The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 101. Alan Johnson: The Prime Minister We Never Had? (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

How much have the “bleak” post-war years shaped modern Britain? How did growing up parentless and in poverty inspire Alan Johnson’s life choices? And, is Alastair right, could he have been prime ministerial material?  On today’s episode of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by long-serving Labour minister, Alan Johnson, to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory, he likes our guests to have a backstory. And he particularly likes backstories where the guests emerge from some terrible poverty in their child. childhood and gone on to great things. And I guess today, Alan Johnson, certainly fits that bill. In fact, his childhood is the subject of one of several best-selling memoirs that he's written, all of which have Beatles songs as their title. And in addition to that, he's most recently written a biography of Harold Wilson, former Labour Prime Minister. He's written novels. And before all that, Of course, it was one of our best ministers, I would say.

Five different cabinet positions. Definitely one of our most reliable. Put it that way. I've been downgraded. I started off his best. And also somebody I think that a lot of people in the Labour Party kind of saw as prime ministerial material, but I don't know if Alan ever did.

And we'll maybe talk about that bit as well. Alan, thank you for joining us. Give us a sense, please, first, of the world you grew up in and what the difference is between the world you grew up and the world today, what we wouldn't recognise about your childhood today. So the world I grew up in was photographed by a famous photographer called Roger Main, who just had an exhibition at the court hold at a place called Southam Street in North Kensington,

London West 10, not Notting Hill. We never called that Notting Hill. Notting Hill was the posh end, you know, up where the Albert Hall was and places like that. Yeah, the New World Rory lives. This was a poor area, always a poor area. tragically, most recently defined by Grenfell Tower, because the slums we moved out of, they then built high-rise flats, one of which was Grenfell. So it was that bleak post-war world? There were slums everywhere. I mean, the government should have pulled these houses down. They were condemned as unfit for human

habitation in 1930s, and we were still living in them. And Roger Main captures the squalor of the outside. I described a squalor on the inside. What was the squalor? What was in the house, what wasn't in the house that people would take for granted today? There's no electricity for a start. So I lived my first six years by a gaslight. And a little guy used to come on a bicycle to light the gas lights out in the street. And our mother used to tell us it was the sandman come to send us to sleep. So one room, then progressing to two rooms and finally three rooms, as lots of people lived in. Multi-occupied basement and then three stories.

No electricity, as I said, no hot water, no heating, no toilet, no bathroom. a butler sink on the landing in one place. But if you wanted to go to the toilet, we were on the top floor when we moved down to 149 Southam Street. You had to come down three stories, go down to the basement, out to the backyard, right at the back of which was this awful Kazi that you didn't want to visit when the sun was shining,

never mind in the middle of the night. And so these buckets. You know, I suppose in posh houses, it would have been called something else, but we had buckets. And because you had to go down on that journey to empty the buckets, you didn't do it that often. There were flies, there were vermin,

these houses were jerry-built, terribly overcrowded. Roger Main, just look at a Roger Main photograph and you'll see what it was like. You said, well, is this true? There was a time with the difference in life expectancy between North and South Kensington was the same as that between North and South Korea. No, that's now.

16 years, now. We know from Grenfville. Now? Yeah. We know from Grenfell the statistics now. I mean, we've getting them all over the place. They say you go on the underground, get on a Jubilee line at Westminster, go seven stops to Canning Town. Your life expectancy goes down a year with every stop.

Nothing to do with London Underground. It's the same if you go on the bus. But that is the famous statistic. Because of Grenfell, people looked into the difference between North and South Kensington. And it's still, North Kensington are very poor area. South Kensington is a very plush area, raw borough of Kensington. But you couldn't get a bigger contrast. And it just happens to be the same contrast as between North and South Korea.

And you mentioned your mum. Your dad sort of disappeared earlier. Yes, my poor mother. Well, my book is really the story of two amazing women who happened to be my mother and my sister. My father was feckless is probably a good word. But he also, worse than feckless, he came home, drunk and used to beat my mother up. So I say in the book, and it's very true, my sister is two and a half years old than me. And he took a great responsibility for bringing me up.

Because we started off as a two-parent family. Then we were a one-parent family when my father did a moonlight flip when I was eight. And then we were an old parent family. So my sister had a very important role in that. Because your mother died when you were 12. She died when I was 13, just turned 13. But the happiest day of our lives, me and my sister say, is when our father left. And people say, well, that's a strange thing.

