It is 50 years this month, almost to the day, since Harold Wilson made his shock announcement that he would leave 10 Downing Street on his 60th birthday. He had won four elections, a feat only matched by William Gladstone, and a European referendum, a feat unmatched by David Cameron. He was two years younger when he quit than Keir Starmer would be when he first walked in.
It’s no wonder that Wilson is said to be the prime minister that Starmer most admires. “Not Winston Churchill” may have been how the US president Donald Trump, so scandalised by the UK’s refusal to let US planes attack Iran through British territories, described the current PM yesterday – but it is this other PM, Wilson, whom Starmer now truly seeks to emulate.
For one thing, Wilson’s administrations did so much to modernise Britain; the first protection against racial discrimination, the legalisation of homosexuality, and the ending of capital punishment, theatre censorship and back-street abortionists. His government built houses (a record 400,000 council houses in a single year), reformed our archaic divorce laws, introduced equal opportunities for women (and legislated for equal pay), expanded higher education and created the Open University. And yet, as his biographer, I find it is something that Wilson didn’t do that comes up time and time again. He refused to send a single British soldier to Vietnam.
On American military interventions abroad, we are already seeing Wilson’s influence on our current PM. Between the calls for Britain to align itself with Trump’s actions (from Kemi Badenoch, the opposition leader, and Nigel Farage, the man who would be PM) and to publicly castigate the US president (from the newly energised Green Party leader Zack Polanski and a few on Labour’s back benches), Starmer sounds like the only adult in the room.
Still, he has lessons to learn from his hero. Wilson’s success wasn’t just in refusing to commit our troops to Vietnam. It was refusing to do so while also maintaining a close relationship between our two countries.
He gave the US everything they wanted – except the thing they wanted the most. It didn’t prevent Wilson from being pilloried by the student revolutionaries of the day, who either didn’t know or didn’t care that it was American loans that were funding our welfare state (and their generous student grants). He was accused of giving pragmatism a bad name.
Harold Wilson rightly refused to send troops to Vietnam, despite US pressure (Getty)
But Wilson’s anti-war instincts weren’t simply pragmatic; they were genuine. When the white supremacist Ian Smith made his unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in what was Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Wilson was urged to send in the troops to deal with what was clearly an act of treason. He refused. Dealing with constitutional issues through military measures would be disproportionate, he argued. And a military intervention in a landlocked country would be bound to lead to thousands of casualties.
On Rhodesia, he issued sanctions. But in respect to Vietnam, Wilson sought to be an honest broker between Washington, which backed the southern army of the Republic of Vietnam, and Moscow, which supported the northern Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army.
Dealing with America’s 36th president, Lyndon B Johnson, was very different to dealing with Trump, but the pressure on Wilson that the Americans exerted was every bit as intense.
“All we needed”, said Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, “was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well don’t expect us to save you again. They could invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
Today, that sounds positively Trumpian. But worse will be directed towards our prime minister in this conflict. Nevertheless, we now know that Wilson’s courageous stance was right, morally, pragmatically and diplomatically. America lost 58,000 lives in a war that the country now considers to have been a tragic mistake. The Vietnamese are estimated to have lost between 970,000 and 3 million.
There is a wide consensus that regime change in Iran can’t be secured from the air, and there is much evidence that the country’s nuclear capacity (that was supposed to have been obliterated a year ago) could have been neutralised through negotiation.
Starmer may have his problems domestically, but on the world stage, he has earned respect and admiration even from his political opponents. Unlike Harold Wilson, he may just get the credit for staying close to America while refusing to become involved in a piece of reckless adventurism. That would be a fitting way to live up to his hero’s legacy.
‘Harold Wilson: Twentieth Century Man’ by Alan Johnson (£7.99, Swift Press) is now available in paperback
