
created the structure of the Welfare
State and after the passing of the National
Health Service Act in 1948, people in Britain were provided with
free diagnosis and treatment of illness, at home or in hospital, as
well as dental and ophthalmic services. However, Wilson, Aneurin
Bevan and
John Freeman resigned from the government
on
21st April when Hugh Gaitskell, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that he intended to introduce
measures that would force people to pay half the cost of dentures
and spectacles and a one shilling prescription
charge.
When Clement
Attlee
resigned in 1955, Hugh
Gaitskell became
the new leader of the Labour
Party.
After the death of Aneurin
Bevan in 1960,
Wilson became the main figure on the left of the party. The following
year he challenged Gaitskill for the leadership but was defeated by
166 votes to 81.
When Hugh
Gaitskell died in 1963, Wilson was one of the main contenders
for the party leadership and he was able to defeat his right-wing
rivals, George Brown and James
Callaghan.
During the 1964
General Election campaign Wilson promised to modernize Britain.
Making full use of his academic background and poking fun at the aristocratic
Alec
Douglas-Home,
Wilson was able to obtain a five-seat majority in the House
of Commons. After the 1966 General Election
this majority was increased to 97.
Wilson
was fairly successful in his promise to modernize Britain. His government
brought an end to capital punishment, reformed the divorce laws and
legalized abortion and homosexuality. He had more difficulty with
the economy and in November, 1967, his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
James Callaghan, was forced to devalue
the pound. By the end of the 1960s, with unemployment and inflation
increasing, Wilson's popularity declined and the Conservative
Party, led by Edward
Heath,
won the 1970 General Election.
Heath successfully
led Britain into the European
Economic Community (ECC).
However, many in his party was unhappy with this policy and it created
deep divisions that lasted for over thirty years.
Edward
Heath
also came into conflict with the trade unions
over his attempts to impose a prices and incomes policy. His attempts
to legislate against unofficial strikes led to industrial disputes.
In 1973 a miners' work-to-rule led to regular power cuts and the imposition
of a three day week. Heath called a general election in 1974 on the
issue of "who rules". He failed to get a majority and Wilson
and the Labour Party were returned to power.
In 1975
Wilson decided to hold a referendum on membership of the European
Economic Community.
Wilson allowed his Cabinet to support both the Yes and No campaigns
and this led to a bitter split in the party.
Wilson's
government again had trouble with the economy. Faced with the prospect
of having to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund, Wilson
came under increasing attack from all sections of the Labour
Party. Wilson was also suffering from the early signs of Alzheimer's
Disease and in 1976 decided to resign from office and was replaced
by James Callaghan.
Wilson
was knighted in 1976 and was created Baron of Rievaulx in 1983. Harold
Wilson died in 1995.
(1)
Harold Wilson wrote about the influence of G.
D. H. Cole in his autobiography,
Memoirs:
1916-1964 (1986)
I had long held G.D.H. Cole in high regard and found this closer
contact with him most congenial. He was a good-looking man, of medium
height with a good head of hair, and most attractive in speech and
address, except for the manner of his lectures. I had attended a number
of them, which he delivered at great speed, eyes down, without a single
note. His special subjects were economic organization and history,
and he concentrated on these. I was left to teach economic theory,
not the area I preferred.
I took to spending most
Tuesday and Wednesday evenings with him, helping with copy for and
proofs of his articles for the New Statesman and Nation. When the
work was finished, he used to pour out for each of us a glass of Irish
whisky, which he preferred to Scotch. On one of these occasions he
was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He announced that he had made
a resolution, to foreswear all reading of books and concentrate on
writing them. He was already publishing at least one a year in addition
to his other writings. For the most part they were highly topical
and dated rather quickly but some, particularly those on economic
history, have survived.
It was G.D.H. Cole as
much as any man who finally pointed me in the direction of the Labour
Party. His social and economic theories made it intellectually respectable.
My attitudes had been clarifying for some time and the catalyst was
the unemployment situation. I had seen it years before in the Colne
Valley, with members of my class jobless when they left school. My
own father was still enduring his second painful period out of work.
My religious upbringing and practical studies of economics and unemployment
in which I had been engaged at Oxford combined in one single thought:
unemployment was not only a severe fault of government, but it was
in some way evil, and an affront to the country it afflicted.