Well, no, it's not. It's great if there's a happy family there. if your father is beating up your mother and you hear it in those places because the walls weren't very thick there was at least one family on each floor, sometimes two, four stories, you heard

it all in graphic detail and he was an awful, very cruel man and we were very pleased when he ran off with the barmaid from a pub called the Lads of the Village and we never saw him again. And when you became like a public figure, never got in touch or never? No, never. Do you feel good

about that? You just glad he's never been by that? I'm fine about that. means nothing to me, but my sister got in touch. But my sister was the heroin here. So she had fought battles with my father, stayed up to protect my mother when she got to about age of 10, cooked my Christmas dinner when she was eight and I was five, and he had gone off with his girlfriend over Christmas. My mum was in and out of hospital all the time. She had a condition called mitral stenosis, which first of all had to be diagnosed, stavowed between the two chambers of the heart, and it had to be cleared every so often. And in the end, she went, People still get it now.

What's happened now is you can replace the mitral valve with a plastic version. She was one of the very early people who that was trialled on. They'd done it in America. And she was convinced by a heart surgeon at Habersmith Hospital, which was a local hospital to us, but a great cardiac hospital, to have the operation. Not many people have had it, but you know, you'll extend your life for 20 years. She died in the operation. So she shouldn't have been in those conditions.

she had the misfortune to have married a feckless husband. So the tragedy, the hard life, people said to me you had a hard life, I didn't have a hard life. The hard life was my mother and in many ways her generation. You say you didn't have a hard life, but I guess most of us grumble about our lives, but we didn't have our father walk out on us, our mother die at the age of 12, grew up in that kind of poverty. I mean, how do you think that's through in terms of your own life, your mental health, trauma, the kind of influences,

had on you. Well, I think I'm fine. I wouldn't like to be psychoanalyced, but everyone around you just don't know. Recommend, Alan. Just look at the Roger Main photographs. Everyone around us lived like that. And there were harder stories than that. I've read harder stories of people who had it much harder. And they had it hard in Leeds and Liverpool and Glasgow and every, my mom was a Liverpoolian, you know, from a family of 11. Her life, if you want to talk about a hard life, Her life was hard. But, you know, we had the benefits me and my sister of that post-war. Tell us a little bit about her life then, just for a second, about her childhood and how your mother grew up.

So she was one of 11, born to a Irish mother and a Scottish father in Liverpool. So her mother had had 11 children by the age of 38, died at the age of 42. Her mother had died age 42, my mother's maternal grandmother. My mother was always convinced there was some curse of the female life. that meant she would die at 42, and she did precisely at 42. But because she was the eldest girl, second eldest of the 11, but the eldest girl, she had to take on all the responsibilities. So that was very tough.

My grandfather, my maternal grandfather was, you know, he wasn't entirely a liberal person, like most of the men weren't with those big families. So she had to struggle, left at the first opportunity, aged 18. War had been declared, 1939, went to London, joined the national, Fafi met my father, who was a pianist, concert pianist. He was a Lance Corporal, played the piano in white gloves, was a very good musician, very good pianist. And they got married. And he took her back to where he came from. The other thing that the area I come from is famous for is Rillington Place. Number 10 Rillington Place was just around the corner to us where Christy killed all of those

women. Were they under the floorboards? Under the floorboards in the the wall. It's also, yeah. State ages at a field day, don't there. And just to conclude this real-life crime episode, Kelso Cochran was murdered on the corner of my street. Kelso Cochran is Stephen Lawrence of his time, 1959, bank holiday Monday on the corner of the street.

I tell the story and this boy, my mother had come round and seen these teddy boys. He was a West Indian carpenter coming back from Paddington Hospital, and they knifed him to death on the corner of our street. Suddenly there were cameras. Southam Street was famous. And it's still not resolved. No one was ever arrested for the murder of Kelso Cochran. But there is a little blue plaque outside the Warwick Arms,

and I hope it's still there on the corner of Goldham Road and Southam Street that records the life of Kelso. And you mentioned your sister as being a heroin of your life, really. So how did that transpire, that she essentially became your guardian? Well, for a start, as we grew up, as I've mentioned, my mum was in and out of hospitals, so Linda was looking after me, particularly after my father went when I was eight,

but also before then because he was never there. So she was working hard to clear my mother's debts. The electricity was always cut off. My mum had six, seven different jobs cleaning at the poshouses, top end elaborate grove. And we used to go with her, by the way. And we used to feel sorry for the kids we heard about there because they were sent away to school and they were seven or eight.

