It's half a century since a prime minister who wasn't a full-time occupant of No 10
4 min read
Andy Burnham will be the first Labour leader and first prime minister of any persuasion born in the north of England since Harold Wilson in the 60s. It’s not the only similarity between them.
Andy says he’s likely to follow Harold’s example of living away from Downing Street for at least part of every week, portraying it as an escape to the North. That said, the only northern aspect of Chez Wilson was its address: Lord North Street, a five-minute amble from Parliament.
Like Burnham, Wilson nourished his northern roots. Born in Huddersfield and representing a Merseyside constituency, he was a cabinet minister in Attlee’s government by the age of 31. In newsreel footage of the time, a young president of the Board of Trade speaks like a BBC announcer, replicating the clipped tones of Attlee. That was how senior politicians were meant to sound in the 1940s. It was Nye Bevan who convinced his friend not to suppress his Yorkshire vowels (nor to over-burden his speeches with statistics).
By following his advice, Wilson wasn’t adopting a persona, but discarding one.
As the social historian David Kynaston records in ‘A Northern Wind’, when Wilson entered No 10 in 1964, the cultural essence of the country was migrating in that direction – in music, cinema, literature, theatre, art and sport. There was even rugby league on the telly every Saturday afternoon. It was a decade dominated by Tom Courtney, David Hockney, Bobby Charlton, Alan Sillitoe and, overwhelmingly, by the Beatles.
Wilson was part of the zeitgeist, but it wasn’t northernness that determined his decision to keep the family home at Lord North Street when he returned to the premiership in 1974.
When Harold proposed to Mary, he was a very young university don; when they married, he was an extraordinarily successful civil servant, and by the time an election was called in 1945, he was back lecturing at Oxford. He was a ‘B list’ candidate (i.e. with no union sponsorship) in a hopeless seat, and anyway Churchill, the Great War leader, was bound to reap the rewards of victory. Mary was entitled to think her future would be amongst Matthew Arnold’s ‘dreaming spires’ pursuing her interests in art and literature and writing poetry. She detested Downing Street and what she saw as the skulduggery of political life.
Evicted by Ted Heath in 1970, the Wilsons’ only home was a modest holiday bungalow on the Scilly Islands (paid for by the royalties from Mary’s book of collected poems which sold an incredible 70,000 copies). Having sold their previous home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the couple rented for a while before buying a twenty-year lease on the elegant Georgian terraced house close to Labour Party HQ in Smith Square. With one of their two sons still living at home, Mary was grateful for the escape from constant turmoil in No10 and had no wish to return to it.
So when Labour came back to power in 1974, Harold simply acted in accordance with his wife’s wishes, as he did two years later, keeping the promise made to Mary that he’d retire on his 60th birthday.
The two years spent working in Downing Street but living elsewhere had been a success. Some have suggested that was because Marcia Williams was Harold’s political wife, compensating for Mary’s disinterest, but that’s unfair to both women. Williams had been Harold’s political secretary since 1956, one of the first women to hold such a powerful position. Had she been a man, the arrangement wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. In any case, Marcia and Mary were close friends, and Harold benefited from Mary’s private advice as well as Marcia’s professional wisdom.
After leaving office, they bought a flat in Ashley Gardens close to Westminster Cathedral, and it was there that Mary nursed Harold through the cruel onset of Alzheimer’s disease until he died in 1995. Mary occupied the flat alone for the next 23 years until her death aged 102.
Burnham is unlikely to have the time to match Wilson’s record of winning four elections, but just a couple would be enough for Labour supporters – with perhaps a plebiscite on Europe, the first of which Harold won in 1975. On the subject of homes, Harold Wilson’s record of 425 new houses built in a single year remains to be broken.
Alan Johnson is a former Labour cabinet minister and author of Harold Wilson: Twentieth Century Man
