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“... to wonder, glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold Wilson met with IRA leaders in Dublin, and the next year the Northern Ireland Minister, Willie Whitelaw, made similar contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officers’ mess in Ulster – and in MI5, who took over intelligence operations ...”

“... early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his ...”

“... and he and his supporters had been cast into outer darkness. Then the pendulum swung again. Harold Wilson, now back in office, sought, after a period of mainly bogus ‘renegotiation’, endorsement in a referendum of Britain’s continued membership of the European Community. Roy Jenkins led the all-party ‘Britain in Europe’ campaign, and ...”

“... influence of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it. When the Tories are in office, all those bankers and businessmen and judges are their friends. There’s no need or inclination to blow them off course. Then suddenly comes Norman Lamont’s shock claim, greeted by prolonged and fervent ...”

“... and inducing nightmares involving Tony Blair as a parking warden. How times have changed. In 1975, Harold Wilson put a temporary halt to Benn’s leftward march by moving him from Industry to Energy, on the grounds that he was safer in the Cabinet than on the back benches. On the evidence of these diaries, Benn’s final years as a Member of Parliament ...”

“... involved. There is George Brown, ‘bellowing on the telephone to No 10, insisting that Harold came over at once and pouring out insults to him on the phone’. There are occasional lunches and dinners à deux with Roy Jenkins, sometimes at the Connaught (‘another demonstration of what he calls, with a smile, his “expensive tastes” ’) and ...”

“... winning of the 1964 Election. Alistair Horne quotes some recent press comment to the effect that Harold Macmillan was the father of British inflation. We all know about ‘lags’ in economics, but the degree of lag needed to justify that comment is surely excessive even if the contention were otherwise plausible. In fact, the Macmillan Government’s record ...”

“... Some time in the late 1960s the then prime minister Harold Wilson started using a new phrase to describe the world we live in: ‘pluralist democracy’. The word ‘pluralist’, which had been hanging around for a long time without doing any harm to anyone, meant, I think, ‘accepting many interests and ideas, rather than one ...”

“... more telling passage, describing two ‘images of patronage’: The first is of Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, walking through the voting lobbies in the House of Commons surrounded by a seething mass of sycophants so that the Prime Minister himself could not be distinguished from the blob which seemed to be moving down the lobby. The second is of ...”

“... sit well with a party which has always seen itself as a crusading organisation. And after that? Harold Wilson was the most successful Labour leader, winning four elections, but the recent spate of admiring biographies cannot rescue him from ignominy. The whole point of Wilsonism, after all, was to box and fox through the burning minute. It is hardly ...”

“... All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited brilliantly by Harold Wilson in the early 1960s, seems strangely vieux jeu today. No one cares. Yet it was effective in its day. Harold Macmillan had an ear for the rhetoric of opposition. He and Sir ...”

“... as, for example, letting any cats out of the bag on the topic of the Belgrano. Moreover, just as Harold Wilson wanted an eye kept on Jim Callaghan when he was Foreign Secretary and therefore placed the reliable David Ennals as Number Two in the Foreign Office, so Mrs Thatcher wanted to keep her potential successor, Michael Heseltine, ‘under ...”

“... When Barbara Castle told Harold Wilson that renegotiating Britain’s membership of Europe would end in ‘a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’, Wilson replied that he felt ‘at his best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’. This from Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler ...”

“... Labour Party as the opposite of the Conservatives. On the contrary, many of them saw the party of Wilson and Callaghan, and even the party of Michael Foot, as (in the old Trotskyist phrase) ‘Labour lieutenants of the capitalist class’. Those members of the staff who did not share this view were castigated as traitors to the cause, and two or three of us ...”

“... Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase ...”