And to us. Well, you, Rory, that to us, that was deprivation. We felt sorry for that. So she had all of these jobs. When my mother died, I said to my sister, well, what do we do? Because she said to me, don't tell anyone. Don't tell anyone at school. Don't tell anyone.

The authorities will come and take you away. We were under the radar system of whatever social services were around. I got free school meals. Linda got free school meals. That was good. That was really, really helpful. But they didn't seem to notice. We were two kids.

She was 16. I was 13. And she said, tell anyone, or they'll come and separate us. And then through the door came an offer of a my mother lived her whole life waiting for a council house. That was everyone in our street, that's all you were waiting for was a council house. And the idea you could afford to buy your own house. I was in my mother on her own, you know, with a cleanest child lady's wage. So through the door after she died, came to Lillian Mae Johnson, my mother, offer of a council

house in Welling Garden City. I'm often glad I didn't take it because Grant Shaps would have been my MP. But anyway, leaving that aside, my sister marched straight, right. She was very forceful, Linda. She got the electricity put back on. She matured very quickly because she had to. She worked from the age of 11 to clear my mum's debts at Berriman's on the corner shop because we would always get stuff on tick. Mr. Berriman never refused this. But in the end, the bill got quite large and Linda started working for him. Anyway, she marched around to the council, said my mum's dead, but me and my brother will have this. She lived in Australia for 40 years, but she still has this naive view that she was right,

that that council house offer should have been in the family. You should have been, you know, you died, but it passed on to your children. Anyway, the guy at the council said, don't be silly. I mean, the age of majority then was 21, wasn't even 18. So into our life came this wonderful social worker. And he came round and said, right, Alan,

you're going to foster parents in Chelsea. Linda, who'd left school to trying to be a nursery nurse, you'll go to Dr. Bernardo's big headquarters in Ilford, and you'll continue your studies to be a nursery nurse while you live in there. And he stepped back, I think Mr. Pepper, his name was. He wasn't Sergeant Pepper so much as I knew, but he said, Mr. Pepper stood back waiting for a round of applause. My sister tore into him. You know, I can see her now, hand on hip, nose wagging. This big Linda-shaped flea in Mr. Poor old Mr. Pepper's ear. he went away and got us a place.

Two kids. Council flat. Linda went to look at it. She said, I never saw it. Worst place. Counsel must have thought, two bits of kids were in the worst place. You know.

She said the previous tenants had taken the doors off to Burners Firewood, the interior doors. It was awful. She rang Mr. Pepper up, put her fullpence in, pressed button A, and said, about this, we're not accepting it. And Mr. Pepper said,

it was flabagher. I said, look, do you know what? I've been through. She said, well, you go and look at it. If you think you can live there with your family, come and look me in the eye and tell me, and I'll think about it again. We never heard of that again. We got this lovely masonette two-bedroom, first time we'd ever had an indoor toilet at number 11 pitt house on the Wilberforce estate in Battersea, which meant we had to go south of the Thames.

That was traumatic. Of course. But we got over that. And we had two happy, until my sister got married when she was 19, we had two happy years there. She moved to a house in Watford with her first husband. He put down a mortgage on a semi-detached. And she wanted me to go to Watford. I said, I'm not moving to the north.

I put my feet down. I put my foot down. You got into grammar school, is that right? I was in Sloan grammar school, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you sat the 11 plus? Past the 11 plus.

Linda passed her 11 plus. Mainly, I mean, we knew our mother saw that as the route out of those conditions. She was very important to her that we passed. And once we'd passed, although Holland's, Park Comp was just starting off. Well, that was the Posh family sent their kids there. To my mother, that wasn't a grammar school. And actually, my mother was still alive, of course,

when we went around and got interviewed by St. Clement Daines, where Frank Field went to school, Sir Walter Sinjans in Battersea, and they refused. And we thought, my mother thought, that we were interviewing them to see if the school was good enough son. We soon realized they were interviewing us to see if the son was good enough. enough for their school. And it must have been a bad year at Sloan grammar school in Hortensia Road,