(2)
Herbert
Morrison,
An Autobiography (1960)
When Wilson was President of the Board of Trade I found
him moderate in his
views - at times too moderate for my liking. His Anti-Monopolies Act
was something of a compromise and therefore not too effective. He
appeared to get inordinate pleasure out of his bonfire of economic
controls. In the main he was right, but I consider that, in view of
the economic situation at the time, he overdid it. At that time he
would certainly not have been classed as left-wing, but his resignation
in company with Bevan over the Health Service rumpus, was an obvious
left-wing gesture. He had taken little or no part in the row, and
his resignation left us speechless with surprise. Was the move from
an ardent conviction? Or was it because he felt that Bevan's resignation
would in due course bring victory and it would be advantageous for
Wilson to be in such company?
If the latter were the
case it was a passing sentiment. Ostensibly a member of the Bevanite
group, Wilson did not find it impossible to accept the seat on the
Parliamentary Committee left vacant when Bevan resigned. Perhaps the
most realistic classification for this able economist and clever debater
is that he is a Wilsonite.
(3)
Michael
Foot, Aneurin Bevan (1973)
Since the opening of the
new session the Bevanites had sought to organize themselves into a
more effective parliamentary group. On the suggestion of lan Mikardo
and on the precedent of the Keep Left group, it was agreed to elect
a regular chairman - Harold Wilson was the first - and to meet at
a regular time in the parliamentary week: 1.30 on Mondays. None of
those participating in these secret rites thought at the outset that
they might be indulging in some scandalous Mau Mau activity - (none
at least except the compulsive informer in our midst who reported
our proceedings regularly to Hugh Dalton and thereby to the Whips).
Unofficial groups had existed in Parliament ever since the first Witenagemot,
and the Bevanites of the early 1950s imagined they were following
a more recent precedent set by others, notably the XYZ Club, which
had been talking politics over exclusive dinner tables since its foundation
by Douglas Jay and a few others in the early 1940s. No one, after
all, had ever suggested that the Keep Left group should be outlawed.
By January 1952 the new Bevanite arrangements were in full working
order and the agenda was crowded.
(4)
Harold
Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister,
1916-64 (1986)
When the Finance Bill
was tabled, it contained the fateful clause. Bevan was on a speaking
engagement in East Anglia. He rang me up to say, 'I am resigning.
They've introduced the Bill.' The next day he sent in his resignation
letter. To the last he was pressing John Freeman and me not to resign,
and Freeman records that he would have stayed on but he felt he had
to resign when I did.
Mary remembers how I agonised
about my own resignation, walking up and down the bedroom floor all
night trying to make up my mind. I was under some pressure to stay
in the Cabinet and maintain a presence, if only to fight the battle
from within. What formed no part of my thinking, although I have been
challenged on it, was the calculation that the Government was disintegrating
and that I would do well to put down a marker for the future. At the
time it looked far more like an act of political suicide, but the
issue on which I resigned was different from Nye's.
His own speech to the
House was sadly miscalculated. For once he should have had a script.
As it was, banal interruptions and barracking from the Conservative
benches, and murmurings from a few on his own side, provoked him to
extravagance in his choice of words. One thing was certain: he could
not speak for me.
The following morning
we went to Ernie Bevin's memorial service and in the afternoon I made
my own statement, which was quietly received. I was careful to say
that although I personally found it necessary to leave the Government,
I intended both inside and outside the House to do everything in my
power to support the Party and the Government in the difficult times
that lay ahead.
(5)
Clement
Attlee, As It Happened
(1954)
Differences of opinion arose in the
Government. The immediate cause was a proposal in the Budget to make
charges for certain of the Health Services in order to prevent abuse.
There were other differences of a more personal nature. I endeavoured
to effect agreement, but the disagreement spread to some other matters,
notably to the effect on the economy of the country of the level of
armaments on which we had embarked. I had, as a matter of fact, pointed
out in public speeches that the achievement of our programme was conditioned
by various factors such as the availability of raw materials and machine
tools, and the level of prices. There was, therefore, in my view,
no real difference of principle. However, the upshot was that Aneurin
Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman insisted on resigning from the
Government.
(6)
Harold
Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister,
1916-64 (1986)
In this
unhealthy atmosphere, the Gaitskellites were seeking their revenge.
