Suppose you are a writer and must contribute to the series recently launched by Swift Press of short biographies of British prime ministers. Perhaps it is a naive suggestion, but the most attractive prospect for the intellectually curious would be a leader with too little brand recognition even to be a question in a pub quiz. It would certainly open most readers’ eyes to delve into the life of Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, Britain’s second prime minister. From later in the 18th century, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, would prove particularly chewy. What do most people know of Spencer Perceval, other than his assassination? Does Bonar Law remain, as Asquith cruelly put it at his funeral, the “unknown prime minister?”
The first two books in the series seem designed to grab the attention, being of leaders considerably better known than these. Peter Caddick-Adams, a highly able military historian, writes on Winston Churchill, and the former Labour politician Alan Johnson on Harold Wilson: both are interesting choices. Their respective works show the strengths and weaknesses of a project such as this; not least that there is sometimes little left to be said about some subjects (as whoever does Thatcher, Lloyd George or Gladstone may find), or that occasionally new material provides a genuine insight. Here that point is particularly true of Johnson, who appears to have first-hand knowledge if not of Wilson himself, then at least of several who knew him. He certainly brings out how little, if at all, politics was discussed around the dinner table in the Wilson household.
Wilson (prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976) was an extensive memoirist and has had several major biographies, notably by Ben Pimlott, Philip Ziegler and, most recently, Nick Thomas-Symonds. But the attention paid to him is minimal compared to that given to Churchill, about whom over a thousand books have been written. In this respect, Caddick-Adams is to be envied. He has taken the right approach, which is to have understood that the legendary nature of Churchill will attract many people with no serious interest in politics; so he can, and does, outline the facts, focus on the most significant ones – to do with the Second World War – and toss in various judgements, some sound, others perhaps less so. By contrast, most readers interested in Wilson can be expected to know the basics of his life already. It is, then, valuable to have a view of him from a Labour insider with the contacts needed to explore the life more deeply.
Caddick-Adams has a different challenge. A typical reaction of reviewers receiving yet another Churchill book (these days, no angle is too recondite) is to put their head in their hands at the very prospect. Caddick-Adams understands the two world wars, and his subject’s role in them, superbly. He is less adept at dealing with domestic politics. He points out that Churchill himself had relatively little interest in such matters during his first premiership of 1940-45, so any notable measures the government promoted or enacted had much more to do with the Labour leader Clement Attlee, to whom most of the tedious business of governing was deputed during the wartime coalition. However, when Churchill returned to power in 1951 there was no Attlee to do it for him. Perhaps as a result – and these are my words, not the author’s – the 1951-55 government was deeply unexciting and sought to undo very little that the Labour government it professed to despise had put in place. From a Conservative point of view, the last Churchill administration was a wasted opportunity: Caddick-Adams might have devoted a sentence or two to pointing that out.
Early on in his essay the author deplores those other biographers who have produced hagiographies: his is not one of those, though some may find his frequent references to his subject as “Winston”, as though they were old pals who would sink bottles of Pol Roger together, extremely tiresome. Caddick-Adams castigates Churchill for the Dardanelles campaign: Churchill’s attempt in 1915 to storm Turkey, against military advice, which led to his removal from the Admiralty and the forcing of the Asquith administration into a coalition with the Unionists. Yet he does not mention the lengths his subject went to for decades to exculpate himself from the stupidity of what he did. He attaches the right significance to Churchill’s preposterous decision as chancellor of the Exchequer to put Britain back on the gold standard in 1925 at the 1914 rate, and the effect that had on British exports and manufacturing industry. He notes that many of the defence cuts Churchill attacked in his “wilderness years” in the 1930s were instigated in his five years at the Treasury.
He recognises that one did not need hindsight or modern attitudes to people of colour to see that Churchill’s view of India in the 1930s was profoundly foolish – though he does acquit him, correctly in my view, of blame for the 1943 Bengal Famine. He argues that many far worse decisions would have been taken during the Second World War but for the deep common sense of Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, with whom Churchill worked closely.
The leadership Churchill gave Britain in the existential crisis of 1940-41, during the bombardments of the Blitz and under the threat of invasion, is correctly lauded, and must never be forgotten – but it is also clear that Churchill’s power waned from then on. Caddick-Adams tells the usual, misunderstood story about Neville Chamberlain, which portrays him as lacking in insight and guilty of some degree of cowardice in the signing of the Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany in September 1938; whereas Churchill was always right. (The committee who wrote Churchill’s Second World War memoirs sought to translate fiction to fact to magnify his reputation as a prophet.) In fact, Churchill as chancellor cut defence spending in five successive Budgets between 1925 and 1929, paving the way for the country’s unpreparedness against Hitler.
Johnson is objective about Wilson, for whom he has nostalgia and affection, but about whom he is under no illusions. One of the great counterfactuals of modern political history is how things would have been had the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell not died in 1963. Would Gaitskell have won in 1964? Probably. Would his administration have been more whiggish, and less socialist, than Wilson’s? Probably. Johnson does not speculate on this, which is a shame, for Gaitskell was just 56 when he died, and Wilson had a chance far sooner than expected.
The successes of his early years – his brilliance at Oxford, where he arrived against the odds from a modest north country background, his patronage by Beveridge, his advancement into government immediately on his election in 1945 – are recounted with great narrative drive. The party factionalism of the 1950s is outlined but not dwelt upon, and the achievements and failures of Wilson’s years as leader (winning four of the five elections he fought) presented honestly. Johnson confronts Wilson’s private life – he accepts the affair with his private secretary Marcia Williams, it seems, but discounts rumours of one with Janet Hewlett-Davies, deputy to Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines from 1974 to 1976, as a product of Haines’s misanthropy and chippiness. Near the end comes the notorious Lavender List, Wilson’s resignation honours, in which he larded various rich businessmen, some of them unscrupulous to the point of criminality, with knighthoods and peerages. Much worse has happened since (Boris Johnson, qv), as other histories will relate. Both these books, in their different ways, show there is nothing new in the nature of politics, and there probably never will be.
Harold Wilson: The Prime Ministers Series
Alan Johnson
Swift Press, 160pp, £16.99
Winston Churchill: The Prime Ministers Series
Peter Caddick-Adams
Swift Press, 176pp, £16.99
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[See also: The two sides of Boris Johnson]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break