King Street, just off the King Street in Chelsea, because I got in there. So that was great, you know, the early 60s on King Street in Chelsea. So apart from the Kings Road, apart from living the Kings Road and the 60s, what was school like? I mean, did you do well at school? It was awful. So my first novel, I dedicated to my English teacher, Peter Carlin, and he was great. And so was the guy taught his history and economics, Peter Pallai, who'd escaped the Hungarian revolution and was teaching in our school. And they were two young teachers. And I liked the subjects. But Mr. Carlin wasn't my English teacher until I was 14. I left at 15. So it's my last year. They inspired me. Nobody else did. And I've talked to Mr. Pallai and Mr. both of whom are still

alive at a great age. And you still call them Mr. That's nice. Do, actually. Yeah. It's very difficult not to. But they both told me about the French teacher, Mr. Harris. I would say, Dolly Harris, you know, he was so boring. People dozed off in his lesson. He dozed off in his own lessons once, I remember. And Peter Conno told me, we do remember, he do know, he only had sort of conversational French. He wasn't a French teacher. He was a chemistry teacher.

People think, you know, the grammar school era was wonderful. It wasn't wonderful the grammar school era if you didn't pass your 11 plus. The motivation for me, not just, you know, my mother would have proven we wanted to please our mother. It was if I'd failed, I'd have gone to the god-awful Isaac. Newton's secondary modern school for boys at the bottom end of the Portobella Road, that was a blackboard jungle. And you kind of knew that and you sensed that you'd be very uncomfortable there. But that's where 80% of kids went. All right, Alan, loads more to talk about. Quick break back in a minute.

Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samrick here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show. The rest is politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on the rest is history, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government It's got a few issues with the trade unions.

And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in. our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson,

and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International monetary fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. So your sister married young. You married young as old, didn't you? You had three kids by no time. Yeah, my sister got married at 19, I think it was. I got married at 18, so I beat that. And then worked in a sorting office.

Well, first I tried to be a rock and roll star, but I don't want to spend much time on that. I made a record when I was 16, all that. But then, so worked in Tesco's stacking shelves. And then when I was 18, I joined the post office as a postman in Barnes, London, South West. And did you have political views then? Yeah. Same Mr. Carlin, who, you know, was this mentor to me, this great teacher.

He introduced us to George Orwell, got us all reading Animal Farm, passing the book between our hinged-lidded deaths to read a page each and then passing it on. And he explained the subtext. This is 1964, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, we were going out into a world, a third of which population lived under communist rule. And he explained the subtext of Animal Farm and, you know, the Bolshevik Revolution and who the different characters were. It's fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating. I was always a reader. My mum dragged us to the Labra Grove Library as soon as we were old enough to turn a page. and I read so much Orwell very quickly and he was a democratic socialist and I decided very soon I was a democratic socialist but always tempted down that route

unlike Harold Wilson who we were talking about in a minute I did read the first volume of Das Kapital and kind of used to show off about surplus value my deep knowledge of surplus value but there was always Orwell warning against totalitarianism that room... So you flirted with communism I never even flirted there's some things there

says I was a member of the communist party. I wasn't. I used to read newslines sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Can you take us about this? Because it's something that Alsa doesn't want to talk about because he hates dissension within the left. So whenever I try to get him to talk about Trotskyites

and the Communist Party and all something, he says, no, no, I don't want to talk about that. It's all too painful. I don't want to go there. Given it's now ancient history and it's not going to get everybody up in it. And maybe it's a route into a book on Harrow Wilson. Give us a bit of a sense of left-wing politics

in the 60s. and 70s and what the spectrum was, you know, because I'm trying to understand. I mean, who is Tony Ben? Who's Jeremy Corbyn? What are Trotskyites? What a Stalinist? How did the Labour Party relate to communism? What was this whole story? Well, well before that, before I could judge the parliamentary Labour Party or what was happening in politics, I was into the trade union movement. So once I was a postman, very quickly I became a local representative and then became the branch chairman and then went to conferences and all of that. This is the UCW, communications worker. Yeah. They were called the Union of the Post Office Workers then.