Their leader, far from discouraging them, was spurring them on, and
some were aiming at expelling those who disagreed with him. A few
of us, Barbara Castle, lan Mikardo and myself, felt that we should
form a small tight group to work out our strategy and our week-by-week
tactics. I was elected leader. We met at half-past one every Monday.
I set myself the task of resisting extremism and provocative public
statements.
For MPs to meet in unofficial
groups, getting together informally, as distinct from in committees
and sub-committees set up by the House of Commons itself, is probably
as old as Parliament itself. King John could have written a thesis
on the subject. But this was too much for Hugh Gaitskell, who would
have been better advised to acknowledge that he led an unofficial
group of his own. Immediately after the annual conference at Morecambe
in 1952 he found his voice.
In a speech at Stalybridge,
he repeated an allegation that one-sixth of the constituency party
delegates at Morecambe were communist or communist-inspired. He drew
the conclusion that at a time when communist policy was to infiltrate
the Labour movement, the Bevanites were assisting them by their disruptive
activities. Then, in a direct reference to us and our pamphlets, he
went on: "It is time to end the attempt at mob rule by a group
of frustrated journalists and restore the authority and leadership
of the solid, sound, sensible majority of the movement.' He referred
to 'the stream fit grossly misleading propaganda, with poisonous innuendoes
and malicious attacks on Atlee, Morrison and the rest of the leadership."
(7)
Harold
Wilson, speech, House of
Commons (12th November, 1956)
For the past fortnight,
the House has debated the cost in political and moral terms of the
Government's action in Suez. Today we have to count the reckoning
in economic terms as well. When I say 'in economic terms' I do not
mean merely the cost in terms of government expenditure. We are no
longer in the days of nineteenth-century colonial wars, when the cost
of these ventures could be reckoned in terms of another tuppence on
the income tax or another penny on tea.
I hope that the Chancellor
or the Minister of Supply will tell the House frankly today what,
in the view of their advisers, will be the economic consequences of
this military action. After all, it was long prepared. What estimates
did the Government make of its costs and its economic consequences?
What estimates do they make now?
(8)
Peter
Wright, Spycatcher (1987)
Much has been written about
Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as
I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh
Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilson's predecessor as Leader of
the Labour Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I
had met him and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall
about a month before he died he told me that he was going to Russia.
After he died his doctor
got in touch with MI5 and asked to see somebody from the Service.
Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian Counterespionage, went to see
him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the manner of Gaitskell's
death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus disseminata,
which attacks the body's organs. He said that it was rare in temperate
climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere
recently where he could have contracted the disease.
Arthur Martin suggested
that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and microbiological
laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor
in the chemical warfare laboratory. Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice.
He said that nobody knew how one contracted lupus. There was some
suspicion that it might be a form of fungus and he did hot have the
foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the disease. I came
back and made my report in these terms.
The next development was
that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few
years of his service he had had some contacts with Department 13,
which was known as the Department of Wet Affairs in the KGB. This
department was responsible for organizing assassinations. He said
that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level
political assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the
top place. He did not know which country it was planned in but he
pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was a man called General
Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just returned
on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge
of the political scene in England.
(9)
Harold
Wilson, speech in the House
of Commons on Harold
Macmillan (February, 1962)
In their rush to get into
Europe they must not forget the four-fifths
of the world's population whose preoccupation is with emergence
from colonial status into self-government; and into
the revolution of rising expectations. If this is so, is the world
organization not to reflect the enthusiasms and aspirations
of the new members and new nations entering into
their inheritance, often through British action, as the Prime
Minister said, and who want to see their neighbours also
brought forward into the light? It must be recognized that
this is the greatest force in the world today, and we must ask
why it is so often that we are found, or thought to be found,
on the wrong side.
The record of this country
since the war, under both Governments,
is good enough to proclaim to the world - India,
Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanganyika and
Sierra Leone and, even after the agonies, Cyprus. Why do we
contrive it that in the eyes of the world we are so often allied
with reactionary governments, whose record in the scales
of human enfranchisement weigh as a speck of dust against
real gold and silver as far as our record is concerned?
Why is it that the British
Foreign Secretary speaks in accents of
the dead past, as though he fears and resents the consequences
of the very actions which his Government as well
as ours have taken?