And had a great general secretary called Tom Jackson. And all these, with the big hand of Obama stuff. And we were in a seven-week strike when I was 20 in 1971, which was very formulative. That's when workers withdraw their labor or a year. It's nothing to do with coffee striking. But the Communist Party of Great Britain were very influential in the trade union movement. And these were great characters, I have to say. In my union, a guy called Morris Stiles, kind of hammer and sickle tattooed.

on to his chest. They believed in something fundamental, and they lived by their beliefs. Dear old Morris would give his money away and lived in place in Brixton that could have been furnished better than it was, and he was a full-time union official by then. And, you know, this idea of a worker's state appeals to a worker who's seen what the capitalist state can do, if you like, some of the, you know, the issues about my mother's life. But there was always to Orwell holding me back, I was never attracted to the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat, which is dictatorship. This idea, the more you read about it, the reason you disagree and why so many working people disagree is false consciousness. And I put that down to Orwell. I put that

down to him. He died before I was born. But, you know, you can learn a lot as an autodidactic that stands you in good stead. And of course, Tom Jackson and people like him, the main story of the trade union movement, were people who stood against that and stood for the Labour Party. Joe Gormley, good example in the NUM. Before we get in the names, though, this is very important, isn't it, in the whole history of the British left, which is their trade union movement often had a more sort of, I guess, kind of what we'd made one now call a more patriotic, less communist element to the British left, and that somewhere in this whole story leading into Wilson and your book is the story of

why Britain and the British Labour Party, unlike European left-wing movements, never went quite so left-wing? And the trade union movement is part of that story, right? Yes, at a time when trade union leaders were powerful figures and had control over their local shop stewards, is when that control broke down, and that largely happened over the Second World War, and they found themselves unable to intervene that things like in place of strife and Wilson and Barbara Carson, all that came up and the need to stop. This incredible level of almost anarchic strike action. Local shops should would decide withdraw the labour.

People at Union headquarters never got, never mind regional level, never had got anywhere near it, and found suddenly all the people were out on strike and they had no levers to pull to get them back in. It's a sad story. But basically in the Labour Party, at a time of blocked votes and all that, all bad stuff, they were keeping the Labour Party on the straight and narrow, if you like. So the vast majority of the PLP, Parliamentary Labour Party, were solid supporters of the Labour Party. And the Labour Party famously said by Morgan Phillips, one of its general secretaries, owes more to Methodism than Marxism. And actually, that does bring us straight to Wilson, because Wilson's politics were forged in

non-conformist, congregational religion, Methodism, really. Why, Wilson? Why did you choose to write about Harold Wilson? And maybe remind younger listeners a bit about why they should be interested in Harold Wilson. Like you two, yeah. Well. Well, thanks. I'm not even... What were you born?

I'm 67. Yeah, so that means... 957. 57. Okay. Okay. All right. You were seven when Wilson was elected yet.

Yeah, but I was very, very precautioned. I'm being nice to you, Alastair, yeah. Well, like you, Rory, who weren't around at the time. Why Wilson, because Swift Press, who should be commended, by the way, they realized that there was a lot of interest in prime ministers, mainly because they'd been six in a fortnight, wherever it was. But if you wanted to know about Gladstone or Churchill, you had to pick up a volume that's like, you know, 1,500 pages and doorstep.

And Penguin had been run in this series of great monarchs, you know, condensed 30,000 words, and they thought it's time to do it with prime ministers. First one was out in July about Winston Churchill. This is the second. And I was given the choice. Do you want to do Callaghan or do you want to do Wilson? and I wanted to do Wilson, he was so much a part of me growing up. And a very, very interesting character.

Well, it's interesting. I mean, we'll get on to the book. Tell us about him. Well, because it's 30,000 words, you actually hone everything down. And you get rid of the kind of, you know, the boring stuff about minutes of whatever meetings or what usually happens with these books about battles that nobody's interested in now that you fought years ago. And you focus on the main stuff. But this could be, I'm not saying because I wrote it, but make a great film.

Wilson was there in everything from the 40s, the 50s, the 60s into the 70s. He's like Alfred Hitchcock with his films. There was always a cameo of Hitchcock in the background. If you look at all these things, the devaluation in 49, coal nationalisation. Yeah, well, no, no, he's not. Yeah, but this is when he's still, way before he's prime minister, way before his prime, that's my point. You look at, you know, Bevan's great resignation over teeth and glasses. There's Wilson.