Not only in this country
but abroad people are asking, 'Who is
in charge? Whose hand is on the helm? When is the Prime Minister
going to exert himself and govern?' I do not believe that
he can. The panache has gone. On every issue, domestic and
foreign, now we find the same faltering hand, the same dithering
indecision and confusion. What is more, Hon. Members
opposite know it, and some of them are even beginning
to say it.
The MacWonder of 1959
is the man who gave us this pathetic performance this afternoon. This
whole episode has justified our insistence eighteen months ago that
the Foreign Secretary should have been in the House of Commons. But
we were wrong on one thing. We thought that the noble lord would be
an office boy. The Prime Minister was able to
restore his tottering position today only by a fulsome tribute to
the noble lord. Indeed, to adopt the saying made famous by
Nye Bevan: 'It is a little difficult to know which is the organ
grinder and which is the other.'
(10)
Harold
Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister,
1916-64 (1986)
During my several visits
to the Soviet Union I had discovered that 60 per cent of their engineers
had got their degrees in part from distance teaching. Then, in March
1963, a Labour Party study group under the chairmanship of Lord Taylor
presented a report on higher education in general and commented on
the continuing exclusion of the lower-income groups. They also proposed
an experiment on radio and television for serious planned adult education.
(11)
Harold
Wilson, speech in Glasgow
(8th September, 1963)
Today I want to outline
new proposals on which we are working, a dynamic programme providing
facilities for home study to university and higher technical standards,
on the basis of a University of the Air and of nationally organized
correspondence college courses.
These will be intended
to cater for a wide variety of potential students. There are technicians
and technologists who perhaps left school at sixteen or seventeen
and who, after two or three years in industry, feel that they could
qualify as graduate scientists or technologists. There are many others,
perhaps in clerical occupations, who would like to acquire new skills
and new qualifications. There are many in all levels of industry who
would desire to become qualified in their own or other fields, including
those who had no facilities for taking GEC at 0 or A level, or other
required qualifications;
or housewives who might like to secure qualifications in English Literature,
Geography or History.
(12)
Harold
Wilson, speech at the Labour Party Conference
(1st October, 1963)
The problem is this: since
technological progress, left to the mechanism
of private industry and private property, can lead only
to high profits for a few, a high rate of employment for a few
and to mass redundancy for the many, if there had never been
a case for socialism before, automation would have created
it. Because only if technological progress becomes part
of our national planning can that progress be connected to
national ends.
So the choice is not between
technological progress and the kind
of easygoing world we are living in today. It is the choice between
the blind imposition of technological advance, with all
that means in terms of unemployment, and the conscious, planned,
purposive use of scientific progress to provide undreamed
of living standards and the possibility of leisure ultimately
on an unbelievable scale.
Now I come to what we
must do, and it is a four-fold programme. First, we must produce more
scientists. Secondly, having produced them, we must be a great deal
more successful in keeping them in this country. Thirdly, having trained
them and kept them here, we must make more intelligent use of them
when they are trained than we do with those we have got. Fourthly,
we must organize British industry so it applies the results of scientific
research more purposively to our national production effort. Russia
is at the present time training ten to eleven times as many scientists
and technologists. And the sooner we face up to that challenge the
sooner we shall realize what kind of a world we are living in.
Until very recently over
half our trained scientists were engaged in defence projects or so-called
defence projects. Real defence, of course, is essential. But so many
of our scientists were employed on purely prestige projects that never
left the drawing-board. Many more scientists are deployed not on projects
that are going to increase Britain's productive power, but on some
new gimmick or additive for some consumer product which will enable
the advertising managers to rush to the television screen to tell
us all to buy a little more of something we did not even know we wanted
in the first place.
This is not strengthening Britain.
What we need is new industries,
and it will be the job of the next Government to see that we get them.
This means mobilizing scientific research in this country to produce
a new technological breakthrough. We have spent thousands of millions
in the past few years on misdirected research and development
contracts in the field of defence. If we were now to
use the technique of R and D contracts in civil industry I believe
we could within a measurable period of time establish new
industries which would make us once again one of the foremost
industrial nations of the world.
Relevant also to these
problems are our plans for a University
of the Air. I repeat again that this is not a substitute
for our plans for higher education, for our plans for
new universities and for our plans for extending technological
education. It is not a substitute; it is a supplement
to our plans. It is designed to provide an opportunity
for those, who, for one reason or another, have not
been able to take advantage of higher education, to now do
so with all that the TV and radio state-sponsored correspondence
courses, the facilities of a university for setting
and marking papers, conducting examinations and awarding
degrees, can provide. Nor, may I say, do we envisage
this merely as a means of providing scientists and technologists.