Big walk-on part in that, but a little walk-on part in other things. Who was he? Give us the sense of his life. So he was, I like him a lot, by the way. Never met him, never met him, but I like him a lot. Did you? Everyone who's met him, and I had books dedicated to a woman called Sue Hutting who worked for him for over 10 years.

And Sue then worked for me years later in Parliament. But Sue and everyone who knew him, George Howarth in his constituents, Conservatives who I've spoken to about Wilson, who remembered Wilson from the smoking room, his famous pipe and all that. They all say the same thing. As a person, he was completely without pretentiousness, completely. Which once you've been Prime Minister, you might not have had much pretentiousness before he became prime minute. After you leave, you know, there's a certain pomposity.

None of that with Wilson at all. He was kind. He was generous. He was thoughtful, very humane. But as a politician. Is the man. Is the man. As a politician, he was a master.

of the arts. I mean, a master of all the political arts. Elected four times, matched only by Gladstone, won a European election, a camera loss. People said he was wily, he was slippery. They were mainly people who had been outsmarted by him. Or there were people who were jealous of his talents, because his talents were numerous. A lot of this book is about before he becomes prime minister, because it's so fascinating. He was the most, he was the brightest student of his era, the first alpha plus economic theory student at Oxford. But while he was doing that, he won two huge glittering prizes, the Gladstone Prize for which he had to write an essay almost as big as that long as that book, and the Webb Medley Prize that got him a scholarship on a postgrad,

then became a don at the age of 21. So success as a student, success as an academic, Then when the war broke out became a civil servant, was amazingly successful at accessing timber for the Ministry of Works, writing a paper on coal nationalisation, how you could do it properly, that eventually ended up as a kind of blueprint for the Labour government. This is all before he's gone anywhere near Parliament. I met him quite a few times, and the last time I remember was at a funeral. And the thing about lack of pretentiousness, he was just sitting like sort of six, seven rows back. and I ended up sitting next to him at this funeral of an MP from Liverpool and by then he had dementia. But I remember having conversations prior to that

where he was incredibly clever, unbelievably smart, informed, but he didn't mind emanating a sense of the wiles. There was a mythology about him that was very attractive to somebody like me who was interested in politics and political engagement. So I think you're right to have done this. I love Calam to bits, but I think you're right to have said if you want to find a really interesting Prime Minister that needs a... Well, I'm free to do Jim if they're interested, but, you know, given the choice of the two straight away... You're going to write the screenplay now as well.

Oh, absolutely. Because he was so much part of the 60s as well. That's the other thing. You know, if you think of the 60s, Tony said you might have been... When Wilson died, you were in opposition, yeah. So you'd been working for Tony. I read Tony's speech as leader of the opposition. Major made a very good speech as Prime Minister. Tony said he was, he dominated the political scene in the 60s in the same way that the Beatles dominated the music scene. And that is absolutely true. Even that is, yes, yes, even that is Nadea after devaluation, he was still getting

approval ratings that were extraordinary, you know, particularly compared to recent examples. And the other thing is, he was successful as leader of the opposition. He made the weather, the white heat of technology speech. in which he called for 200,000 extra university places, the creation of the open university, as well as that great thing about the white heat of technology. He was the leader of the opposition. He wasn't a minister.

It wasn't prime minister. And yet it still thought of as one of the most influential speeches. So he succeeded as leader of the opposition, which is a very difficult, I know Tony did as well, but it's a very difficult job to succeed in and to make the political weather. Yeah.

How do you think, as you've researched him, politics has changed from the parliament that Wilson entered and the parliament that you left. What happened over that period? Well, I think there were two big differences. Wilson's parliament mainly consisted of people that have been in, in the military, in some capacity or other. Wilson would have gone and fought. In fact, it was Hugh Gateskill, funny enough, who became his kind of nemesis, who was a senior civil servant in wartime. He said, we shouldn't lose all this talent, the same way as we did in the first way as we did in

First World War. They had a very recent example and kind of engineered that he would never be called up. But anyway, most of the MPs there had done things and been through things. And there was an ideological reaction of anti-fascism because Stalin was our ally during the war. There was not so much of a kind of feeling that communism was a bad thing. And there were people like Wilson who was saying, whatever you think of communism, Russia's a big power and we need to have more trade with them and all of that. I think there were fewer women. I mean, Barbara Castle was one of only 26 women who came in in, 24 of them were on Labor's benches, by the way, in the 1945 election. It was very much on the Tory side, and this is something else that Wilson would eventually change,

very Edwardian. I mean, this idea that, you know, Sir Alec Douglas Hume was his predecessor, was in any way connected to people's lives. You mostly saw him in plus. for us out on the Grouse Mall. And the analogy that Wilson used, which answers your question as well, Parliament has changed the way society has changed, Wilson used the analogy of cricket, that in 1962, finally endorsed by the MCC in 1963, the amateur versus professional, mainly put down as players, gentlemen versus players. There was a match every year, gentlemen versus players, was finally discarded in cricket. Cricket's a really good example of the way the class system dominated this country.