I believe a properly planned University of the Air
could make an immeasurable contribution to the cultural life
of our country, to the enrichment of our standard of living.
(13)
Denis Healey,
The Time of My Life (1989)
Vaguely Liberal at Oxford, and a civil
servant during the war, Harold Wilson had won fame as Attlee's President
of the Board of Trade, by promising 'a bonfire of controls'. He applied
himself seriously to Labour Party politics for the first time when
he threw in his lot with Bevanism in 1951, as 'Nye's little dog',
to use Dalton's words. Then, as Bevan's star faded, he moved far enough
towards the centre to be elected leader of the Labour Party when Gaitskell
died in 1962. By now he had become an accomplished speaker; he roused
the Party Conference to wild enthusiasm by talking of 'the white heat
of the technological revolution'. In the General Election of 1964
he made rings round
the skeletal inadequacy of Sir Alee Douglas-Home.
No prime minister ever
interfered so much in the work of his colleagues as Wilson did in
his first six years - though I am glad to say that he gave me a pretty
free hand on defence, except when there was a crisis. Unfortunately,
since he had neither political principle nor much government experience
to guide him, he did not give Cabinet the degree of leadership which
even a less ambitious prime minister should provide. He had no sense
of direction, and rarely looked more than a few months ahead. His
short-term opportunism, allied with a capacity for self-delusion which
made Walter Mitty appear unimaginative, often plunged the government
into chaos. Worse still, when things went wrong he imagined everyone
was conspiring against him. He believed in demons, and saw most of
his colleagues in this role at one time or another. I was no exception.
Fearing that if he left a minister too long in the same department
he might develop a power-base from which to challenge him, he shifted
his ministers around far too often.
(14)
Edward
Heath, The Course of My Life
(1988)
Twenty years later it
is possible to make a balanced assessment of Harold Wilson's contribution
to our political life, particularly in his first period as Prime Minister.
There was then no doubt about his skill as a professional politician.
Although he won the 1964 general election with a majority of only
four, his personality appealed to a considerable section of the electorate,
and he certainly developed a manner which carried the viewer, the
listener and the reader with him. After the 1966 election, however,
he never hesitated to reverse his position when he found his own forces
lining up against him. Barbara Castle's attempt at trade union reform
was a major example of this. He also had little lasting success in
foreign affairs, and became far less effective after the elections
of 1974, when he had not really expected to win again. He was already
tired and no longer possessed that freshness and energy which had
previously served him so well. Nevertheless it came as a surprise
when he resigned on his sixtieth birthday. It may be that he himself
already realised the impact which his illness, later to prove fatal,
was having upon him. Jim Callaghan later told me that he thought that
Wilson had realised soon after 1974 that he was past it. 'That,' I
said, 'rather backs up what Roy Jenkins said to me recently, namely
that Wilson was ten years older than he had publicly admitted and,
when he resigned, he was really seventy and not sixty.' 'Yes, that
is very interesting,' commented Jim, 'and I suppose that, when all
those well-known photographs were taken of him outside No. 10 when
he claimed to be eleven, he was really twenty-one!' Harold Wilson's
lasting achievements are difficult to discern, except for the fact
that he held the Labour Party together for nearly fifteen years, whereas
under his successors it collapsed, thereby helping to sustain eighteen
years of Conservative government. Harold was, above all else, a great
political survivor, a fine politician if, perhaps, never truly a statesman.
(15)
Ken
Livingstone, speech in the House of Commons
(10th January, 1996)
The major problems inside
MI5 concern its relationship with the former Prime Minister Harold
Wilson. As the Minister responsible for trade in the Attlee Government,
he attempted to increase exports to the USSR. He constantly ran up
against United States Government opposition towards any growth in
such trade. Wilson felt that the United States used the hysteria of
the cold war to prevent Britain from increasing its trade with the
USSR. His was not a position that was likely to be viewed with favour
in MI5. In fact, there was near hysteria in MI5 when he was sent to
the USSR to negotiate the sale of 20 advanced jet engines. Wilson
was only a junior Minister carrying out a Cabinet decision, but from
that point on he was viewed with suspicion by MI5 officers.