If you were a player, i.e. professional and good at it, your initials came before your name, WG Grace. If you were an amateur, just doing it every so often, mainly because you learned to have public school, your initials came afterwards, Grace WG. A famous story about Fred Titmus, who was walking out onto the Oval. I was just test Roy, Fred Timbers, Rory.

Fred Timbers was a great cricketer. And the announcer said there'd been a mistake in the order of batting. And Tipmus FW should be FW Titmus. Because he was a player, not a gentleman. So Wilson picked up on that. And here's a talent, Tony had as well, you can pick an issue to say a very complex issue, now you can understand.

Well, now they've done away with the distinction between amateurs and professionals, gentlemen and players in cricket. Isn't it about time we did it in politics? Isn't it about time the 14th Earl of Hume, who was Sir Alec Douglas Hume, actually made way for someone of this century and of course the plain old Mr Wilson?

Alec Douglas Hume made a really good reaction to him in Parliament. He said, yes, I'm the 14th Earl, but in many ways, gentlemen opposite is the 14th Mr. Wilson, which was true, which was true. But, you know, that distinction was happening in our society. Wilson changed the leadership at a Tory party forever. They never elected another Old Etonian. They elected Heath and then they elected whoever they elected another blah blah.

It wasn't until Cameron came along. Then they went back to Old Etonians. That was really in reaction to Wilson. You and I appear saying nice things about him, but he was incredibly controversial as well. What would you say were the less attractive sides to his record and his politics? Someone said, and I forget who said it, that he had a real predilection to surround himself with very rich, powerful men. And he did. There's no doubt about that. That kind of came out eventually in the famous lavender list. You know, if you look at the scandals attached to Wilson, there's Marcia, who we might come back to, there's devaluation and there's the lavender list.

And the lavender list is appointing a couple of pretty dodgy people. One of them gets a peerage, one gets a knighthood. Yeah. 10, 10, really. So, you know, there was the non-con. He was stepping down as Prime Minister. Step down, incidentally, at an age younger than Keistama was walking in to 10 down the street. It was age 60.

There was the beginnings. No one is quite sure when that wonderful brain, he had a photographic memory, when that wonderful brain started to deteriorate. But the other thing which we'll come on to is the kind of, paranoia about a security service. They're the things that you would say would be negatives. But tell us a bit about some of the dodgy people he gave Pearson- So he gave a peerage to Lord Kagan, Joseph Kagan, who made the Gannix raincoat that no one knows what the Gannix raincoat but Wilson wore it. If you look at a picture of Wilson, you see him in a Gannix raincoat.

It's a different type of material. He made close to his constituency. He was great friends with Kagan. Kagan and when he, on his resignation, I mean, the stupid thing, as I say in the book is that there's a resignation, you know, list for the Lords. But nevertheless, you know, at least one prime minister has put their hairdresser on it. He put his constituency agent on it. He put another other people who wouldn't be controversial. But he put Kagan on it. And Kagan was a little bit dubious. He was being examined then, but had not been arrested. It wasn't until 1980. This is 1976. It wasn't until 1980 that he served time for dodging the inland

revenue. There was another character on there who, two years later, or just about two years later, committed suicide while he was under investigation for financial irregularities. And I'm kind of just sort of trying to get my head around this. But in the 70s, Labour, Conservative Lib Dems, there's some pretty strange stuff, conservative chancellors getting up to strange financial business after they leave. Liberal leaders, famous murdering people. I mean, what's going on in the... No, no, no, no. Let's hang on.

He's dead. He's got to label the dead. A point here. Point of order. Well, this is the paranoia. So I say with Wilson and the stuff that you see about him going into the gentleman's toilets and turning on all the water in the House of Commons before he'd have a chat with someone. I say it was late stage paranoia meets early stage dementia. His late stage paranoia, I say in a book, he was a man who was paranoid but had a lot to be paranoid about.