When the unexpected death
of Hugh Gaitskell led to the election of Wilson in 1963, MI5 immediately
tried to recruit Wilson's campaign manager, George Caunt, to spy on
the Labour leader. Shortly before the 1964 election, the FBI told
MI5 that it had discovered a KGB mole who had been operating inside
MI5 in the key post-war period. The fact that Sir Anthony Blunt was
a KGB agent and had close connections with the Queen was certain to
create a spy scandal as damaging as that of Kim Philby. Even worse
for MI5 was the knowledge that it had been tipped off about Blunt's
spying a decade earlier and had failed to take action. It now feared
that Wilson would use the opportunity of the scandal to dismember
its organisation. Sir Roger Hollis, then director-general of MI5,
and Arthur Martin, head of the counter-espionage department, decided
on a cover-up and did not even tell the outgoing Tory Prime Minister,
Harold Macmillan. Instead, Blunt was granted immunity and was interrogated
by Peter Wright, who made the position clear in Spycatcher,
when he wrote: "We
had strict orders from successive Director-Generals to do nothing
that might provoke Blunt to go public." All that was concealed
from Wilson when he became Prime Minister, and he was also not informed
when Hollis and his deputy, Graham Mitchell, eventually came under
suspicion as KGB moles.
Other news was kept from
Wilson. In 1961, Anatoli Golitsin, a KGB defector, had arrived in
the USA with all sorts of wild allegations few of which yielded anything
of substance except the identity of the Admiralty spy, John Vassall.
By coincidence, shortly after Wilson's election as Leader of the Opposition,
Golitsin was sent to Britain to be interviewed by MI5. His agreed
fee was £10,000 a month - £70,000 at today's prices -
which was a considerable incentive to keep the interest of his MI5
hosts. Although he had made no mention of it during his two-year interrogation
in the USA, Golitsin now told MI5 that he had heard of a KGB plot
to kill the leader of a west European political party so that its
man could take over. That was all that Peter Wright and other extreme
right-wingers inside MI5 needed to confirm the suspicions that had
been hanging around ever since the jet engine trade deal and Wilson's
annual visits to the USSR while in opposition. They believed that
the assassinated party leader had to be Gaitskell.
Oblivious to the suspicions
of MI5 and the CIA, the new Labour Prime Minister Wilson issued instructions
that MI5 was to stop tapping the telephones of Members of Parliament,
although it never occurred to him that MI5 could continue to get access
to the information gleaned from taps on Members of Parliament run
by the CIA or GCHQ. He also instructed that MI5 should stop using
Members as agents without knowing that one Tory Member, Captain Henry
Kerby, had been used by MI5 to ingratiate himself with Wilson's shadow
Cabinet colleague George Wigg by spying on the Tory party for Wigg.
It gives one great encouragement that such people might have a greater
role in law enforcement in the future.
The instructions from Wilson
caused deep resentment inside MI5, where some officers retaliated
by leaking damaging bits of gossip about members of Wilson's Government
from MI5 files to the press. That was of course a breach of the Official
Secrets Act 1911, but no one has ever been prosecuted.
MI5 believed that seven
members of Wilson's Government and three other Labour Members of Parliament
were either spies or at the very least security risks. Only one of
those 10, Will Owen, the Member of Parliament for Morpeth, eventually
turned out to be guilty. He had been taking £500 a month from
Czechoslovakian intelligence in exchange for low-grade information
that it could most probably have got cheaper by buying Hansard and
reading the quality press. All the other names on MI5's list were
completely innocent, but that did not stop MI5, in particular Peter
Wright, hounding Bernard Floud, who had been devastated by the death
of his wife. MI5 pursued him until he finally committed suicide in
a moment of despair.
When Treasury Minister
Niall MacDermot had his promotion to the Cabinet blocked following
MI5 pressure on Wilson, he resigned from politics in disgust. The
other seven Members on MI5's list were John Diamond, Tom Driberg,
Judith Hart, Stephen Swingler, John Stonehouse, Barnet Stross and,
of course, Wilson.
The MI5-inspired rumours
about Wilson eventually reached the ears of former Prime Minister
and Leader of the Opposition, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who asked James
Scott-Hopkins, a former MI6 officer who had become a Tory Member of
Parliament, to conduct his own investigation to discover whether there
was any danger of Wilson's being blackmailed.