MI5 opened a file on him in 1945, called him Norman John Worthington, because he went to Russia a couple of times. This is the kind of world we were living in. That was all bad. There was other incidents. By the time it came to the 70s, which is the most recent period for you, Rory, here, the world had gone absolutely wacky. He came back into power in 74. There were all these Colonel Blimps, retired military men, one of whom, Wallace, Walter Wallace, Who was, you know, a very senior wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, saying maybe people have fed enough of democracy by the ballot box. Maybe they'd like to see a bit of order restored through. He didn't use the term, barrel of a gun, but that's what he meant.

At the same time, you had the CIA described by a Senate committee as rogue elephants, still unclear who authorized the attempt to assassinate Castro. and the CIA were active in London and in England. And because Wilson had refused to send troops, British troops to Vietnam, he was a kind of candidate to be discredited. And you had boss the South African Secret Service, who were very active in London, responsible, so it said, for the guy who attempted assassination on Jeremy Thorpe's lover, story we all know about now for a very English scandal.

He's the murdering liberal leader that we referred to, isn't it? He's the one, yes. Yes. And Thorpe told Wilson they had a good relationship. In fact, if Heath had done a deal after the 74th, when he won the popular vote but didn't have enough seats, he offered Jeremy Thorpe a seat as home secretary and a combined guy. That would have been interesting. Thorpe had told Wilson all about the plots and all that. And so Wilson knew there were all these issues going around, and there's lots of others.

Because MI5, the security service, I was responsible. for as Home Secretary and love them dearly and think they do a great job. But they were masters to themselves for years and years. It wasn't until the late 80s under Thatcher that there was any parliamentary oversight, Security Intelligence Committee. Final question before we wrap up, part one. Great talking to you. Just put Wilson in your league table of Labor leaders through your lifetime. Who you put in top? That's really difficult. I have thought about this. That's really difficult because I would be. part of the Blair guy. I mean, I'm, you know, the reason I have a political career at all is

because of Tony Blair, ringing me up and asking me if I was interested in being an MP, to which I said, don't be stupid. What would I want to do that for, Tony? I'm the general secretary of six biggest affiliated union. Anyway, he was persistent. So, so I can't judge Tony, and I was part of that government. I thought it was a great government. This is the 20th anniversary of my elevation to cabinet. You'd gone by then. But, you know, all of the stuff we were we were doing, I thought it was tremendous. So can I judge Wilson against that? Can I judge Wilson against Atley? Atley was probably, people say Bevan was Wilson's mentor. I don't think Bevan, you have to say Bevan so that people don't get confused with Bevan. With Ernie. Because Bevan and Bevan.

With Ernie. But I think it was more Atley. It was Atley who saw the talent of Wilson and projected him and promoted him and all rest of it. And Wilson's youngest son, Giles, his godparents are Mr and Mrs. Atley, or Mr. Mrs. Atley. So I find it impossible to judge. I think Wilson should be up there in the pantheon. I mean, I think he's a great prime minister. He was the youngest cabinet minister since 1806. Henry Petty was the last one who got in that young. His experience the things he dealt with. My final point, and it's the things that meant a lot to people's lives, sorting out the divorce laws that meant my mother, even after she was abandoned, couldn't divorce. The men, ruled on whether a wife could be divorced or not. It was Wilson that introduced irretrievable breakdown. It was Wilson that legislated to ensure that homosexuality wasn't illegal. It was Wilson. I know Jenkins played his role, but Wilson was the Prime Minister. Got rid of the backstreet ablionists, introduced a redundancy act, introduced the Health and Safety Act, which stopped the carnage in British countries. So I'm hearing Tony getting relegated to number

He's not, no, because he'll never be relegated in my view. But so all I'm saying is is difficult for me But for someone who's neutral, who wasn't part of the Blair government, I think Wilson would be up there. Okay, Alan, that is the end of the first part of this two-parter. Next week, next Monday, we're back talking about the various cabinet positions and what he got up to, how Tony Blair hunted him down to get him to become an MP in the first place. And also, we'll touch on Brexit and all sorts of other things. So we'll see you then. If you cannot wait for part two, then you know.

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