In the summer of 1967,
people from MI5 met people from the CIA, the FBI and the Australian
and New Zealand security services in Melbourne, Australia, where they
were addressed by Golitsin about his Wilson allegations.
Matters began to hot up
when the press baron Cecil King, a long-standing MI5 agent, began
to discuss the need for a coup against the Wilson Government. King
informed Peter Wright that the Daily Mirror would publish any
damaging anti-Wilson leaks that MI5 wanted aired, and at a meeting
with Lord Mountbatten and the Government's chief scientific adviser,
Solly Zuckerman, he urged Mountbatten to become the leader of a Government
of national salvation. Lucky old Britain. Zuckerman pointed out that
that was treason, and left the meeting. The idea came to nothing because
of Mountbatten's reluctance to act.
The late Harold Wilson
was not the only one under suspicion. While the right hon. Member
for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) was Leader of the Opposition,
the Tory Member of Parliament, Captain Henry Kerby - as I have explained,
he was an MI5 agent who had ingratiated himself with George Wigg -
was used to spread rumours that the right hon. Gentleman was a homosexual
who had had an affair with a Swedish diplomat.
Doubts about the right
hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup were not confined to the more
extreme elements who clustered round Peter Wright. The newly appointed
head of MI5, Mr. Hanley - otherwise known as Jumbo - did not inform
the right hon. Gentleman that investigations were taking place to
try to determine whether Sir Roger Hollis had been a KGB agent.
The head of MI5 did not
inform the Leader of the Opposition of MI5's doubts about Wilson,
either, or reveal the contents of the file on Wilson that he had inherited
from his predecessor, Furnival Jones, and which was kept in his safe,
filed under the name "Henry Worthington".
The second factor that increased
MI5's alarm at the time was the rise in trade union militancy and the
swing to the left in the Labour party. Any pretext that MI5 existed
to catch Russian spies went right out of the window at that point. From
1972, there was a vast growth in the sections of MI5 that were involved
with domestic surveillance.
Trade unionists, peace
campaigners, Cabinet Ministers and political activists in their tens
of thousands became the objects of illegal telephone taps and letter
intercepts. Recruitment of agents on a scale not considered necessary
even at the height of the cold war meant that, by the mid-1970s, even
a small group of left-wingers meeting anywhere was likely to have
an MI5 agent reporting back on its activities. By the end of the 1970s,
2 million British citizens had security files held on them by MI5.
A constant drip of innuendo
about Wilson's loyalty was fed by MI5 to Private Eye, and Michael
Halls, the liaison officer between No. 10 and MI5, considered Marcia
Williams to be a security risk and funnelled damaging smears about
her and Wilson to Private Eye. As Peter Wright put it in his book:
"most people in MI5 didn't have a duty to Parliament. They have
a duty to the Queen . . . It's up to us to stop Russians getting control
of the British government."
Although it is easy to
dismiss some of what I have described as the work of a lunatic fringe,
the views of MI5 chief Sir Michael Hanley are well known. When he
was asked at a seminar for junior MI5 officers what would happen if
Michael Foot became Prime Minister, he replied: "I and every
other officer in the service will have to consider our position."
Other officers in MI5 did not share Hanley's sense of resignation,
and 30 MI5 officers, including Peter Wright, engaged, on Wright's
own admission, in 23 criminal conspiracies and committed 12 acts of
treason against the elected Government of the day.
Finally, what was happening
came to the attention of Sir Maurice Oldfield, then head of MI6, who
took Wright to dinner at Lockets restaurant in July 1975 and asked
him about the extent of the plot in MI5 against Wilson. Having heard
Wright out, Oldfield told him to put MI5 chief Hanley in the picture.
This Wright did the next day, and in his book he says: "Hanley
. . . went white as a sheet . . . he was learning that half of his
staff were up to their necks in a plot to get rid of the Prime Minister."
When we consider that record,
we realise that it involves more than one or two eccentrics such as
Peter Wright, and that there is clearly a culture of extreme right-wing
politics in MI5, which has been there throughout this century. Occasionally
there are brought to the surface very deep links with individual Conservative
Members of Parliament who have been able to use MI5, disinformation
and black propaganda to damage Labour Members of Parliament and Governments.
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